Customer Reviews

Planning Local Economic Development: Theory and Practice

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I have purchased several books to use for the Economic Development class that I teach within a MPA program. This is the best book available for public administrators. Chapter 5, which is about "analytical techniques" is rather watered down. A couple of the chapters are getting a little outdated. Overall, this book provided a good general understanding of economic development.

I utilized this text while taking an Economic Develoment course as an undergraduate student. I am probably partial to the text as my Professor was a co-author. R.I.P Professor Bradshaw!

It's really as if someone from another planet or dimension wrote this book, or at the very least someone who is completely illiterate when it comes to economics.

The authors blame the very brief, and relatively mild recession of 2001 on "the gap between the haves and the have-nots."

Huh? Everyone with even a modicum of education knows that the economic slowdown began when the NASDAQ bubble burst in March of 2000, which turned into a full-blown recession a year later.

The authors call the 1980s and early 1990s (The Reagan-Bush 41 years) "one of the most traumatic economic experiences since the Great Depression."

Again, huh? Reagan inherited a basket-case of an economy from Jimmy Carter in 1981, but by 1983 the economy was experiencing one of the greatest booms in American history. The Reagan years saw the creation of nearly 20 million new jobs in the United States. There was a relatively mild and rather short (less than a year) recession in the middle of Bush 41's term in office, but it is pure lunacy to compare it in any way to the Great Depression.

I suspect the authors of this text are more interested in indoctrinating young and impressionable college students into a leftist worldview with dishonest propaganda than they are at actually informing and educating students with an unbiased assessment of the economic realities of our nation's recent history.