THE CHANGING AMERICAN ECONOMY: Essays from the 40th Anniversary Symposium of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States of America

by David & Paul Sarbanes--Eds. Obey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 1986

A collection of 16 less-than-explicit call-to-action papers. Rep. Obey (D., Wise.), chairman of the JEC, sets the activist agenda in a keynote plea for public policies that are softhearted as well as hardheaded. Sarbanes (D., Md.), a ranking senator on the committee, concludes with a unifying pitch for innovative government programs (á la the GI Bill) which will foster individual opportunity and hence the common good in an increasingly interdependent global economy. Most of the other (mainly academic) contributors echo the editors' yes-but tone. To illustrate, Walter Heller (chairman of the CEA under JFK) devalues the ""haunted prosperity of the 1980's,' while investment banker Felix Rohatyn warns that the ""casino society"" engendered by deregulation threatens the stability and integrity of financial institutions which are vital national assets. In like vein, MIT's Lester Thurow (borrowing from his own The Zero-Sum Solution) argues for greater Federal involvement in education to ensure creation of a world-class work force. John Zysman and Stephen Cohen (Univ. of California, Berkeley) stump for government policies that will not only foster comparative advantage for the US but also ""balance trade at a high-wage level."" Boston College's resident radical, Barry Bluestone, and a couple of collaborators go further, making an iffy case for the proposition that too few of the many jobs created in the domestic economy over the past decade afford opportunities for advancement, let alone higher incomes; in particular, they dispute the notion that there has been any substantive growth in the black middle class, characterizing it as ""greatly exaggerated."" Among the few challenges to conventional progressive wisdom are a soft-sell spiel for a variation of the value-added tax by Kevin Phillips (publisher of The American Political Report) and an abstract from Robert Eisner's How Real Is the Federal Deficit? The Northwestern Univ. economist cautions that difficulties in measuring shortfalls make it tough to develop practicable theory and pursue appropriate courses of action. In brief, then, an articulate, up-to-date record of liberal viewpoints which, on the evidence of the chart-crammed text, seem longer on aspiration than inspiration.

Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Basil Blackwell

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION