What happened to the "American dream"—the promise of a happier, healthier, more prosperous future—which was once such an inextricable part of our national identity? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Leonhardt examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today's Great Stagnation, in search of an answer.
While Leonhardt is a man of progressive sympathies — perhaps because of those sympathies — he devotes plenty of ink to castigating Democrats. He charges them with abandoning bread-and-butter issues like labor unions and the minimum wage for neoliberal causes, such as free trade and unreserved support for immigration ... Not a familiar-feeling book. Leonhardt introduces every section with a historical vignette ... Leonhardt has clearly cherry-picked his anecdotes to make his case, but the stories enliven what could have been a dry or data-heavy polemic. They also advance his worldview: Policies and personalities have a great effect on economic progress. If you think of the economy as something like an ecosystem, in which millions of self-interested agents interact through the medium of price, this is not the book for you. Ours Was the Shining Future offers a top-down view of economics ... An interesting book, with many provocative points, but I found it too tendentious to be the last word on the fate of the American dream. Leonhardt tells us that his book is 'for anybody trying to understand how our economy — and, with it, our society — has been hobbled.' He concludes with a discussion of how progressives might win elections in the future. His partisan pitch may put off some of the anybodies he aims to reach.
Ambitious ... A chronicle of almost a century of American economic life, rich with historical details and resonant narratives. It also makes a subtle but pointed argument about the present, offering a diagnosis of our current maladies and suggestions about the shape solutions could take ... Some of the most fascinating material in the book endorses a more nuanced interpretation of America’s political realignment in the 1960s ... His examination of the politics and economics of immigration is also fascinating ... Despite its overall strength, the book has some odd omissions and unexamined assumptions ... Barring the discovery of truly miraculous sources of clean energy — and unlimited supplies of the minerals and materials used to manufacture the stuff we consume — an environmentally sustainable American Dream in this and future centuries may need to look quite different from the ways it has until now.
