Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media: Civic Engagement, Contested Issues, and Emerging Identities. By James S. Lai. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022. 211p. $104.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

thinking, Berman gives scant attention to the ways in which they reshaped the bounds of the politically possible, too. In health care, for example, a huge part of the problem was simply that, after 1965, most Americans who didn’t receive Medicare and Medicaid were covered by taxsubsidized private insurance. Economists were hardly of one mind about how to improve this patchwork framework, but more than a small share believed a universal public program would deliver better value per dollar. Nor were economists as a class averse to using the regulatory power of government to restrain costs; members of the discipline played a key role in pushing for price controls within Medicare. To be sure, the prescriptions advanced often reflected biases of the sort that Berman enumerates, especially a general preference for competition among insurance plans. But the biggest factor curtailing ambitions was the belief that frontally dislodging the existing system was a political nonstarter. This belief was reasonable—even policy thinkers like me who recommended using the public sector to insure the nonelderly (the so-called public option) recognized how difficult it would be to displace existing coverage—and it makes the limits of President Obama’s narrowly enacted health plan more understandable. Still, Berman’s critique has bite. At the end of her book, she pinpoints the root problem—what she calls the economic style’s “implicit theory of politics.” Economic experts didn’t just elevate certain aims, assumptions, and instruments. They internalized a conception of politics in which their job was to craft technical solutions and leave the messy world of politics to others. In practice, economics-oriented policymakers had to incorporate political judgments into their designs, and they did. But these judgments were usually unstated, often crude, and certainly never subject to the rigorous analysis valorized elsewhere. For those seeking to craft popular, effective, and sustainable policies, this was the worst of both worlds: technocrats simultaneously foreswearing political calculations and baking them into their policy designs. In the ugliest cases, elected leaders were left to “sell” policies that had little organized support or public resonance. More common but no less consequential, nobody in power who was struggling to use government for good was really doing careful thinking about how the policies they were seeking reflected and altered the power of citizens, movements, interest groups, and the state. I would like to think that political science could do better, which is why Berman’s book made me wonder what a political style of thinking might entail. We dearly need a policy mindset that takes seriously imbalances of power in the political economy, grapples with the challenge of building durable governing capacities, and focuses on the political as well as economic effects of public policies. But for such an outlook to take root, more political scientists will need to engage with the substance of policy, with the feedback effects of policies not just on the public but also on organized groups and governing institutions, and with deeper questions about the forces driving policymaking than those at the center of the discipline today. For scholars who find inspiration in this aspiration, Berman’s book is a timely and powerful reminder of why it matters.