If you were to ask people who have taken an undergraduate economics course what they think of raising the minimum wage, you would expect them to express at least some reservations, saying the increase could hurt employment for low-skill workers. That concern, according to University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak, would exemplify the harmful phenomenon he calls “economism.” When people make decisions on what he deems complex policy questions based on their having absorbed some of the “simple” concepts from Econ 101, that is a bad thing. In his view, the United States is being held back from addressing what he believes is our crucial issue—rising economic inequality—because economism has indoctrinated so much of the population.

The “elegant model” of supply and demand, Kwak writes, “rests on a set of highly unrealistic assumptions. The definition of a competitive market requires that all suppliers offer the same product—there are no differences in features, quality, or anything else—and each competitor is so small that its behavior has no effect on overall supply.”

Because the model of a perfectly competitive market is unrealistic, Kwak argues, it follows that the basic teachings derived from it are not reliable policy guides. Hence we really can’t be sure about what the effect of a mandated wage increase would be, and so it’s wrong to instruct impressionable students that there are any necessary implications from it or other interventionist policies.

In short, learning the basic principles taught in Econ 101 is an instance of the old adage that a little learning is a dangerous thing. If it weren’t for these simplistic notions implanted in people’s minds, government would have adopted a host of regulatory and tax policies to relieve suffering and make America a more equal nation. Interestingly, Kwak doesn’t reach the parallel conclusion that assumptions about the benefit of such interventions are likewise simplistic and unreliable.

If his thesis seems like an attack on economic theory, that’s because it is. He derides writers such as Henry Hazlitt for arguing that the world obeys economic laws. Theory, Kwak maintains, has been overthrown by data. We can only discover the effect of different policies by looking at studies after implementing them, and if any study finds an apparently beneficial result—even if that study conflicts with a larger body of empirical work—that’s adequate justification for the policy. Naturally, he points to outlier academic studies finding little or no harm from minimum wage increases and little or no benefits from tax cuts to make his case that the world is too complicated for mere theory.

Undermining FDR / Where does economism have its roots? They’re found in the ideas of economists who have argued that free markets lead to the most efficient use of resources to satisfy the desires of consumers and, equally important, that coercive interference with markets will have predictable and generally harmful consequences.

Kwak displays a superficial familiarity with those economists. Throughout the book, he mentions Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. All of them opposed the sorts of interventionist policies that he thinks are now necessary to restore fairness: trade restrictions, minimum wage laws, strong labor unions, high taxes on the wealthy, and so on.

But he never ventures a direct assault on their ideas. Rather, his contention is that their theoretical notions, while not necessarily wrong, have been pulled out of their books and impressed into the service of rich Americans who were unhappy that the New Deal had slightly reduced their share of national wealth and wanted some means of fighting back. If, for example, Charles Koch cites Milton Friedman on the benefits of deregulation in an op-ed, that’s bad old economism at work: using simple, merely theoretical ideas to tear down our regulatory apparatus so Koch’s companies can gain.

In Kwak’s version of history, America had settled into a comfortable and relatively fair economic equilibrium under the enlightened policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which sensible Republicans continued under Eisenhower. But then a few people on the far right decided that the New Deal’s big administrative state was an obstacle to their wealth maximization. They created a movement to counter it, a movement centered around the anti-interventionist arguments of Smith, Mises, et al. Thus was economism born. It takes “simplistic” economic concepts and repackages them in op-eds, videos, and radio commentaries designed to get Americans to believe that free markets are always good and government interference with them is always bad.

In making his argument, Kwak is relentlessly uncharitable toward his opponents. They’re mean-spirited people, all about money for themselves, never about principled economic and philosophical arguments against government coercion. Yale social scientist and noted libertarian intellectual William Graham Sumner is tarred with the false claim that he was indifferent to the poor, who just “deserved it.” Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, was just a business executive looking for ways to put business back on top, not a man with a deep philosophic commitment to liberty. Americans who oppose the minimum wage merely want to keep down labor costs for business. And those who argue for tax cuts do so only because their deep pockets could hold a few more dollars.

Kwak can’t even resist a dig at two Nobel laureates who provide ammunition for the practitioners of economism. He writes of Hayek and Friedman, “Both were well versed in the complexities of various markets, even if their political sensibilities constantly colored their economic assessments.” I don’t think I have ever before seen the intellectual sincerity of Hayek or Friedman called into question, but Kwak feels the need to suggest that they were part of the right-wing cabal against the Golden Age of progressivism.

