Selected Product:
| The Conscience of a Liberal
Hardcover
Author: Paul Krugman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Release Date: 2007-10-01
ISBN-10: 0393060691
ISBN-13: 9780393060690
List Price: $25.95
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
ISBN-10: 1933392797
ISBN-13: 9781933392790
List Price:$13.95
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Vintage)
ISBN-10: 0307277992
ISBN-13: 9780307277992
List Price:$15.95
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
ISBN-10: 1591841917
ISBN-13: 9781591841913
List Price:$24.95
Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches
ISBN-10: 0143114212
ISBN-13: 9780143114215
List Price:$16.00
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman (ISBN-10: 0393060691, ISBN-13: 9780393060690).
At this time we have not yet written a review for The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman (ISBN-10: 0393060691, ISBN-13: 9780393060690). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
This wholly original new work by the best-selling author of The Great Unraveling challenges America to reclaim the values that made it great.
With this major new volume, Paul Krugman, today's most widely read economist, studies the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age 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 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.
Synthesis
| Customer Rating: | | This book is a very readable history of economics and politics in the U.S. brought to bear on today's financial times. Mr. Krugman has the unique ability to speak in lay terms and provide an excellent framework for understanding where we've been,where we are and where we're going. |
Gretchenfrage: distribution equality
| Customer Rating: | From the latest Nobel winner for economics a political statement and a historical overview of American politics since the early 20th century. Key themes of the story are the impact of race and racism on election results; the development of the 'compression', ie a more equal distribution of income from the New Deal to the 80s, and the more unequal trend since then; the take over of the Republican party by fundamentalist conservatives; the need for a radical health care reform.
This has been summarized by other reviewers. For me as an outsider looking in, it is always fascinating how terms have different meaning in America.
Consider this quote: "Even liberal economists have a healthy respect for the effectiveness of markets as a way of organizing economic activity."
This shows mainly how far the US has moved away from European languages. As a matter of fact, liberal economists are the ones who argue for the market in first place. What you call 'liberal' should be called different names. Maybe 'progressive'; Krugman discusses this term in the book.
Your conservatives would be 'neo-liberals' in Europe, and they are actually the real radicals in the game. Milton Friedman was as radical as Marx, and like Marx, he was a dangerous man with brillant insights (Krugman admits that Friedman deserved his Nobel regardless of political implications). There is nothing more dangerous than the belief in (any)absolute truth!
Since the book is essentially a political pamphlet, Krugman does not go very deep in most of his statements. I would wish for a more thorough analysis of the following:
"Middle class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be created through political action."
That would be a starting hypothesis for a different book, that I would like to read from Krugman. Is the middle class society a means to an end? Is it a value in itself? What is the relation between sustainable growth and distribution structures? How do the 'values' of the opposing political camps relate to the implications of this question? |
ahistorical, nonsensical, pseudo-intellectual babble
| Customer Rating: | | The title of the book is oxymoronic; the same can be said of its contents (minus the oxy). |
Heart and Brains on the Sleeve
| Customer Rating: | | Economists properly equipped with a balanced combination of heart and brains did not need the Nobel Prize in order to recognize Paul Krugman's valuable contribution both to the "dismal science" and to the global public discourse (such as it is...). "The Conscience of a Liberal" is a sine-qua-non for anyone caring to analyze the current global financial (and real-economy) crisis. It isd also a great springboard for a search for the right policy mix to attain viable solutions to the huge problem we are all facing. |
Essential Reading
| Customer Rating: | Krugman isn't concerned with narrowly defined economics. This is an historical perspective that incorporates the social and political forces that shape the economy. In fact, his thesis is that the increasing inequality in the United States, a feature which is more and more exceptional to this country when compared to other advanced Western countries, is a result of the policies brought upon by the movement conservatism ideology which took over the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.
This movement has now (the book was published in 2007) been rejected by the majority of the electorate and it is up to Barack Obama's government the task of implementing a new New Deal that would reduce inequality and deliver a better economic future to the overwhelming majority of America's population.
Given the crossroads where we are now, it is essential to understand the powerful forces that will match each other, the interest groups lying beneath each one, and to see beyond wedge issues that have divided the electorate. Krugman does it masterfully. This is the best book I have read in a long time. |
|
