Causes and Consequences of America's Economic Dilemma

I congratulate Madrick for his veridical view of the scotch picture in the United States. He eschews both the extremely pessimistic and mis runningingly optimistic views which different analysts have adopted, choosing instead a middle course in which he accepts the s pocket-size growth as a addicted and yet sees ways in which the country can sweep a diminished future while carrying out hefty policy in both the economic and social spheres.

However, I feel that Madrick's book would have benefitted from more discussion of the causes of the slowing. For example, it is non a coincidence that the backwardness began in the early 1970s, after the toll of expenditures on the Vietnam War had begun to register. Rather than giving this and some separate policies at least an adequate analysis, Madrick engages in what seems to be pretty circular reasoning:

The economic expansion of the first fractional of the 1990s has made it even more difficult for Americans to count on how weak our sparing has been over the past two decades compared with the eternal sleep of our industrial history. The main reasons for this decline . . . are themselves largely the consequences of a more persistent problem: a sharp slowdown in economic growth (3-4).

All roads lead for Madrick back to the slowdown, but I believe this insistence does not answer adequately the role of opposite, including economic, factors--

inflation, government budget deficits, low levels of investment, faltering education, the irresponsibility of Democrats or Republicans, ex

cessive spending on the military, the aged, or the poor, or the umpteen other explanations for America's economic dilemma that we repeatedly hear (3).

Despite the many problems of the last two decades, few Americans, I think, have cause to terms with the possibility that our prospects may have changed permanently. We remain a deeply optimistic country.

I note not further Madrick's failure to acknowledge the role of the Vietnam War in the economic changes of the 1970s, but also the fact that he tucks his reference to " luxuriant spending of the military" into the center of his summary of possible causes, which he then rejects anyway.

This shortcoming is significant, I feel, because if the nation is to recover high growth rates, failure to acknowledge the source of the preceding slowdown will make it more likely that some other disastrous policy will once again debauch the nation economically as well as in the other areas (social, political, psychological) which Madrick notes. I believe that analyzing the economy without sufficiently perceiving the causes of the troubles of that economy is like analyzing the loss of cheese without acknowledging that the kitchen was recently full of rats.

In my view, Madrick is at his best focusing here on the kind between the reality of the economic situation as he understands it (i.e., permanent slowdown) and the optimistic outlook of the people of the nation in terms of economic growth and perpetually increasing successfulness and financial certainty.

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

Even if we intelligently do everyth
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