Book: Felony Review by Randy Barnett

Barnett, Randy. 2026. Felony Review. Encounter Books.

The publisher codes the book as "true crime", but one could argue that Felony Report is really a professional memoir rather than a proper "true crime" book, in the sense that it is really about what it was like to work in the office of the State's Attorney in Chicago in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Telling that story means telling some stories about crimes, especially about how the crimes played out for their perpetrators in court, but the book is much more than just those stories. Indeed, one of my favorite bits of the book (pages 79-81 for those playing along at home) explains how the skills required to be a good prosecutor differ from those required to be a good defense attorney, so more labor economics than sordid criminal detail. 

The book also reveals an impressive familiarity with cop shows and lawyer shows both modern and, even more so, vintage, including many shows from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Overall, Randy is not so pleased with their representation of prosecutors and their role in the criminal justice system.

The title of the book refers to one of Randy's first jobs within the office of the State's Attorney, namely reviewing potential felony cases to see if they merited pursuing. This role within the office, which began in part as a way of unclogging the courts and focusing prosecutorial resources on the most winnable cases, put him in a position to interview both suspects and victims and do to occasional bits of detective work. 

I know Randy in the sense that we met a few times many years ago at libertarian events when I was in gradual school at the University of Chicago. I have followed his (quite impressive) career from a distance since that time and look forward to reading his longer biography, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. 

I purchased Felony Review at Madison Street Books. Perhaps oddly, Madison Street Books is in Chicago rather than Madison, sitting not far from Greektown in an area I would not have walked in at night when I was a graduate student but which has become a hipster haven. It has become my favorite stop for new books in Chicago outside of Hyde Park.

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.