Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: Writing about the economic future
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
- INSTITUTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVES
- POLICY PERSPECTIVES
- SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
- CONCLUSION
- 11 American economics and the American economy in the American Century: doctrinal legacies and contemporary policy problems
- List of contributors
- Index
11 - American economics and the American economy in the American Century: doctrinal legacies and contemporary policy problems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: Writing about the economic future
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
- INSTITUTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVES
- POLICY PERSPECTIVES
- SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
- CONCLUSION
- 11 American economics and the American economy in the American Century: doctrinal legacies and contemporary policy problems
- List of contributors
- Index
Summary
At the present moment people are unusually expectant of a more fundamental diagnosis; more particularly ready to receive it; eager to try it out, if it should be even plausible. But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men [and women], who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
–John Maynard Keynes, 1935Contemporary anxieties about the performance of the American economy have been paralleled by similar concerns about the ability of modern economic theory and policy to provide effective remedies for slow growth and inadequate domestic capital formation. It would be safe to say that the credibility and influence of economists, both within the academic community and in governmental service, have taken as much a battering in the past two decades as the domestic economic growth rate. There is a rather exquisite irony in this fact, for in many respects it was the faltering economic performance of the late 1970s, epitomized by the very high levels of the “misery index” (the sum of the rates of inflation and unemployment) during that decade, that laid the foundations for a major transformation in American economic policy during the 1980s, with the advent of so-called supply-side economics.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Understanding American Economic Decline , pp. 361 - 394Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994