The Causes and Consequences of America

He eschews both the incredibly pessimistic and misleadingly optimistic views which other analysts have adopted, choosing instead a middle course where he accepts the slow growth like a given and yet sees methods wherever the country can navigate a diminished future whilst carrying out sound policy in each the economic and social spheres.

Madrick's would have benefitted from additional discussion with the factors from the slowdown. For example, it is not a coincidence that the slowdown started inside early 1970s, following the toll of expenditures on a Vietnam War had begun to register. Rather than giving this as well as other policies at least an more than enough analysis, Madrick engages in what looks to be somewhat circular reasoning:

The economic expansion from the very first half on the 1990s has produced it even additional hard for People to judge how weak our economy has been more than the past 2 decades compared with the rest of our industrial history. The principal factors for this decline . . . are themselves largely the consequences of the more persistent problem: a sharp slowdown in economic growth (3-4).

All roads lead for Madrick back on the slowdown, but this insistence does not answer adequately the role of other, for instance economic, causes - inflation, government budget deficits, low levels of investment, faltering education, the irresponsibility of Democrats or Republicans, excessive spending on a military, the aged, or the poor, or the many other explanations for America's economic trouble that we repeatedly hear (3).

Despite the many issues in the last 2 decades, few Americans, I think, have come to terms of the possibility that our prospects may possibly have changed permanently. We remain a deeply optimistic country.

One notes not only Madrick's failure to acknowledge the role from the Vietnam War from the economic changes of the 1970s, but also the reality that he tucks his reference to "excessive spending from the military" to the center of his summary of possible causes, which he then rejects anyway. This shortcoming is essential due to the fact if the country is to recover higher growth rates, failure to acknowledge the source with the preceding slowdown will make it far more probably that some other disastrous policy will again undermine the nation economically in addition to during the other areas (social, political, psychological) which Madrick notes. Analyzing the economy without sufficiently perceiving the factors with the issues of that economy is like analyzing the loss of cheese without the need of acknowledging that the kitchen was recently full of rats.

Here Madrick is at his best, focusing over a relationship in between the fact in the economic case as he understands it (i.e., permanent slowdown) as well as the optimistic outlook of the people from the region in terms of economic growth and perpetually increasing prosperity and financial certainty.

We may well yet, in our straitened circumstances, remake our lives on a sounder basis than within the past, becoming much less dependent on material gain. we may yet be in a position to manage well within the new globe economy, as folks and like a nation. But we do not do so by optimistically assuming that this new globe has remained as accommodating as its predecessor and all that ails us is that we have taken a wrong moral or ideological turn (119).

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