Today’s inequality has more to do with historical accident and political power than economic efficiency.
Eric Rauchway
Eric Rauchway is the author of The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction and Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America among other books. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis.
Posted inArticle
Learning From the New Deal’s Mistakes
The New Deal was, for the most part, phenomenally successful, but there are many ways it could have gone further or been better organized — failings it is critical we avoid this time around.
Posted inArticle
Can We Have a New Deal Without the New Dealers?
Can a massive government intervention in the economy work if it is being run by people who don’t believe in government?
Posted inArticle
McCain’s Dangerous Do-Nothing Economics
The Great Depression was caused by a banking system left to self-destruct by a conservative president who, like John McCain today, insisted that the economy’s “fundamentals” were strong.
Posted inArticle
Drawing the Line
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon (The Penguin Press, 1120 pages) Thomas Pynchon’s characters in Against the Day worry about America’s “capitalist Christer Republicans” as only the inhabitants of a thoroughly Protestant universe can. It’s easy to mistake Pynchon’s jittery, inventive monologues and his resentment of social order for the ramblings of a stoner hippie. […]
Posted inArticle
Redemption Songs
The U.S. Civil War cost $6.6 billion in 1860 dollars, with which you could have bought freedom for all American slaves, set each of them up with forty-acre parcels and mules, and still have about $3.5 billion to cover back pay. So, the war was a bad bargain; more importantly, fumbling its aftermath represented an […]
Posted inArticle
Talk Isn’t Cheap
Incidents often affect interpretations. Because I read academic megablogger Michael Bérubé‘s new book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? while I was serving on a jury, I came to believe that the most important part is not the accounts of his ongoing quarrel with David Horowitz or his stout defense of academic freedom, but the […]
Posted inArticle
BUSH AND THE FLASHMAN.
BUSH AND THE FLASHMAN. To me, the strangest thing about the president’s summer reading list is not its heft, nor its inclusion of heavyweight history and existential literature, but the indication that the President is working his way through the Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser. And no, I don’t mean it’s odd because Sir […]
Posted inArticle
Tongue-Tied
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s renunciation of his past support for Proposition 187 confirms that the Austrian’s wild tour of the American ideological spectrum has now taken him definitively away from anti-immigrant policies. Democrats can enjoy watching him squirm as he describes the “intensity of prejudice” among his onetime supporters. But the rest of us, including liberals, should […]
Posted inArticle
Habitual Blindness
If, somewhere on our warming globe, a migratory bird is insisting that, by God, his ancestors went no further north than this, and whatever the heat this year, he’s staying put — well, we know what nature has in store for creatures who mistake habit for virtue. But what God’s creation does at its peril, […]
