S26

David Eltis, Atlantic Cataclysms: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades

At our nation’s 250^th birthday on July 4, slavery was again a central point of contention, as it has been from the beginning. On one side, millions of Americans have been exposed to the 1619 Project, a curriculum that makes slavery central to every aspect of American history, from the Founding to the industrial revolution and rise of capitalism, to many of today’s social problems. On the other side, national parks and museums in the Trump era have scaled back exhibits on slavery, and his “Task Force 250” has rejected a proposal to mint a commemorative “Abolitionism” coin, all starkly at odds with the 1619 Project, to say the least.

Is it possible in such a polarized environment to bring a reasoned approach to such an accursèd topic? In this PEP reading group, we’re at least going to try. 

David Eltis is often called the “dean” of Atlantic slavery studies. In the 1970s, the Canadian-born Eltis was a student of Eugene Genovesi and Stanley Engerman, pioneers in the history of American slavery. After a chance encounter in 1990, he and fellow historian Stephen Behrendt began compiling a database of the Atlantic slave voyages. When their CD-ROM appeared in 1999, he and colleagues set about expanding coverage to benefit from the dawning internet age. A quarter century later, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database at the website SlaveVoyages.org is one of the most monumental efforts in historical collaboration ever compiled, on any topic.

Author of three previous books that have won twelve prizes, including the Frederick Douglass Prize, Eltis’ 2025 book Atlantic Cataclysm is a landmark event, “a tour de force by the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade” (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). 

In a way, however, Eltis’ core finding is a discouraging one: the narratives we carry around with us—from high school, college, journalism, popular culture, and our political elites—have been drifting ever further from the findings of two generations of painstaking research. “In God we trust, all others must bring data,” is his challenge.

W26

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation

Is Gen-Z (b. 1997-2012) an "anxious generation"? Has a combination of "safetyism" and social-media addiction produced a cohort ill-equipped for real life? For the labor market? For civic engagement in a liberal, pluralistic, democratic society? Jonathan Haidt seems to think so. In his best-selling 2024 book, the leading social psychologist charts the replacement of a "play-based" childhood with a "phone-based" childhood. He argues that "safetyism" and digital media have ushered in an unprecedented experiment in human history: a "great rewiring" of childhood itself that has done harm to young people, and to the future of society itself.

Policymakers have been listening: In Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado and Kansas (among others), laws promote the raising of "free-range children" to combat the "antifragile" safetyism decried by Haidt and others. In Australia, France, Florida and elsewhere, states are curbing the use of social media.

But is this diagnosis, and the whole movement it has spawned, well-founded? Or is it another in the perennial refrain of O tempora, o mores, where the older generation exerts its rose-colored nostalgia to complain about the youth?

If Haidt's argument is at all true, some political-economy questions arise: What is the role of markets or corporations in causing the problems he identifies, and potentially addressing them? Can the state take action that does not risk becoming yet another sumptuary law, or worse, a new moral panic such as the "temperance movement"? 

F25

Half a century ago, the United States was in a bit of a panic about the "population explosion." Books such as The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth sowed fear that there were too many people, too few resources, and that mass famine and human catastrophe were inevitable without drastic government action.The panic was exported abroad, and was instrumental in the adoption of draconian policies by states such as India and China.

As it happened, there was no mass famine, no exhaustion of resources, and no "population explosion." A "demographic transition," identified by researchers as early as the 1920s, was already well under way. The draconian policies did little good and much harm. And now they are gone and mostly forgotten. Nowadays, the narrative has been nearly reversed. As the total fertility rate of nation after nation falls below replacement levels, commentators are beginning to worry about the effects of a terminal world-wide decline in population.

Will such a decline be as good for the environment as it seems? Will it make solutions to the big problems of our age—the Global North entitlement state, the Global South poverty rate, the global energy transition, etc.—easier or harder to solve? How will a shrinking work force pay the bills for aging citizenries?

More generally, is population policy a legitimate public issue at all, or is family size a wholly private matter?

What, if anything, have we learned from the population controversies of the 1970s? What should we learn?

After the Spike, a national best-seller written by two economists, is the sharpest, most thoughtful, and most readable recent statement of what the authors provocatively call the "case for people."

