Plenty of nothing

Palley's book challenges the economic orthodoxies of the political right and center, popularized by such economists as Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman. He marshals a powerful array of economic facts and arguments to show that the interests of working families have gradually been sacrificed to those of corporations. Expanding on traditional Keynesian economics, he argues that, although capitalism is the most productive system ever devised, it also tends to generate deep economic inequalities and encourage the pursuit of profit at the expense of all else. He challenges fatalists who say we can do nothing about this - that economic insecurity and stagnant wages are the inevitable results of irresistible globalization. Palley argues that capitalism comes in a range of forms and that government can and should shape it from a "mean street" system into a "main street" system through monetary, fiscal, trade, and regulatory policies that serve the cause of widespread prosperity.

First sentence: THIS BOOK is about the American economy and the gradual dismantling of mass prosperity that has been taking place over the last twenty-five years.

Year

1998

Language

English

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Editions

1

Pages

260

ISBN

9780691050317

Data source: Wikidata