Volume 30, Number 9 · June 2, 1983
The Wealth of the Nation
By John Kenneth Galbraith
Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline
by Samuel Bowles, by David Gordon, by Thomas E. Weisskopf
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 459 pp., $17.95
During the last two and a half years there has been no shortage of comment on what is at fault in Reagan's economic policy; the very word Reaganomics has now developed a well-justified connotation of acute denigration. And, however overtly immune, the administration itself has not been wholly unaffected. There has been a disorderly retreat from supply-side economics; its surviving proponents, in unlikely alliance with the liberal left, have now turned their fire on the monetarists. 'Tight money' did them in. As to monetary policy, there also has been a retreat if not precisely a regrouping. Interest rates have been eased; the money supply, however defined, is no longer being so ostentatiously controlled, and Professor Milton Friedman, according to longstanding practice, has disavowed his former disciples. They have been slack and erratic; they have not stayed the course. This negative adjustment has been sufficiently strong so that there is now at least a glimmer of a chance of recovery. Those among us who predicted continuing disaster are hedging bets in a sensible way. It's not that the original Reagan policies were any good; rather, there has been more willingness to retreat from them than most foresaw.
Review, 2956 words
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