S25

Yuval Levin, American Covenant.

Many people are worried about the polarization of our national life. But what should be done about it? Start by reflecting on less polarized times. Much of that earlier success, Yuval Levin argues, is a function of our original constitutional design. This eighteenth-century document created incentives that led Americans to elect officials, form parties, and pursue policy agendas with more of an eye toward getting along with those who differed from us. It is not that we have forgotten how to agree, he suggests, but that we have forgotten how to disagree.

Part of our problem is a raft of Progressive-era reforms that, while well-intentioned, have left us more polarized and dysfunctional than we would have been without them. Emerging at a time of wrenching economic and social change, the Progressives around 1900 were impatient with the checks and balances, the separation of powers, the institutional restraints that frustrated the kind of forceful, decisive leadership they felt the  urgency of the times demanded. Their reforms accordingly empowered the presidency, weakened the Congress, foregrounded primaries over party leaders, and all in the service of more unified national action.

Much of the dysfunction of our current politics, Levin claims, is because those reforms rested upon a misunderstanding of the original Constitution and its educational effects, and have backfired for reasons the founders would likely have foreseen.

The way forward, he concludes, begins by recovering those aspects of the Constitution most conducive to the habit of compromise and negotiation that the founders thought essential to any true "unity" in such a large and diverse republic. Is he right? Or would adopting further Progressive reforms—abolishing the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court, eliminating the filibuster, etc—be a better path?

W25

Ruchir Sharma, What Went Wrong With Capitalism? (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

President Donald Trump seems intent to "shake things up" in everything from immigration and trade policy to education and energy, and far beyond.

One big exception is easy money, where he is likely to reinforce the status quo. And yet, according to Ruchir Sharma, most of the malaise about global capitalism—including the very reasons for the advent of populists like Trump himself—is traceable to the relentless rise of fiscal and monetary stimulus in rich economies.

Myth has it that neoliberalism "hollowed out" the safety nets of post-war democratic capitalism. Citing a wide array of evidence, Sharma argues the opposite: The Keynesian formula of surpluses during booms to cover deficits during busts has been replaced, he claims, by the practice of never saying No to anyone, rich or poor alike.

One result has been gargantuan debts and constant deficits far over the horizon. A bigger result, though, is that the market economy itself has been severely disfigured. Capitalism, Sharma maintains, feeds on creative destruction. But the "destruction" part has now been ruled off-limits, by fiscal and monetary authorities and by governments of both parties going back a half-century or more.

The upside of this sea change has been smoother peaks and troughs in the business cycle. But the downside, mostly overlooked, is that increasing financialization has brought gross distortion of investment decisions, misallocations of capital, the spread of "zombie" firms and an attendant bailout culture, weak productivity gains, anemic ("jobless") recoveries, and business concentration that has contributed powerfully to inequality of wealth, income, and overall access to the fruits of an open economy.

Echoing Adam Smith's criticism of public debt in the eighteenth century, Sharma suggests that since taxes are unpopular, the recent de facto policy of boundless state expansion has largely been outsourced to monetary authorities, which are able to defer the inevitable reckoning to an ever more distant, unrealistic future, while systemically misaligning the incentives for today's market actors. "When the price of money is zero," he writes, "the price of everything else goes bonkers."

Thus, capitalism did not fail, it was killed by an excess of what might be called "policy safetyism."

F24

Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

Shortly before 9/11, there were officials in various agencies of the United States government who knew bits and pieces of what was being planned. But murky lines of accountability and perhaps other factors prevented the communication and sharing of information necessary to put the pieces together to prevent it. To critics of our administrative state, this was neither the first nor the last time that its supposed ethos of "rule by experts" had turned out to be more like a "rule by nobody"—in this case, with lethal and even historic effects.

Five years ago, the Political Economy Project offered a reading group on Philip Howard's best-selling book with that very title: Rule by Nobody: Saving America From Dead Laws and Broken Government. It proved so resonant that some student participants were moved to engage Howard in the first-ever student-led author interview (find here).

