Summary of Elizabeth Popp Berman's Thinking like an Economist

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 While Obama was able to resolve the 2008 financial crisis and slow the rate of economic decline, many of his supporters anticipated that he would usher in significant policy change. However, Obama’s presidency was largely continuity with the recent past.
#2 The Obama administration, despite coming to power during a crisis, did not pursue more fundamental change. It remained committed to an incrementalist, modestly ambitious vision of government, even as the country faced unprecedented challenges.
#3 The Democratic Party’s commitment to a market-friendly, technocratic approach to policy since 1990 has many sources, including the influence of the tech and finance industries within the national Democratic Party.
#4 The results of this turn continue to play out in politics today. Material interests play a significant role in determining which ideas get political attention, but once a particular intellectual framework is institutionalized, it can become extremely difficult to change.

Sujets

• General officer
• Economics
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781669392859
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Elizabeth Popp Berman's Thinking like an Economist
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

While Obama was able to resolve the 2008 financial crisis and slow the rate of economic decline, many of his supporters anticipated that he would usher in significant policy change. However, Obama’s presidency was largely continuity with the recent past.

#2

The Obama administration, despite coming to power during a crisis, did not pursue more fundamental change. It remained committed to an incrementalist, modestly ambitious vision of government, even as the country faced unprecedented challenges.

#3

The Democratic Party’s commitment to a market-friendly, technocratic approach to policy since 1990 has many sources, including the influence of the tech and finance industries within the national Democratic Party.

#4

The results of this turn continue to play out in politics today. Material interests play a significant role in determining which ideas get political attention, but once a particular intellectual framework is institutionalized, it can become extremely difficult to change.

#5

The economic style of reasoning is a loose approach that began turning up in Washington in the 1950s. It starts with basic microeconomic concepts, like incentives, efficiency, and externalities. It takes a distinctive approach to policy problems that includes using models to simplify, quantifying, and weighing costs and benefits.

#6

The economic style is a loose and flexible approach to analyzing policy problems that has evolved gradually over time. It maintains a deep appreciation of markets as efficient allocators of resources, and it places a high value on efficiency as the measure of good policy.

#7

While economists were critical of the environmental approach taken by Congress in the early 1970s, they were largely ignored by policymakers. By the 1990s, however, the economic style had pervaded many more domains, including environmental regulation.

#8

The 1970s and 1980s saw environmental policy shift away from a moral framework that stigmatized polluters and towards the position that pollution was simply an externality to be priced.

#9

The power of economic reasoning rests in part on its ability to bring new concerns into its framework. However, rethinking competing values in the language of economics often comes at the cost of some violence to the originals.

#10

The economic style is so prevalent today that it is taken for granted. It was at the heart of the policies advocated by the Obama administration, and it continues to be supported by centrist Democrats.

#11

Economists were brought into the federal government in the early twentieth century. They had real influence in particular policy areas, like macroeconomic ones, but their economic style of reasoning was a distinctively microeconomic approach. It began to take off in the 1960s, as two intellectual communities rooted in the economics discipline brought their insights into policymaking.

#12

The economic style of reasoning was institutionalized in American politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and it primarily came from the center-left. In contrast, the most important advocates for the economic style in governance came from the center-right.

#13

After 1965, economists and other advocates of economic reasoning became more active in policymaking, and their methods began to seem intuitive. Deregulating railroads stopped seeming like a heresy, and became conventional wisdom.

#14

The economic approach became a taken-for-granted approach to policy problems, one that was embedded in the state: in bureaucratic offices, in the ecosystem of policy organizations surrounding the federal government, and in the law and policy programs that trained the staff of both.

#15

The economic style of reasoning was not just an approach to thinking about policy problems, but also a set of values that were built into it. It typically valued efficiency, which was seen as the cardinal virtue.

#16

As the economic style was institutionalized in various policy domains, and considerations of efficiency were naturalized and sometimes legally required, it became harder for policymakers to make arguments based on these competing logics.

#17

The economic style did not constrain conservatives as much as it did liberals, because while it prescribed government efficiency, it did not prescribe any clear position on what government should or should not do. This allowed conservatives to argue against specific liberal programs on efficiency grounds, while still supporting a more efficient alternative.

#18

The economic style of reasoning, which was not associated with the right, was promoted by Democrats even more than Republicans. This shift made it harder for competing claims grounded in different values and ways of thinking to gain political traction.

#19

The economic style of reasoning is not just advice from economics PhDs. It is a way of thinking that has become embedded in bureaucratic expertise and is reproduced in the organizations and institutions around government.

#20

The economic style of reasoning is still dominant in and around many government organizations. It is dominant in places like the Congressional Budget Office, agency-level policy offices, and at most of the think tanks that produce policy options.

#21

The economic style of reasoning is extremely difficult to overcome, even when it is in opposition to the dominant style of reasoning, which is typically found in Democratic institutions.

#22

The future of the American political system is very much in flux at the moment. On the one hand, fascist and antidemocratic movements threaten to upend and perhaps destroy it. On the other, we have been able to successfully muddle our way through the presidential transition.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The rise of a distinct microeconomic style of reasoning in policymaking began in the 1960s, and was influenced by the earlier generation of economists who had built ties with the government in the 1920s and 1930s.

#2

The second wave of macroeconomics, which peaked in the early 1960s, was influenced by the Keynesian approach. It saw recessions and depressions as a constant threat that government could avoid through careful management.

#3

Institutionalism was a movement in economics that began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the early twentieth century. It was highly empirical, considered humans to be irrational, and believed that economic laws evolved over time.