Against Thrift

by Livingston, James

• ISBN13: 9780465021864
• ISBN10: 0465021867
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-22
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

Since the financial meltdown of 2008, economists, journalists, and politicians have uniformly insisted that to restore the American Dream and renew economic growth, we need to save more and spend less. In his provocative new book, historian James Livingston--author of the classic Origins of the Federal Reserve System--breaks from the consensus to argue that underconsumption caused the current crisis and will prolong it. By viewing the Great Recession through the prism of the Great Depression, Livingston proves that private investment is not the engine of growth we assume it to be. Tax cuts for business are therefore a recipe for disaster. If our goal is to reproduce the economic growth of the postwar era, we need a redistribution of income that reduces corporate profits, raises wages, and promotes consumer spending.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Waiting for Galileo	p. ix
Our Very Own Perestroika
Understanding Backward: The Past as Imprisonment	p. 3
How to Explain a Crisis: The Revenge of the Populists	p. 8
Their Great Depression and Ours	p. 40
Living Forward: Economic History as Moral Philosophy, Social Theory, and Political Science	p. 63
The Morality of Spending
The Politics of "More": From Gompers to Du Bois	p. 77
Exporting the Black Aesthetic: From Du Bois to Havel	p. 99
The Wand of Increase: Advertising Desire	p. 115
News from Nowhere: Advertising Utopia	p. 135
It Beats Working: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for Your Soul and Our Planet	p. 162
Coda: Bataille Made Me Do It	p. 197
Appendix: Capital in the American Economy: Kuznets Revisited	p. 211
Acknowledgments	p. 231
Bibliography	p. 233
Index	p. 243
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