In the present reading group, we will pursue the topic in a slightly different direction. Justice Neil Gorsuch and his co-author, Janie Nitze, point out that whereas the Federal Register was sixteen pages long a century ago, it is today adding thousands of pages of text each year. No one quite knows how many Federal laws there are now (there seem to be roughly 5,000 or so), but a number of questions arise: have these laws made the United States a well-governed nation? Have they caused the people to respect and trust their government more than their absence would have done? Have they helped make Americans trust and cooperate with each other better than their absence would have done? Is there any connection between the strikingly low ratings of trust and approval enjoyed by all three branches of our Federal government—but especially the lawmaking branch—and the size, composition, and dynamics of our administrative state?

The overarching question we address is: Is the current size and structure of our administrative state simply a price we pay for the kind of complex economy we live in, or has it become part of the "democratic erosion" that we are all so concerned about?

S24

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the Twenty-First Century

Half a century ago, the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker greatly expanded the reach of economic analysis with a series of pioneering studies of household and family relationships culminating in A Treatise on the Family(Harvard, 1981).

The sexual revolution of the 1960s is still normally viewed through a different lens—that of moral, political or ideological debates—but in her 2022 book, the young British journalist and advocate Louise Perry views it with some of the same questions that are integral to the broader conception of political economy displayed in Becker's work: how did the incentives and constraints of the different "stakeholders" change when personal autonomy began to replace familial, or religious, or social obligations as the main standards of individual conduct? Which women (or men) benefited from the great changes of the 1960s? Were there some who did not benefit? Have there been unintended consequences for the lived experience of young people in the adoption of the new post-1960s norms? Are there no "negative externalities" in the exercise of sexual freedom and autonomy, as everyone agrees there are for the exercise of economic freedom?

Research shows that young men, and especially young women, are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and other forms of malaise.  Is it conceivable that the sexual revolution itself—and the recent turn that its ethos of absolute individual autonomy has taken—might be one of the reasons? Have we reached a dead end in the logic of 1960s liberationism, and if so, what exits—religious or non-religious, political or non-political—might be available?

These are among the many stimulating questions that this student-initiated reading group on Louise Perry's short, engaging, nontechnical, highly readable book will raise.

W24

Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We're Wrong About the World, and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Are activists today mostly misguided in their priorities? Have they mostly misidentified the things that deserve public attention?

Hans Rosling, one of the great "activists" of the past half century (before his untimely death in 2018), came to believe the answer was Yes.

Starting as a Swedish physician and global public health reformer, Rosling eventually became one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of our time, a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences and on Time's list of 100 most influential thinkers.

Rosling's efforts around the world gradually led him to three unexpected conclusions: that global activism today contains enormous waste and mismatching; that the world is actually doing far better than most of us imagine; and that the more exposure people have to elite higher education and media (with their large elements of activist influence), the more inaccurate their understanding of the world actually becomes.

Can these conclusions possibly be right?

In this reading group, we will seek answers by exploring the new cause that Rosling took up in his final years: that of bringing focus, evidence, and rationality to the still-beckoning task of making the world a better place.

W24

Phil Gramm et al, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate

Economic inequality has been at the center of political debate for a decade or more. It has been blamed for eroding social justice, weakening economic opportunity, even harming mental and physical health. But what if the current anxiety over inequality, on both Right and Left, is misguided or even counterproductive?

In their focused, closely reasoned book, three economists argue that in the United States, economic inequality has actually fallen since 1947, that the reason most people think otherwise is that the Federal government has changed how wealth and income are calculated, and that the misreporting defies fairness and common sense, while needlessly compounding the divisiveness and negativity of our current politics.

Could they possibly be right? If so, how would this affect our broader thinking about inequality in the United States or the world?

W23

Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas, Not Less (Penguin, 2022)

Every energy policy must somehow combine three kinds of goals: the strategic, the economic, and the environmental. This was true long before the modern age: medieval governments had to address popular complaints about dirty air from the burning of coal. Since the Industrial Revolution, of course, the stakes in each of these three areas have risen dramatically. Non-organic energy has transformed the economic opportunities—even the prospect of life itself—for billions. It has made possible a level of general prosperity undreamed of by our ancestors, while making energy a resource of global strategic importance. Likewise, the climate consequences of using fossil-fuels are increasingly described in global terms today. Is the trajectory of energy policy in the Western world currently optimal? Alex Epstein doesn't think so. In his highly contrarian but well-written and thought-provoking best-seller, he argues that as many fossil fuels are likely to be used in 2050 as in 2020, and that this would be cause for celebration, not lament.

