Book: The Chile Project by Sebastian Edwards

Edwards, Sebastian. 2023. The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism. Princeton University Press.

This book provides a history, aimed at an intelligent lay (i.e., non-economist) reader, of the "Chicago Boys," the group of Chilean economists whose market-oriented program was adopted by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship following the military coup that deposed the elected president Salvador Allende. Edwards is well-positioned to tell the story, as he is Chilean, an economist and long-time faculty member at UCLA, and knows most of the players in the story including the Chicago Boys, without being a Chicago Boy himself. 

The first thing I learned from the book was that Allende's ideology lay further to the left than I had imagined. The second thing I learned was that he was not only very far to the left but also apparently very far from competence. Edwards shares a derisive remark made in private by French philosopher Michel Foucault blaming the "Marxists" for the coup and its aftermath as well as a statement by left-leaning development  economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan that "Salvador Allende died not because he was a socialist, but because he was an incompetent ... It is not inherent in socialism to be inefficient." We can debate the second bit of that sentence while still recognizing the very large difference between thoughtful socialists who understand some economics and silly socialists who do not. The third thing I learned is that the reforms moved along in fits and starts, and that most of the economic growth they engendered actually took place under the early center-left post-dictatorship administrations, which retained the reforms while attempting to soften their effects via a more generous welfare state.

The broad arc of the book addresses the question of how the largely successful reforms of the Chicago Boys, and the economic growth that eventually followed from them (and which moved Chile to the top of the Latin American economic league table), ended up engendering an intense left-wing backlash both against specific reforms and against "neoliberalism" more generally. Edwards identifies four main factors, two involving specific policy design choices and two broader failures of imagination. 

The first policy mistake was setting the contribution rate for the private pension accounts in the compulsory-savings scheme too low, leading to a lot of unhappiness decades later when Chileans discovered that their realized pension benefits did not match the promises made when the system began. The second was the failure of policy design in the university sector, where the setup allowed nominally non-profit but factually for-profit post-secondary institutions, whose troubles in Chile mirror the issues that arose with explicitly for-profit institutions in the US. 

The first broader failure of imagination was the failure to grow a true culture of liberalism (without the neo). This sort of culture-building exercise is not something economists train to do, and requires the patient building of institutions and the cultivation of liberal scholars and activists outside of economics. In a strong liberal culture, the lure of excessive state power may lessen on both the left and the right. The second broader failure concerns a lack of attention to both the perception and the reality of socio-economic mobility in a society with a rigid pre-existing class structure. I agree with Edwards that in order to support reforms that increase the size of the aggregate economy, the broader public needs to feel like they have a stake in them, which they may not if family background still largely determines outcomes.

The book notes but does not dwell on the many non-economic evils of the Pinochet regime. It also discusses but does not dwell on the question of what various Chicago Boys knew about those evils and when they knew it. The question of when doing good within an evil regime represents the right choice always remains in the mind of the reader, but this book does not aim to answer it. Instead, it aims to explain the history behind the recent backlash against the reforms, a backlash that ultimately led to the failed attempt to replace the Pinochet-era constitution with a thoroughly left-wing one. That is enough for one book.

I learned much from this book both about the history of the Chicago Boys and about Chile and its history more generally. I valued Edwards's sympathetic but critical perspective on the Chicago Boys and their reforms. The book is very much worth reading if one is interested in the episode and in lessons for liberalism in other contexts. 

I bought this on Abebooks for an online book club of aging Chicago economists that I ended up not being able to attend due to a conflict.

TV: The American Experiment [Netflix]

Over its five parts, The American Experiment covers the lead-up to the American Revolution, the revolution itself, the period under the Articles of Confederation, and finally the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. It has the standard features of historical documentaries in the present age: talking heads, old photos, old locations, and little mini-reenactments with too few actors (e.g., the reenacted continental army has only about 50 soldiers). 

The talking heads include a number of authors of relevant books, some more academic and some more popular. I seek out Tom Nichol's writing in the Atlantic and enjoyed seeing him on screen. I liked most of the others too, and would be curious to know how much control they had over the substantive content of their bits.

The talking heads also include a veritable jamboree of politicians, including Al Gore, Hilary Clinton, Ron Wyden, Ted Cruz, Jeff Flake, Mike Pence, and Rand Paul. I think their presence represents an effort to make the show visually bipartisan in a sort of pre-MAGA, pre-DSA way (those were the days ...). Tom Hanks is one of the executive producers and I tend to associate him with bipartisan, civic-minded impulses of this sort. While I have some amount of patience for Jeff Flake and Rand Paul, I would have skipped the politicians entirely in favor of more historians. I think including politicians will serve mainly to make the documentary age faster than it otherwise would. 

The academic in me was bothered by the absence of references to John Locke or any of the other philosophers whose ideas filled the heads of the Founders and guided them as they declared and constituted. A naive viewer could easily come away from the documentary thinking that the founders thought up classical liberalism on their own. They did not.

Finally, the show on a few occasions refers directly to current events in order to bash a certain sitting president. These bits will speed up the show's aging even more than Al Gore. And they are unnecessary! Even relatively dim viewers will get the point by just having the talking heads, or the narrator, repeat relevant lines from the Declaration of Independence or Common Sense or the Federalist Papers. The show does not need to beat the viewer over the head, and do some damage to its bipartisan mojo, by connecting the already painfully obvious dots. 

To close, let me balance out my criticisms by noting that others in my household found the series entertaining and informative. And I did not mind most of it either.

Book: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship

Masur, Louis. 2025. A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship. Oxford University Press. 

I read this short - just 160 pages - book over the past couple of weeks in honor of 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I would categorize it as an academic books aimed at a non-specialist audience. There are footnotes and sources, but I am pretty sure the book was an impulse buy on display near the checkout stand of some independent bookstore. 

