The Economists’ Hour

In this insightful study of post-World War II economic orthodoxy, editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum details how economists Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer and other free market proponents captured the imaginations of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders. The results, Appelbaum writes, were lower taxes for the wealthy and falling incomes for everyone else. His far-ranging analysis will engage readers of all political and economic stripes, who will find Appelbaum’s treatise a sobering take on the modern economy.

This Wall Street Journal bestseller earned the Porchlight Business Book Award in Narrative and Biography. The Economist called it “a well-reported and researched history of the ways in which plucky economists helped rewrite policy in America and Europe and across emerging markets.” The New Republic wrote that Appelbaum “shows economists’ dramatic impact on government policy, and thus reveals economics to be not an abstract, disinterested science but a moral and political science all to itself.”