cover image Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society

Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society

Alan S. Blinder. Addison Wesley Publishing Company, $17.9 (236pp) ISBN 978-0-201-11504-8

Princeton economist and Business Week columnist Blinder passes a farewell judgment on Reagan-era economics and offers other ideas. Among them: inflation is not all bad and unemployment may not be as ""acceptable'' as once thought. Economics under the current administration has been a ``comic opera,'' claims the author, with Keynesian fine-tuning, be-all monetarism, ``rational expectations'' as a policy determinant, and supply-side ``quackery'' all backing and filling between academe and the White House. Blinder opposes trade protectionism, demonstrates how hard-headed yet soft-hearted 1986 tax reform came about and favors complex economics over elementary science by advocating cumulative and putatively irreversible industrial air and water pollution-for-a-fee. (November 11)