The economic style of reasoning is not value-neutral! An interview with Elizabeth Popp Berman

Abstract

As part of Acta Sociologica's special issue on “Social investment in Action” we bring an interview with Professor Elizabeth Popp Berman, author of the widely acclaimed Thinking like an Economist – How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy (Princeton University Press, 2022). Interviewer, Ditte Andersen, probes Berman's argument on how the economic style of reasoning is linked to specific values, especially the value of efficiency, in ways that crowd out other values (e.g. democratic participation, universal rights) and constrain social policy thinking in contemporary Western societies. Social investment policies epitomize the economic style of reasoning by orientating towards returns of public spending. In policy domains such as education, “social investment in action” forefronts the value of returns (in the future) rather than, for example, the value of equality and universalism (in the present). The interview also turns attention to the role of sociologists in denaturalizing the taken for granted and aid the imagination of alternative futures.