It’s not every day one is quoted – not just mentioned but quoted! – in a publication as eminent as The New Yorker, so you will forgive me for adding it to the scrapbook. The article, a review of Elizabeth Popp Berman’s new book ‘Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy‘ has me mentioned next to the late great David Graeber. We are the obligatory econ-hating-lefties in Idrees Kahloon’s ‘war on economics’ (see left) but still. I’m very glad to be in Graeber’s company, too.
The line itself comes from a blog I wrote for the LSE back in 2014, following the publication of my book I Spend therefore I Am (Viking, 2014, republished by Penguin as A Richer Life, 2015, and now available for less than a fiver, so knock yourself out). The book ruffled a few feathers among reviewers, just as Elizabeth Popp Berman seems to have done, and the blog was something of a reply to critics. Here it is:
Philip Roscoe 