Book Review: American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker

Author: Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Title: American Amnesia 
Narrator: Holter Graham
Publication Info: Simon & Schuster Audio (2016)
Summary/Review:

Two political scientists discuss the history of the “mixed economy” in the United States, how it was dismantled, and why our current political and economic malaise is due to it’s absence.  The mixed economy was ascendant in the United States from roughly the 1910s to the 1970s and at it’s height received wide bipartisan support and was recognized as unchallengable norm by even the most right-wing Republicans.  Mixed economy is defined as one in which corporations have wide ranging freedom to control the means of production and accumulate capital but the government has strong powers of regulation while also providing extensive public services.

During the long progressive period when the US was under a mixed economy, government was generally looked upon in a positive light.  The “American amnesia” is the state we are in today where most Americans are anti-government and have completely forgotten our ancestors’ admiration for government.  This is due to a five decade campaign spearheaded by individuals such as the Koch Brothers and corporate interests like the Business Round Table and the Chamber of Commerce whose Randian ideology of free market libertarianism required debasing and then dismantling the government and the mixed economy.  These views soon were adopted as the Republican Party platform and by the 1990s, even Democrats echoed anti-government sentiments.

This book is important work of political science, economics, and history that shows where Americans once were in a time of more generally widespread prosperity, how we lost that, and what we can do to regain it.

Recommended books:

• Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy K. MacLean
• Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann
• The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz
• No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein
• Free Lunch by David Kay Johnston
• The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul R. Krugman
• Pity the billionaire by Thomas Frank
• The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman

Rating: ***