Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane:
"Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America" (2013)
(Copyright © 2011 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions )
| Beware of this book: the title makes it sound like a scholarly history of great powers from the viewpoint of their economies but it is a (very short) text of propaganda for the right-wing of the USA. The economies of past powers are barely sketched and the conclusions are invariably what the leaders of the Republican Party wants you to believe: balance the budget, kill the welfare state, simplify the tax code, etc. This book will look old a decade from now when their party will have inevitably changed platform. They don't spend a word to discuss the real causes of the recent Great Recession (consumer and corporate debt) nor to discuss how fiscal austerity has compounded the economic crisis in southern Europe. They don't even analyze the starting point of the Great Recession: the George W Bush tax cut of 2001, after which the economy simply went from bad to worse. All they do is simply carbon copy anything that your favorite Fox News commentator has been repeating for years; with scant or no evidence that they know any better than those commentators. |
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