Against debate / Kwak claims that he isn’t trying to say who is right and who is wrong in such policy debates; he only wants deeper and more enlightened discussion. But given his dismissiveness of first principles on the pro-market side of these debates, it’s hard to take this claim seriously. He never indicts any of the equally simple arguments that come from progressives. For every instance of “economism”—let’s say a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing that raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment—it’s easy to find one of simple progressivism—say a New York Times op-ed declaring that taxes should be raised on the “wealthiest 1 percent” as a matter of basic fairness. Only the former appears to bother Kwak; simplistic appeals that help advance the policies he likes occasion no complaint.

Instead of promoting deeper discussion, the book encourages leftists to believe that free market arguments are just masks for greed.

Whatever effect the book has will be to encourage true-believing progressives to say “Well, that’s just economism for you” any time they encounter an argument that’s premised on supply and demand, incentives, efficiency, or other foundational concepts of economics. Instead of promoting deeper discussion, the book encourages leftists to believe that free market arguments are just a mask for greed.

Besides the book’s tactic of impugning the motives of those who argue for freer markets and less interventionist government, Kwak’s work is open to two obvious objections.

First, is it true, as he says, that basic supply and demand analysis is so drummed into American students that they reflexively oppose government interventionism? Demonstrating that would seem to be crucial to Kwak’s case, but he never bothers to try. In point of fact, only a rather small percentage of Americans ever take an economics course (very few colleges require them) and as George Mason University economist Daniel Klein has shown, many economics professors are not free-market enthusiasts. So among the minority of students who do take Econ 101, many are taught in a way that gives more attention to alleged market failures and the need for intervention than to the adverse consequences of tampering with prices. And in the rest of the college curriculum, students are far more likely to be imbued with egalitarian and statist ideas than to hear anything that reinforces supply and demand theory from Econ 101. If “economism” affects American thinking, its effect is far, far smaller than Kwak would have us believe.

The second obvious problem is that despite the supposedly gigantic barrier of economism, the United States has kept right on increasing the power of the state to interfere in markets. Economism did not prevent the Affordable Care Act from passing; it didn’t keep Congress from raising the minimum wage in 2007 or keep Seattle from raising it to $13 per hour last year; it didn’t prevent ethanol subsidies or steel tariffs; it didn’t keep states from enacting laws against price gouging. Nor has the government repealed any of the laws that people ostensibly infected with economism have long railed against. The Davis-Bacon Act? Still on the books. The Department of Education? Still there.

In short, Kwak vastly overstates the power of economism to dictate policy. He declares that it prevents Americans from even considering a single-payer national health policy, but many politicians and policy advocates have put forth that idea and it has been widely discussed. Most Americans seem to have concluded that single-payer would be a big mistake. That isn’t because “economism” is so dominant; it’s because the case for a federal health care monopsony is so poor.

Conclusion / What this book boils down to is the author’s complaint that the world of policy debate doesn’t operate to his satisfaction. “With economism,” he writes, “there are only implicit assumptions and asserted conclusions. When commentators and politicians say that a higher minimum wage will increase unemployment … they often do not realize that they are making contested claims about how the economy should be organized and how its output should be distributed.”

Yet, writers who rely on economism are just as apt to know they’re making “contested claims” as progressive writers are to know that they’re doing so when they advocate interventionist, redistributionist policies. People on any side who seek to shape public opinion couldn’t possibly include and respond to every objection that has been lodged against the positions they advocate. The realm of policy debate is (thankfully) still an even field of battle and Kwak’s lament that “economism” gives greedy right-wingers an unfair advantage is risible.

In the end, what does he want? He wants his philosophical allies to develop “a new, compelling narrative about how the world works.” What would that entail? To break the grip of economism, he wants to fight the idea that “the overriding objective should be to have more and more stuff.” He praises Amartya Sen for saying that we should care about “the richness of human life” and not just “the richness of the economy.”

Fine. Let Kwak and anyone else make that case any way they can, even if those advocates don’t bother to acknowledge when they’re making “contested claims” and ignore the counterarguments about the tradeoffs their preferences would require.

In fact, writers have been trying to sell people around the world on a “less is more” philosophy for thousands of years. They haven’t gotten far. Perhaps Kwak’s next book will argue that Americans should change to a sharing ethic because we have enough stuff.