Late last month, the Chicago Booth economist Luigi Zingales expressed the hope that the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate represented an embrace of an affirmative vision for America’s future. In the days since, the Romney-Ryan ticket has been thrown off balance by a extremely effective counterattack from its Democratic rivals, and the themes that are central to Zingales’s A Capitalism for the People have gone largely neglected. Yet there is reason to believe that a Romney administration would embrace Zingales’s brand of reformist politics should it come to pass, if only because the alternative would be to spend the next four years in a defensive crouch.