The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen is surprised to find the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal “not that shrill.”

“There is an argument, to be sure, but the book has much more economic history than I had expected, and much more political history,” Cowen writes.

He does criticize Krugman for conflating relative and absolute wage differences between classes. He disputes Krugman’s contention that conservatives played “the race card” in their 1980s political ascendancy, arguing that Krugman underplays the preceding economic chaos and America’s loss of international stature.

“His theory of government failure is that wealthy right-wingers hijack the state to redistribute wealth to themselves, and that’s all we hear on what’s wrong with government,” Cowen writes. “That’s the part of the book I find hardest to swallow.”

But otherwise Krugman’s “calls for single-payer health insurance, tax hikes, and raising the minimum wage” don’t “come off as all that radical,” says Cowen.

“Bush receives virtually no attention; perhaps Krugman is simply sick of writing about the guy.”

Indeed, Cowen predicts, “for lack of red meat,” a book as sensible as this might not sell as well as, say, Naomi Klein’s latest.