Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Jul 14, 2025

Elizabeth Popp Berman is the Director and Richard H. Price Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan, and author of 'Thinking like an Economist'. She discusses how an economic style of reasoning emerged in U.S. policy from the 1960s to the 1980s, favoring efficiency over equality. Berman reveals how this shift has constrained progressive ambitions and shaped debates on pivotal issues like healthcare and environmental policy. She offers insights into the implications for current and future political strategies, especially for the resurgent left.

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INSIGHT

Economic Reasoning Style Defined

Economic reasoning centers efficiency as the key measure of good policy, emphasizing cost-effectiveness, choice, and competition.
This style views government's role as correcting market failures to enable efficient market functioning.

ANECDOTE

Rand Corporation's Economic Techniques

Rand Corporation applied mathematical and economic techniques for optimal decision-making for military defense problems after WWII.
Their methods were later adopted by government agencies for broader policymaking beyond defense.

ANECDOTE

McNamara Institutionalized Economic Analysis

Robert McNamara brought scientific management and cost-effectiveness principles from Ford to the Defense Department.
He institutionalized economic analytical offices across executive agencies under Lyndon Johnson's directive.

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For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow debates over public policy today.

Introduced by liberal technocrats who hoped to improve government, this way of thinking was grounded in economics but also transformed law and policy. At its core was an economic understanding of efficiency, and its advocates often found themselves allied with Republicans and in conflict with liberal Democrats who argued for rights, equality, and limits on corporate power. By the Carter administration, economic reasoning had spread throughout government policy and laws affecting poverty, healthcare, antitrust, transportation, and the environment. Fearing waste and overspending, liberals reined in their ambitions for decades to come, even as Reagan and his Republican successors argued for economic efficiency only when it helped their own goals.
A compelling account that illuminates what brought American politics to its current state, Thinking like an Economist also offers critical lessons for the future. With the political left resurgent today, Democrats seem poised to break with the past—but doing so will require abandoning the shibboleth of economic efficiency and successfully advocating new ways of thinking about policy.

Elizabeth Popp Berman is Director and Richard H. Price Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine (Princeton).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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