The book tells the story of a road trip that Jefferson and Madison took in 1791, so well after the revolution and well before their respective presidential terms. They travelled from Virginia to New York, a journey not new to either, and from there up the Hudson, across to Vermont, and then back down to New York via Long Island. The book covers the whole tour but highlights three destinations and uses these to motivate discussions of three topics in greater detail: the Hessian fly, race and slavey, and the prospect of an American maple sugar industry. The (mis-named) Hessian fly was reducing colonial wheat harvests at the time, and so piqued Jefferson's interests in both botany and economic development. The section on race and slavery includes some material on the American Colonization Society, which prompted me to look a bit into the literature on it as well as the related literature on Liberia. Maple sugar was viewed by some at the time, including Jefferson, as a possible avenue to economic development and as a moral opportunity to reduce the consumption of the cane sugar produced by slaves in the Caribbean. Alas, it never really took off and, more narrowly, Jefferson never succeeded in getting any sugar maple trees to grow at Monticello despite multiple attempts. Through it all, the friendship between Jefferson and Madison develops, and Jefferson rates all the of the inns they stay at as poor, middling, or good in his notes.

In sum, a bite-sized piece of early Republic history, with special interest for afficionados of the two founders at the center of the story. I enjoyed it.

Purchased on one of my spring travels, but I do not recall just where. I can rule out the JF Bookstore in DC, the little store in the Statler Inn at Cornell, Literati in Ann Arbor, the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle and the MIT Press Bookstore based on my receipts. Hmmm .... 

Book: The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love

Love, Robert. 2010. The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Viking.

Perhaps surprisingly, the "Great Oom" is actually a person, namely a fellow called Pierre Arnold Bernard, who played a key role in the importation and development of hatha yoga into the United States. The book chronicles his Midwest origins, including his initial encounters with yoga in, of all places, Lincoln, Nebraska, his sojourn on the west coast, his years in New York City and then his years of success and eventual decline, brought on by the Great Depression, in the small town of Nyack-on-Hudson. He received the "Great Oom" nickname from the press, and it ended up following him throughout his life.

Bernard's personal journey offers plenty to interest the reader. It also sheds a broader light on American life, especially in the teens, twenties, and thirties. Then, like now, celebrities and the rich gravitated to Eastern mysticism and health fads. Then as now the media loved a moral panic, especially one involving the bodies of the rich and famous. Then, as now, people like Bernard become less daring with age and success. Indeed, my one complaint about the book concerns how little the reader learns about how Bernard saw his own public and private evolution over the course of his life. Overall, I quite enjoyed the book. 

If you think you'll like it, you will.

I purchased this book many years ago at the Crazy Wisdom bookstore in Ann Arbor.

Economics Moment of Zen #20

Reviewer #2: "I did not enjoy reading the paper, which is a slog to get through."

Reviewer #3: "This is a very nicely written, easy to follow, and thorough analysis ..."

The good news is that these divergent views apply to a paper I am handling as an editor, rather than a paper on which I am an author!

UW Live on Immigration

 

The UW Live show provides a link between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its alumni base, though of course anyone can follow along. In that regard, it also embodies the "Wisconsin idea" that the university should benefit everyone in the state, which is taken more seriously on campus than I expected when I first arrived.

The show was explained to me as a partial substitute for in-person road shows in Chicago and Florida and other places with lots of alumni. The livestream costs less than the road shows and reaches more alums. In this case, we had more than 450 steady viewers of the initial livestream. 

Several of my colleagues appear in earlier episodes, including Ananth Seshadri, Kim Ruhl, and Lydia Cox. The host, Mike Knetter, is an economist who used to be the boss of the alumni association and the foundation.

Two of the sources I found most useful in preparing are this AEI piece on the fiscal costs of immigration and this Pew report on the number of undocumented immigrants.

Thanks to those who have pressed me over the years to do more public engagement. 

Book: Qualitative Literacy by Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco

Small, Mario Luis and Jessica McCrory Calarco. 2022. Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research. University of California Press.

This (short) book lays out clear standards by which outsiders can judge the quality of qualitative empirical research in the social sciences. It has in mind in particular ethnographic work, in which the researcher embeds themselves into a context, thoughtfully observes, takes lots of notes, and then attempts to construct meaning from the notes. It also discusses, and applies the same conceptual framework to, research based on in-depth semi-structured interviews. I am a sometimes consumer of ethnographies and have often wished for a book like this one, as I, not at all surprisingly, never received any formal training in ethnographic methods along the way, though I could certainly rank the many ethnographies I have read over the years on some implicit quality scale.

The authors organize their book around the notions of cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, palpability, follow-up, and self-awareness. Cognitive empathy comes first, and has a special salience in polarized times when it seems deficient on all sides. But ethnographers really need it in a way that ordinary folk do not, for without it they can never hope to really understand their subjects. Heterogeneity basically means that if everyone in some group comes off as identical, then the ethnographer has done a bad job, in the sense that they have surely missed important features of those they purport to study. Palpability means sharing telling details rather than just offering generalities. Follow-up means investigating interesting bits as they come up during fieldwork (or in a long-form interview). Put differently, it means not rigidly adhering to some ex ante research plan. In qualitative work, as in quantitative work, the most interesting bits will sometimes be those that depart from the explicit or implicit "pre-analysis plan", which of course does not imply that the pre-analysis plan was not worth doing. And self-awareness means the researcher needs to think about how they - their features and their words and their behavior - affect the content of their research. 

Overall, a remarkably clear and concise guide. Nothing was super surprising to me, but I found the value-added from organizing the material into a clean conceptual framework and providing many examples both real and contrived quite large.

Recommended to consumers (and producers!) of qualitative research.

I ordered this book from the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago.