Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
February 9, 2009 at 17:27
filed under economics, read
Tagged books
I’ve been told many people did not know New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman was a renowned economist until there was much made this past year about his Nobel Memorial Prize. One could be excused I imagine since he has a popular twice-weekly column in the NY Times, published every Monday and Friday, which has been better known for fierce criticism of the previous administration than for exploring narrow economic topics. Although many would argue he is very partisan, a narrow mind Krugman has not. His Nobel prize was awarded mainly for work he did on international trade while he was in his late twenties and he still teaches Economics at Princeton. Furthermore, now that a new administration has taken office, he admittedly has more time to spend on specific economic issues in his columns. He covers a lot as well on his blog which I find to be a great resource for better understanding the troubled economic times in which we find ourselves.
I read this book several months ago so while the details might not all be fresh in my memory, the central idea strongly articulated by Krugman in ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’ is, and in my words turns into ‘inequality in the United States is a result of ideological economic and political decisions, many of which are historically rooted in the race issues which plague the history of the country’.
More formally, according to Publisher’s Weekly on Krugman’s own website:
Paul Krugman, today’s most widely read economist, examines the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age and the 1920s to the unraveling of that achievement and the reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a “new New Deal,” Krugman has created his finest book to date, a “stimulating manifesto” that offers “a compelling historical defense of liberalism and a clarion call for Americans to retake control of their economic destiny.
Immensely inspirational, I found the book to be somewhat reminiscent on some levels of Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States‘ in how it sheds light on historical periods and/or events which were previously viewed, at least for me, in a different light. Another abstract from his publisher:
Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a “new New Deal,” Krugman has created his finest book to date, a work that weaves together a nuanced account of three generations of history with sharp political, social, and economic analysis. This book, written with Krugman’s trademark ability to explain complex issues simply, will transform the debate about American social policy in much the same way as did John Kenneth Galbraith’s deeply influential book, The Affluent Society.
As I previously said, many find Krugman to be very partisan, and I believe the following sentence from this book both captures the essence of many of his arguments made in this book, while it will also explain where the partisan tag comes from:
Republicans increase economic inequality, Democrats decrease it, and so, politics matter.
And so, this book matters. Read it.
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