Resolved. Robert Litan

      Preface

      Fiction authors are commonly advised to “write what they know.” Nonfiction authors, especially those at think tanks like the Brookings Institution, are a bit different. They write about what they research, and through the course of their careers, they often change fields to mix things up. That pretty much sums up what I have tried to do during my research career, most of it affiliated with Brookings.

      In recent years, I have concentrated my research on the influence and nature of economics itself. In 2014, I authored a book The Trillion Dollar Economists, about how economics and economists have had hugely influential, though until then not widely recognized, influence on business in America. As 2016 was beginning, I was planning to follow up that book with another about economics, but focused on how much the field has changed, specifically through the mushrooming use of randomized control trials (RCTs)—of the kinds use to test new drugs—in economics and social sciences generally, and how the use of such information is increasingly being viewed as important by policymakers. The appointment in 2016 of a Commission on Evidence-Based Decision-Making, based on legislation authored by Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) and then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, one of whose chairs was my Brookings colleague Ron Haskins, seemed to make that book timely.

      I had a change of heart about writing such a book after the 2016 election results, fearing there wouldn’t be much of a market for a manuscript about evidence-based decisionmaking. Ironically, I was wrong about the market. Yale University Press (the intended publisher of the book I initially was going to write) published in 2018 an excellent book, Randomistas, on the history and utility of RCTs by noted economist and Australian politician Andrew Leigh. In the fall of 2019, three economists—Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer (with whom I had the privilege of working at Brookings two decades ago)—shared the Nobel Prize in Economics for their pioneering use of RCTs in testing various “micro-interventions” to reduce poverty.

      In any event, by the time the Leigh book was available, I had mentally moved on, writing several essays for the Brookings website in 2017 and early 2018 about the fraying American political fabric, ways to help the middle class without reducing economic growth, and the worries but also the misconceptions about continued automation. All these essays were prompted by concerns I suspect bother most Americans, making them fearful or even angry. These are also the concerns I focused on after organizing and hearing comments at a conference held in June 2016 at Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) to discuss an outline for the book I had initially intended to write. I am grateful to the Smith Richardson Foundation that generously provided the financial support for this working conference and to the foundation for the patience it displayed while I decided to write a very different book (this one), and to the many well-known economists who showed up to participate at the Stanford session.

      One comment at that conference by one of my lifelong friends and mentors, Stanford emeritus professor Roger Noll, struck a special chord with me, however. He suggested that instead of writing a broad-based book—the kind Leigh had written—I should focus on one or two specific public policy challenges where the empirical revolution in economics was having a real impact. That explains why I wrote the Brookings essays on the growing incivility in public life and the seemingly intractable problem of growing income inequality, topics which, not surprisingly, are related to one another.

      But I didn’t yet have the desire or the “hook” to write another full book until, quite by accident, I read an article in April 2018 on my Twitter feed. The article was written by a journalist at the Christian Science Monitor who highlighted the surprising (to her) importance of competitive high school debate in my home state of Kansas.1 The article caught my eye because a little more than 50 years ago, I, too, was a competitive high school debater in Kansas (who went on to debate a little more than two years at the college level before turning to my real intellectual passion, economics, full time). Also, as I explain in the first chapter, debate fundamentally changed my life, and I instinctively felt I had something more to say about the virtues of debate, potentially for others. I didn’t realize the extent of those virtues at the outset, however—not until I began the research about to be described.

      Before doing that, a remarkable coincidence is worth mention. Two months after the Christian Science Monitor article published, a high school team from Blue Valley Southwest in Johnson County,