Ezra's Bookshelf

Ours Was the Shining Future

by David Leonhardt · 529 pages · ~9.5 hrs

HistoryEconomicsPolitics & Government

Recommended on

buy on bookshop.org →
David Leonhardt, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist behind the morning newsletter, attempts a synthetic history of the American economy from the Great Depression to the present, organized around a single question: why did the broad-based prosperity of the postwar decades come apart, and what would it take to rebuild it? His central argument is that the United States once practiced what he calls 'democratic capitalism'—a version of capitalism deliberately constrained by strong labor unions, redistributive taxation, public investment in research and infrastructure, and an immigration system that integrated newcomers into shared prosperity—and that this system was dismantled, piece by piece, beginning in the 1970s. Leonhardt tells the story through portraits of figures who built that order: Frances Perkins, who designed Social Security; Paul Hoffman, who ran the Marshall Plan and Studebaker; Cesar Chavez and A. Philip Randolph in the labor movement; the engineers and scientists who staffed Bell Labs and the early Pentagon. He is candid about the order's failures, particularly on race, but argues that the alternative dismantling of public capacity produced an economy that no longer delivers rising incomes for most Americans. The book has become a touchstone for the post-2020 'abundance' and 'productivism' debates within the Democratic Party.

For fans of

Reviews