Many readers will doubtless be daunted by the prospect of reading a history of the United States economy that is almost 1,000 pages long. But it’s well worth the time and effort ... a stunning accomplishment from history professor Jonathan Levy. It’s a history and analysis of the various economic systems from the Colonial period to the 2016 election. And it’s relatively free of jargon and written in lively, accessible prose ... Some of the material covered will be familiar ... I can honestly say I’ve never before read a work of economic history that’s actually quotable ... Levy’s gifts as a historian are most evident in his clear explanations of key economic concepts, some of them so fundamental to our world we might not realize they need explaining, such as credit ... while this book’s strongest chapters are on history before 1950, Levy’s assessment of the late-20th and early-21st century economy is astute and troubling ... an indispensable guide to understanding American history—and what’s happening in today’s economy.
... deftly weaves strands of economic, business, political, social and intellectual history into an engaging, accessible narrative of how and why the United States became the world’s most successful economy. Prodigiously researched, elegantly written and relentlessly interesting, Levy’s opus should be required reading for every college history and economics major ... vivid ... Unfortunately, Levy’s magisterial volume is undermined by his tendency to characterize every major development in American capitalism as a change in 'liquidity preference,' a Keynesian tic that will be distracting to the general reader and unconvincing to those who might understand it ... We could also do without Levy’s repeated attempts to enhance his woke creds by applying present-day norms and morals to earlier eras ... These are disappointingly ahistorical assessments from such a fine historian, one who has now given Americans reason to restore economic history to its rightful place in the study of the past and our understanding of the present.
Moving from John Winthrop’s world of seventeenth-century colonial trade to Donald Trump’s twenty-first-century leveraged real-estate acquisitions, Levy weaves a great many precepts from economic theory into his narrative, illustrating their significance with carefully parsed statistics and graphs. But he also finds the social meaning of economic developments in paintings, song lyrics, novels, movies, and television shows ... Rejecting the narrow rationalism focused exclusively on the profit motive, Levy develops a fully human perspective on capitalism, allowing readers to see investment, not profit, as its flywheel. He soberly examines the sluggishness of that flywheel in recent decades, as anxious Americans have preferred the security of immediate liquidity over the risk of long-term investment. Asserting that only political realignment can restore economic health, Levy’s conclusion will stir debate.
Mr. Levy is less successful at developing his thesis than he is at announcing it. His haziness on the nomenclature and history of finance is one problem, his want of authorial craft is another. Evelyn Waugh laid it down that a good writer no more wastes words than a master tailor does cloth. Mr. Levy writes as if his publisher were paying him by the sentence ... Even familiar phrases and concepts lose something in the author’s translation ... too numerous pages ... Mr. Levy need not worry about today’s capitalists sitting on their money. Thanks to lawn-level interest rates, limitless public spending and the envy vector of social media, blue-chip stock prices, measured as a percentage of GDP, are higher than they have ever been. Mr. Levy designates this time in finance the Age of Chaos. He could be more right than he knows, but for reasons that he seems not to be entirely aware of.
Levy has given us a textbook on America that successfully explains history through an economic perspective ... This massive tome provides a clear narrative of how economic power in America has always resided with those rich enough to invest. An understanding of economic principles is helpful but not essential to following Levy’s analysis ... Levy makes a cohesive argument that provides a new perspective on the trajectory of the U.S. but will still feel familiar to any student of history.
... detailed, discursive ... It helps to have some knowledge of economics to read this book, though it’s not essential. Levy is an uncommonly lucid interpreter of numbers and theories and a nimble explainer ... A rewarding exercise in understanding where we are and how we got there.
