Michael M. Rosen

In late 2019, for the first time ever, American women outnumbered men in the college-educated labor force. Women now earn bachelor’s degrees and doctorates at a higher rate than their male counterparts, and they account for more than 56 percent of law students. They lead more than 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Has the United States come a long way in equalizing opportunities for men and women? Definitely. Do we still have a long way to go? Absolutely, says Josie Cox in Women Money Power, her compelling analysis of the ups and downs of the long road toward workplace parity.

“Under capitalism,” John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.” For a left-wing economist such as Galbraith, this was about as close as one might get to exalting capitalism — damning by faint praise. But in The Capitalist Manifesto, a lively, closely argued polemic by the Swedish historian Johan Norberg, we find a much more vigorous and persuasive defense of the most successful economic system the world has ever seen, a mechanism for sowing widespread abundance and lifting billions out of penury. “The argument for capitalism,” Norberg boldly declares in his preface, “is not that capitalists always behave well... but that they often do not behave well unless they have to.