Winner of the Porchlight Business Book Award in Narrative & Biography A New York Times Editor's Choice A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller One of Oprah Magazine 's Best Political Books to Read Ahead of the 2020 Election One of Book Riot's 50 Best Books to Read this Fall One of Five Books' Best Political Books of 2019 One of Vanity Fair's Best Books of 2019 One of MIT Technology Review's Best Books of the Year Justin Fox, The New York Times The Economists' Hour is a reminder of the power of ideas to shape the course of history."—Liaquat Ahamed, The New Yorker Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace The Economists' Hour . As he shows, economists were treated as little more than backroom statisticians until the late 1960s.... Appelbaum argues that their heyday ended on October 13 2008, when the chief executives of America's largest banks were marched into the US Treasury for a crisis meeting. He is surely correct. The mother of all Wall Street bailouts shattered the reputation economics had gained over the previous 40 years. Yet economists' hubris lingers. Perhaps it is a lagging indicator. Economists might call it "sticky".—Edward Luce, Financial Times "The Economists' Hour provides a novel perspective on the conservative revolution that dominated the past half-century of American political history."—James Kwak, The Washington Post " A kind of ur-text, revealing the destructive role of centering economists in shaping public policy. It's not that we don't need economists and economic theory, but The Economist's Hour patiently reveals the many times and multiple ways they've had an outsized influence at key times and have steered us wrong. It's a fascinating analysis."—John Warner, The Chicago Tribune The Economists' Hou r is a work of journalism rather than polemic. It is a well reported and researched history of the ways in which plucky economists helped rewrite policy in America and Europe and across emerging markets."—The Economist Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, The New Republic Hamilton Cain, Barnes and Noble Review Edward Hadas, Reuters Seattle Times E.J. Dionne, The Washington Post Axios The American Prospect Chris Johns, Irish Times New York Times editorialist and former economics beat reporter, writes lucidly about a number of connected subjects: the content of economics scholarship during the postwar era, the highly interpersonal and institution-specific story of how particular ideas and individuals came to have influence with those in power, and, most strikingly, how economists came to enter policymaking and insinuate themselves into the governing class-a distinction among academic disciplines. The result is a convincing historical interpretation that shows both the origins and consequences of economists' most self-serving myths... No one has told this whole story, operating over multiple economic subfields, as well as Appelbaum."—Marshall Steinbaum, The Boston Review Allison Schrager, Quartz Democracy Journal Prospect Cass Sunstein John Hardwood, CNBC New York Times financial writer maps the advance of economists-from the Kennedy administration onward-out of the academy and into government, elevating free markets in the sausage-making of public policy and sparking the inequity that plagues us today."—O Magazine Library Journal Publisher Weekly (starred) Kirkus Mohamed A. El-Erian, author of New York Times bestsellers When Markets Collide and The Only Game in Town The Economists' Hour , an entertaining and well-written look at how market-oriented ideas rose from the academy and transformed nations. I do not agree with each and every perspective, but found this a valuable and highly recommendable book, which I devoured in a single sitting."—Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation
★ 07/29/2019
New York Times correspondent Appelbaum, who won a George Polk Award for his subprime lending reporting, intelligently chronicles the unprecedented influence of economists on public policy during what he dubs “the economists’ hour,” roughly from 1969 to 2008. He recounts how economists in the U.S. rose from laboring in obscurity in Quonset huts on the National Mall to occupying such lofty roles as secretary of the treasury and chair of the Federal Reserve. Appelbaum is sharply skeptical of the reputed alchemical powers of economists to engineer prosperity, particularly those (Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan) whose blind adherence to free market principles, he argues, fostered the Great Recession and significant income inequality. He notes that countries that consulted economic theory, but then accorded management of the economy to engineers (as in Taiwan) or the state (as with China) have performed better economically than the U.S. with its policy of minimal government intervention in markets. He also examines the deleterious effects of the unfettered free market philosophy upon health and safety regulations, regulation of industries, and antitrust litigation, concluding that blind reliance on free markets has led to an ossifying plutocratic minority. This thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and critical account of the economic philosophies that have reigned for the past half century powerfully indicts them. (Sept.)
The influence of economists has increased steadily over the last 50 years, and the author, ably aided by narrator Dan Bittner, provides a lively history of how their policies have brought enormous wealth—to the few. In a chronological approach, the audiobook demonstrates that cycles of deregulation and lower taxes routinely led to massive business defaults and market plunges. Bittner is adept at conveying the author's outrage and, often, his biting humor: Two politicians who went into private banking immediately after backing deregulation were "fortunate that espousing the prevailing ideology would be an express lane to personal enrichment." Bittner’s voice is modulated so that the complex theories of influential players like Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, and Larry Summers seem digestible, even if their arrogance is not. L.W.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
NOVEMBER 2019 - AudioFile
2019-06-30New York Times editorial page writer Appelbaum recounts the hijacking of economic and public policy by right-wing adherents of the unfettered market.
The hour of which the author writes is going on five decades now. The influence of economists on government has grown exponentially since the Nixon administration, with economists convincing the president to scrap the military draft and the judiciary to shelve antitrust cases, their numbers in the federal employ tripling from the 1950s to the 1970s. Economists have taken larger roles in formulating every aspect of public policy—and, in time, leaving their disciplinary bounds to issue pronouncements on matters societal and moral. Economists tend to be conservative, and truly conservative economists would in time, for example, come to blame inflation for the decline of the Protestant work ethic and a rise in corruption, fraud, and "a generalized erosion in public and private manners." At the same time, government was generally taking Milton Friedman's laissez-faire, free-market approach to problems rather than the Keynesian quantitative easement of old. As Appelbaum notes, one reason China has been successful compared to the austerity economies of the West is that Keynes has not been forgotten there. Writing in accessible language of thorny fiscal matters, the author ventures into oddly fascinating corners of recent economic history. For instance, a modern trope holds that actor Jayne Mansfield's beheading in an automobile accident prompted changes in truck design (yet mass shootings have produced no comparable gun control legislation), but that turns out to be wrong: The actuarial minds of the late Nixon era put the value of a human (American, anyway) life at $200,000, did the math, and concluded that the proposed addition of safety bars "would need to save four times as many lives to justify the cost." The larger point is that the government's blind trust in the market is now the status quo, and "reliance on the market grants priority to people who have money."
Anyone who wonders why government officials still take the Laffer curve seriously need go no further than this lucid book.
