IN THIS ECONOMY?

A young progressive’s take on how the economy works and what it means to ordinary consumers.

If Madeline Pendleton’s I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt speaks to the intricacies of personal finance, Scanlon’s offering ratchets up the discussion into more ethereal realms—the economy as a reflection of not just on-the-ground realities but also human emotions. The author opens her debut book with “The Deciders,” the higher-ups who build and shape economic policies that, at least in theory, “are designed to work for the collective benefit.” The Federal Reserve is among this group, with its two sometimes-conflicting missions of keeping employment high while keeping inflation low through such instruments as contractionary monetary policy. Scanlon does a good job in later sections of relating such macro issues to the vicissitudes of daily life: why, for instance, the imposition of tariffs or the relative strength of the dollar to the yuan makes Chinese trade goods more or less expensive, with the resulting knock-on effects on consumers’ pocketbooks. The discussion of recession is admirably clear, and Scanlon ably explains the causal mechanisms and the fact that from time to time, the economy needs a reset, albeit at a cost borne by ordinary people more than those with deeper resources. Throughout, the author, leaning to the left, reminds readers that the economy is ultimately about people, a matter that governments and corporations seem to have forgotten. “If the minimum wage had moved with productivity growth (as it did up until 1968),” she notes, “it would now be about $24.00 per hour”—a fact that, one hopes, will startle policymakers into taking the issue seriously. Currently, writes Scanlon, “there is no place in the United States where a minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment.”

An accessible overview of the dismal science.