Why read An Extraordinary Time?

Book cover of An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy

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A Washington Post and Strategy+Business Book of the Year.

Stagnant wages. Feeble growth figures. An angry, disillusioned public. The early 1970s witnessed the arrival of the problems that define the twenty-first century.

In An Extraordinary Time, Marc Levinson investigates how the oil crisis of the 1970s marked a radical turning…

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Why read it?

1 author picked An Extraordinary Time as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Benjamin C. Waterhouse

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Levinson is a rare thing among economists: he is willing to admit what we don’t understand.

This book argues that global productivity declined in the 1970s compared to the 30 years after World War II, and no one knows why. It seems that, under capitalism, economic growth is normally just very slow, and the fast postwar growth was the aberration. But what really matters is how political leaders responded, making a series of bad decisions to try to appease people’s over-inflated expectations of growth. And this happened all over the world, from the U.S. to Germany to Japan to…

From Benjamin's list on The best books that explain why corporations are so powerful but the economy still stinks.