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The Journal of Socio-Economics 41 (2012) 726

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The Journal of Socio-Economics

j o ur nal homep ag e: www.elsev ier .com/ locate /soceco

ook review

ailure by Design, Josh Bivens. ILR Press (Cornell Universityress) (2011). 99 pp., $18.95, ISBN: 978-0-8014-5015-0

This book is an attempt at popular economics and a product ofhe Economic Policy Institute which employs the author and gen-rated the figures which take up nearly half the book. It is writtenor those who can read text, but not a regression table. It has threeubjects, the consequences of the financial crisis of 2008, the pol-cy response to this crisis, and labor market economic policy forhe thirty years before the economic crisis. Obviously, we shouldot judge this book by whether it proves its arguments; charts andiscussion cannot settle important economic questions. We shouldope that a book like this gives a compelling narrative and supports

t with some riveting charts and statistics. The narrative need notonvince economists with opposing views; it should be designedo convince an intelligent lay reader that its narrative makes sensef recent history and deserves to be considered on at least an equalooting with opposing narratives.

The book’s perspective is avowedly social democratic withegard to the first and third questions. The Economic Policy Institutes, according to the forward, committed to judging the economy bywhether it is delivering rising living standards to the vast major-ty.” On those grounds the book clearly finds recent neoclassicalnd Republican dominated economic policy to be a dismal failurend the Democratic responses to be entirely too influenced by theepublican oriented orthodoxy. One wishes the author were a bitlearer about that orthodoxy. The author does clearly argue againstsing slack labor markets to restrain inflation, and comments onhe distributional effects: “A key reason why, for example, lawyersnd surgeons saw rapidly rising living standards over the past threeecades is precisely because the wages and salaries of the majorityf Americans did not rise as rapidly as theirs . . . cars and lawn-are services became relatively cheap . . .. Lawyers, surgeons andnancial professionals could enjoy goods and services that were

ade cheap because the workers producing them saw such slowage growth . . . (p. 70).” Tax cuts get less attention, and are treated

s simple idiocy rather than a strategy to control the size of gov-rnment. Given the book’s brevity, there cannot be more than fifty

053-5357/$ – see front matterttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2012.05.016

pages of text and few paragraphs exceed 200 words. The authorhas made a mistake in not setting up a straw man that he canknock down. The book may convince social democrats they havebeen right all along; it does not make a convincing argument to theuncommitted.

The second question is treated in a similar tone. Keynesianpolicies are sensible; other policies benefit only the very rich. Pro-ponents of limited government are idiots or cretins, perhaps both.Josh Bivens may be right, and Bob Lucas (just as an example) maybe wrong, but it is a challenging strategy to argue that Bob Lucas iswrong because Josh Bivens says so. Lucas might respond, and read-ers might not find him an idiot. As to integrity, it is hard to argue,Nobel millions in his bank account, that Lucas is merely endorsingthe policy preferences of his sponsors. If Bivens has any insight asto why a Bob Lucas believes as he does, he does not share it withhis readers.

This is a disappointing book. Given the vigor of the pro-Keynesian blogosphere (Krugman, DeLong and Thoma come tomind) appeals to authority, which are important in a work whereproof is beyond the methodological horizon, are surprisinglyabsent. The bibliography is less than one page, and less than halfare references to scholarly articles; this is really inexcusable. Thebest parts of the book are the 46 figures, most of which the authorhas culled from the EPI’s continuing, “State of Working America.”My own favorite is Figure 27, which shows the remarkable risein the income of the top one tenth of 1% ($6M) over the last 30years compared to the modest $9K rise for the middle 60% of theincome distribution. Such facts support the EPI’s commitment. Theydeserve a better storyteller.

Stephen Snyder ∗

Dept. of Economics, Posvar Hall, University ofPittsburgh, 15260, USA

∗ Tel.: +1 443 604 2287.

E-mail address: sesnyder@pitt.edu

URL: http://www.econ.pitt.edu/people/facpage.php?uid=188