F22

Benjamin Powell, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy

"Labor History" has traditionally treated modern workers as a block—a mostly homogeneous group of people subject to the same broad types of experience, especially exploitation, solidarity, resistance, and perhaps ultimately emancipation. The case of sweatshop factories is typically seen as one of the strongest sorts of evidence for this traditional view. In recent decades, however, revisionists have slowly begun to paint a quite different picture, mostly by paying more attention to workers as individuals who make choices at the margins based on their own personal histories and experiences. Even sweatshop labor has come under the influence of this new methodological individualism, and Ben Powell's Out of Poverty is a good example of the new approach.

S22

Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine

Putin's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 may turn out to be the most important world event in a generation. This PEP reading group will try to provide some perspective. Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow is not solely about Ukraine, or about Russia. Our book group will primarily concern those sections of the book that do focus on the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. It will remind us that February 24 was not the first time that a Russian government has attempted to extinguish the Ukrainian nation. We will be able to compare the experiences of 1929 and 2022. Among the questions that may arise in our discussions are: What was the role of political economy in the episode of 1929, compared with the current crisis of 2022? What is the international role of political economy today, compared with its role in 1929? Progressives like to say that there is an "arc of history," and that it "bends toward justice." Conservatives reply that human nature is always the same, and that cruelty and inhumanity are always live options to be actively prevented. What if anything does the comparison of 1929 with 2022 tell us about this perennial debate?

W22

Paul H. Rubin, The Paradox of Capitalism

Is capitalism based on competition rather than cooperation? According to generations of critical commentary, the answer is obviously yes. The "survival of the fittest," the "laws of the jungle," the "Darwinian" marketplace are among the most familiar images of modern life. But Paul H. Rubin thinks this is mostly a mistake. In The Paradox of Capitalism, Rubin argues that there is a much higher quotient of voluntary cooperation in a capitalist than in any known non-capitalist society, past or present. An economist himself (Emory University, Emeritus), Rubin partly blames his fellow economists for not doing enough to explain to their students, and to the general public, just what the balance of cooperation and competition really is in a modern economy. And the stakes are high, since for at least a century, people on all continents have been repeatedly seduced by visions of an alternative economy that ends up featuring much less voluntary cooperation than the capitalist system they have so often spurned. Is Rubin right? Can capitalism possibly be the most cooperative economic system available?

F21

Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

Cowen addresses topics such as work-life satisfaction, CEO pay scales, business ethics, financialization, crony capitalism and more, offering an upward revision of the moral and social value of business in modern life that some commentators now regard as prescient. Is he right? Or does the increasingly cozy relationship between big business and government (speech codes, privacy rights, vaccine mandates) augur a new era of corporatism, perhaps even proto-fascism?

S21

Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

This book group tackles some of the most controversial questions in public policy over the past four or five decades: the economics of sex, race, income inequality, global development, cities—as well as academe as a social institution for addressing these and related issues. How far is Sowell's critique of these economic "fallacies" justified and illuminating for our current public-policy debates? Is there something that can be done to improve the way that democratic polities think about these kinds of issues, and does Sowell's book help do it? 

W21

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions

After a year when socially usable knowledge was often hard to come by, this book group turns to a classic study of the use of knowledge in any decision-making process. Time and again, Americans (and others) were surprised and frustrated in 2020 by the performance of some very smart people in various sectors of our social life.

The theme of Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions (1980) is that there are hidden but powerful reasons to expect frustration: notably, our systemic tendency as humans to overlook the role of incentives and constraints in the production, acquisition, distribution and use of knowledge in the decisions made by individuals, groups and institutions. Some of the analyses appearing in this work make for uncanny reading in the wake of 2020.

F20

Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Volume 1, Rules and Orders

What is the role of law in human social life? What does Hayek mean by a "spontaneous order," and does it entail a libertarian social order or a moralistic one? Indeed, what kind of morality is best suited to the global economy that Hayek endorsed?

