Eyal Press writes:

The title of Krugman’s new book is a play on Barry Goldwater’s 1960 manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative. Yet what’s striking are the differences between the books. Where Goldwater’s aims were utopian – roll back the New Deal, eliminate progressive taxation, allow the free market to flourish – Krugman’s are reformist: he wants to turn back the clock to the regulated capitalism of the 1950s, a decade he sees as a ‘paradise lost’, which might come as news to blacks in the South. Despite that, it’s true that millions of Americans might find some aspects of the 1950s quite appealing. A third of the private sector workforce was unionised in that decade – roughly three times the proportion today. The tax rate for those in the highest income bracket was 91 per cent, compared to 35 per cent now. The US was a prosperous, middle-class society, Krugman claims, without the stark income disparities the Bush administration has worked so hard to widen.

(LRB 19 June 2008)

Allen Lane | hardback 296 pp. |ISBN: 9781846141072