Customer Reviews

American Economic Development Since 1945: Growth, Decline and Rejuvenation

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I ordered this book to consider assigning as a text for an intro. US history course. I had hoped to assign it with Liz Cohen's A Consumer's Republic among other books. Cohen is lively and accessible examination of 20th century economic history, particularly as related to the long-term consequences of the GI Bill. This text, in contrast, is achingly dull. It doesn't have enough social context to make the book accessible and/or bearable for undergrads other than perhaps students majoring in economics. Chapter 10, "The Economic and Political Stalemate, 1971-1980" was highlighted as an examination of the response by "workers... and civil rights organizations" to the crippling economic conditions of the 1970s [page 185]. Instead the chapter flattens out the complicated and vibrant responses of organized labor and others, leaving the reader with a statistical impression of the era without any real sense of what those statistics might have meant to ordinary Americans and their families.

The bottom line: This is an excellent resource for lecture prep and for scholars interested in US economic history but it misses the target market of its publisher--undergraduates.