X20

Philip K. Howard, The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government (2014)

"Our regulatory state is failing us." So wrote economist and blogger Tyler Cowen—early and often—during the Spring pandemic of 2020. But is this true? Are the problems we face in dealing with our 20 million or so local, state and Federal employees anything more than the usual annoyances one would expect from any large, impersonal bureaucratic organization? Philip K. Howard thinks so. Ever since his best-selling book The Death of Common Sense appeared in 1995, Howard--lawyer, civic activist, and founder of Common Good—has been sounding the alarm about the dysfunctionalities of the contemporary administrative state. 

S20

Alan S. Kahan, Mind vs Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism (2010)

Are intellectuals—journalists, writers, artists, and academics—a "permanently alienated elite in capitalist societies"? Do they have a more negative view of the economic system under which we live than most ordinary people do? Do they provide legitimacy and leadership to anti-modern movements that those movements would not otherwise enjoy? To Alan S. Kahan, respected intellectual historian of liberalism, the answer to all of these questions is Yes. And in Mind vs. Money, he tells their story and outlines their contours.

W20

Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

In this ambitious book (described by reviewers as "brilliant," "definitive," "extraordinary," "magisterial," "required reading," "the must-read book of the year"), Eric Kaufmann addresses the complex connections among between race, immigration, globalization and democracy. What is the relationship between immigration and national identity? How has the issue of immigration provoked the rise of populism and the recent "crisis of democracy"?  Finally, what about political economy? What role did economic globalization have in changing notions of national identity, and what role if any might markets have in addressing its manifest problems?

F19

Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We're Wrong About the World, and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (2019)

Are activists today mostly misguided in their priorities? Are they guilty of unscientific or evidence-free emotionalism in the way they choose their various causes? Have they mainly misidentified the things that deserve public attention? Hans Rosling, one of the great "activists" of the past half century (before his untimely death in 2018), came to believe the answer to these questions was Yes. Moreover, he further concluded that the more exposure people had to higher education, the more misguided their approach to activism became.

S19

Harry Frankfurt, On Inequality (and other selections)

Everyone "knows" that income inequality is a large, growing, and urgent problem. It erodes our sense of solidarity and social justice, weakens our economic opportunities, even harms our mental and physical health. Its inexorable rise, we are told, has been proven many times over, most notably by economist Thomas Piketty. Inequality helped fuel the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and is poised to dominate the election of 2020. Everyone knows that inequality is a leading problem of our time.

But what if what "everyone knows" is mistaken? What if income equality is "not a fundamental component of human well-being"? (Pinker 2018, 98) What if the current passion over inequality, on both Right and Left, is misguided or even counterproductive? In the last five years or so, an interdisciplinary array of researchers and thinkers have been coming to just that conclusion. Their arguments form the topic of this reading group.

W19

Paul Hollander, From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship

What is it that attracts so many intellectuals---i.e., journalists, writers, artists, and academics---to dictatorship? Is it the same thing that attracts ordinary people? Is the appeal of left-wing dictatorship different from the appeal of right-wing dictatorship? Is the role of intellectuals in facilitating dictatorship a real problem, or are they too marginal a group to matter very much? Are we living in a time when the appeal of dictatorship is again on the rise throughout the world? Such are among the big questions addressed by this reading group.

S17

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion

Moral Foundations Theory, developed by Jonathan Haidt among others, raises provocative questions for our thinking about political economy in all of its dimensions---including: How much of our economic and political thinking is actually moral in nature? Where do our political and economic ideas come from? And why does it seem to be getting harder for people of different economic and political ideas to understand or sympathize with each other? The present reading group provides an opportunity to explore some of those and related questions. 

F14

John Tomasi, Free-Market Fairness

Can libertarians care about social justice? In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi argues that they can and should. Drawing simultaneously on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls, Tomasi presents a new theory of liberal justice. This theory, free market fairness, is committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor. Unlike traditional libertarians, Tomasi argues that property rights are best defended not in terms of self-ownership or economic efficiency but as requirements of democratic legitimacy. At the same time, he encourages egalitarians concerned about social justice to listen more sympathetically to the claims ordinary citizens make about the importance of private economic liberty in their daily lives. Tomasi argues that free market fairness, with its twin commitment to economic liberty and a fair distribution of goods and opportunities, is a morally superior account of liberal justice. Indeed, according to Tomasi, free market fairness is social justice, American style.