One of the Best Economics Books of the Year

The Financial Times
Bloomberg

  • "In this pithy book of accessible prose, Kwak begs us to content with the messiness of the real world—and the inequality our economic system has spawned—before it's too late."

    Heather Boushey
    Council of Economic Advisors

  • "Kwak has written the myth-buster that our distorted economic debate needs."

    Jacob S. Hacker
    Yale University

  • "In this beautiful and accessible book, James Kwak shows us how a simplistic idea about economics has captured policy-making to the detriment of sensible policy."

    Lawrence Lessig
    Harvard Law School

  • "For years, I’ve encountered people with a strong sense that many economic arguments in support of the status quo are not just inequitable, but wrong. With Economism, they’ve got the proof they’ve been waiting for."

    Jared Bernstein
    Former Chief Economic Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden

  • ""This clearly written book is an excellent dissection of some bad ideas that have been allowed to masquerade as common sense for too long."

    Jedediah Purdy
    Duke University School of Law

  • "James Kwak time and again debunks economics platitudes to show why the minimum wage might decrease unemployment, why taxing profits might not reduce investment and even why free socialized medicine might not lead to overconsumption of health care."

    Ian Ayres
    Yale Law School

  • "As Kwak shows on issue after issue, the economic dogma that now dominates American politics is often a self-serving pretext for policies that have led to extreme and growing concentration of income and wealth and requires the disregard of observable real world experience."

    Congressman Brad Miller

Excerpt

“The Curse of Econ 101,” The Atlantic

Reviews

Economics lecturers, take note: include Kwak’s book on your syllabus and set aside ample time to discuss its arguments in class.

—Martin Sandbu, Financial Times

“Economism” is a very important and timely book, and anyone who is interested in public affairs should pick up a copy and read it.

—Noah Smith, Bloomberg

A very good book about how a very large part of the economics profession has failed to get the true message of economics through its own biases and the political and ideological filters.

—Brad DeLong

While Economism has succeeded as an idea — the same way the virus in a disaster movie “succeeds” during the inevitable scene where the generals and the CDC show the entire map being overwhelmed by one color — its success in creating a world of shared prosperity is debatable, at best.

—Dustin McKissen, Inc.

Do you know someone who relentlessly says, “It’s just simple economics,” or “It’s just supply and demand?” Give them “Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality.”

—Louis D. Johnson, MinnPost

If ever a book arrived to fill a need, this one has.

—Peter Dorman, EconoSpeak

Media

Marketplace, February 6, 2020