Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

Today we discuss economists.

Why are they seemingly everywhere?

How did they become so influential in United States social policy?

My guest is Professor Elizabeth Pop Berman, Professor Organizational Studies at the University

of Michigan and the author of the book, Thinking Like an Economist, How Efficiency

Replace Equality in U.S. public policy available from the Princeton University Press.

Professor Brumman, thank you so much for joining us today on Current Affairs.

Thanks for inviting me, Nathan. I'm really looking forward to talking with you.

Well, let's start with what it means to think like an economist.

Your book is a history of how, what you call, the economic style of reasoning came to be so

dominant, but perhaps you could give us a broad level overview of what the economic style of

reasoning that you're describing actually is? Sure.

So the book talks about, right?

So the book is in one sense about economists,

but really more specifically,

it's about something narrower,

which is what I call this economic style of reasoning.

So this is something that is grounded in the discipline of economics. It is reproduced there and taught there,

but it is something a little bit more broad than that and a little more basic. And so it's

basically what you'd think of as a sort of Econ 101 approach to thinking about microeconomic problems.

So an orientation towards thinking about policy that focuses

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