Visible Hand

January 10, 2022
Wall Street Journal opinion editor Hennessey evangelizes free markets in this accessible if slanted primer on economics. Acknowledging at the outset that he’s not a trained economist and doesn’t “have a PhD in anything,” Hennessey illustrates economic principles with real-world examples—for instance, explaining “diminishing marginal utility” with an account of eating cotton candy at the county fair (“At the third bite, the fun is over”)—and name-checks thinkers including Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter without explaining their contributions to the field. (Adam Smith gets the in-depth treatment, however.) Instead, he draws on pop culture and memories of working in his father’s New Jersey bar to explain how incentives, pricing, scarcity, and other economic concepts reveal “the hidden impulses and involuntary actions that move lives.” Throughout, he defends market capitalism as the economic system that has done the most “to improve people’s material circumstances, at both the individual and societal levels,” and critiques socialism as a “nice-on-paper philosophy that has always and everywhere diminished human flourishing.” Hennessey’s sense of humor and lucid prose appeal, but he undermines his case by downplaying the struggles of poor Americans and refusing to acknowledge the structural advantages enjoyed by wealthy ones. Readers who don’t already agree with Hennessey won’t be convinced.