The New Deal inflated the size of the federal government, and politicians turned to economists to make sense of their new complicated initiatives and help rationalize their policies to constituents. First, everything is fine in the sunny fields of the booming post-war era and then somehow you’re back in today’s fetid austerity swamps.Įach story begins in the mid-century, when the New Deal created a new need for economists. This structure causes the book to feel like a recurring nightmare that differs only slightly upon each retelling. Appelbaum tells the story of each of these economic ideas in turn, often starting in the 1940s or 1950s and tracing its creation and enactment to the present day. It is a period when market fundamentalism triumphed. For him, this was a time when the policies that economists almost universally endorsed-tax breaks, austerity, deregulation, free trade, monetarism, floating exchange rates, reduced antitrust enforcement, low inflation, among others-were enacted. The title of the book refers to a period that Appelbaum defines as being between 19. If this seems odd today, it was then too-so odd, in fact, that the chair manufacturers voluntarily changed their designs. So in December, the commission decided that they didn’t need to require chair manufacturers to modify their products. This was far below the cost to the manufacturers. Estimates said modifications likely would save about one life per year, and since the commission had decided in 1980 that the value of a life was one million dollars, the benefit of the requirement would be only ten million. He figured that 40 million chairs were in use, each of which lasted ten years. So Warren Prunella, the chief economist for the Commission, did some calculations. But the commission still needed to decide if they would require design changes. In June of 1985, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a “national consumer alert” about the type of sofa chair that strangled Griffith. What is interesting in this passage is the exploration of what happens to men who live under a corrupt and tyrannical regime.THE ECONOMISTS’ HOUR: FALSE PROPHETS, FREE MARKETS, AND THE FRACTURE OF SOCIETY by Binyamin Appelbaum Little, Brown and Company, 448 pp., $27.00 In this long passage Milton is keen to demonstrate the justice of overthrowing a tyrant king, something which the American colonists were to do in their own way 150 years after Milton wrote these words. It is all these facts which make him a fascinating figure. It is not just because 2008 was the 400th anniversary of his birth, or that he is one of the greatest poets in the English language, or that he was a participant in the English Revolution of the 1640s which saw the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, the execution of a king, the installation of a republic which turned into a new form of tyranny under Cromwell. We have turned to the writings of John Milton many times in the selection of these quotations. For indeed none can love freedom heartily, but good men: the rest love not freedom, but license: which never hath more scope, or more indulgence than under tyrants. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public state conformably governed to the inward vicious rule, by which they govern themselves. If men within themselves would be governed by reason, and not generally give up their understanding to a double tyranny, of custom from without, and blind affections within they would discern better what it is to favour and uphold the tyrant of a nation. John Milton draws upon classical authorities and Christian writers to support his argument that the people have the right and duty to rise up in rebellion and overthrow a tyrant: Found in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
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