Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

I remember thinking, This was why my professors in college had used the terms political economics and the political economy as distinct from simply economics and the economy. For one thing, economics has the connotation of pure science, suggesting that organizing production and pay and investment and taxes and all the rest is just…math. Whereas political economics contains the crucial reminder that real-life societies and economies are the result of all kinds of fights and negotiations and feelings and choices about the rules of the game, what’s fair, what’s not, what to maximize, how to optimize for the majority instead of maximizing only for some powerful minority. It’s fine to call it the economy when we’re discussing what’s happening month to month or year to year—the ups and downs in the stock market and rates of employment and inflation and growth. Whereas if we’re talking about the whole megillah, the way we’ve structured our capitalism versus the versions in Canada or Denmark or Russia or China, I think political economy is much better. The economy is weather, the political economy is climate.