More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century
Author: Godfrey Hodgson
During the past quarter century, free-market capitalism was recognized not merely as a successful system of wealth creation, but as the key determinant of the health of political and cultural democracy. Now, renowned British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson takes aim at this popular view in a book that promises to become one of the most important political histories of our time. More Equal Than Others looks back on twenty-five years of what Hodgson calls "the conservative ascendancy" in America, demonstrating how it has come to dominate American politics.
Hodgson disputes the notion that the rise of conservatism has spread affluence and equality to the American people. Quite the contrary, he writes, the most distinctive feature of American society in the closing years of the twentieth century was its great and growing inequality. He argues that the combination of conservative ideology and corporate power and dominance by mass media obsessed with lifestyle and celebrity have caused America to abandon much of what was best in its past. In fact, he writes, income and wealth inequality have become so extreme that America now resembles the class-stratified societies of early twentieth-century Europe.
More Equal Than Others addresses a broad range of issues, with chapters on politics, the new economy, immigration, technology, women, race, and foreign policy, among others. A fitting sequel to the author's critically acclaimed America In Our Time, More Equal Than Others is not only an outstanding synthesis of history, but a trenchant commentary on the state of the American Dream.
The New York Times - Allen D. Boyer
In More Equal Than Others, an up-to-the-minute critique of modern American life, the British historian Godfrey Hodgson combines intelligent discussions of pressures that have shaped American society during the last quarter-century (emerging feminism, booming immigration, the drawn-out struggle for racial equality and the dawning computer age) with a factoid-packed jeremiad against the triumph of the suburb -- the demographic zone where half the population now lives, where two-thirds of new jobs are located, whose voting strength overawes Congress and which, he writes, has become ''the normal and perhaps also the normative American environment.'' He argues that the development and marketing of suburbia has led to a stratification of wealth and interest among communities of like-minded residents, even to a politicized class struggle between ''the Democratic cities and the Republican suburbs.''
Publishers Weekly
Hodgson sets out to say some things outside "the two ruling narratives of American history over the past three decades: the liberal recessional or conservative triumphalism." Above all, he observes, "Great and growing inequality has been the most salient social fact about the America of the conservative ascendancy. It is hard not to ask whether that was not one of the conservatives' strategic goals." Yet inequality is mentioned more than discussed, while conservative mechanisms that may increase it are barely even mentioned until 100 pages later. Despite occasional flashes of insight, Hodgson, biographer of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and a scholar at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, repeatedly muddles matters with generous dollops from those ruling narratives-such as the Democratic Leadership Council's analysis of what ailed the Democrats in the 1980s-regurgitated as gospel. Similarly, he attributes white backlash to "the noisy claims of radical black leadership" in his chapter on race, while his chapter on women blames articulate feminists not so much for antagonizing men and conservative women but for letting their middle-class "cultural" movement get in the way of a second, "primarily economic" women's movement, "silent and largely the sum of private decisions." He rightly notes that the Internet boom was built on decades of government-funded, university-nurtured research, then says, "[T]he legendary entrepreneurs deserve every bit of their fame and fortune." Hodgson inadvertently demonstrates what he seeks to explain: how inequality can grow so sharply, yet be marginalized in political discourse. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Interesting textbook: Subject to Change or Cyberjustice
Social Security Reform: Financial and Political Issues in International Perspective
Author: Robin Brooks
As population aging has become increasingly acute in many countries, the debate over how to reform often creaking public pension systems has gathered momentum. In many cases, this debate has become politicized and the focus on some of the underlying economic issues has been lost. This volume hopes to redress some of this imbalance. It begins by examining the rationale behind why public pension systems were introduced originally - out of fear that individuals do not adequately save for retirement. It then systematically examines different aspects of reforming these systems. It covers the fiscal repercussions of reform, the implications of the baby boom on asset returns in the years ahead, the political economy of the reform process, and finally the risk-sharing implications that are inherent in reform. An important additional goal of this volume is to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible: students, academics, and policy makers.
Table of Contents:
| Introduction | 1 | |
| 1 | The developed world's demographic transition - the roles of capital flows, immigration, and policy | 11 |
| 2 | Will Social Security and Medicare remain viable as the U.S. population is aging? : an update | 44 |
| 3 | Self-control and saving for retirement | 73 |
| 4 | Social Security investment in equities | 145 |
| 5 | Investing public pensions in the stock market : implications for risk sharing, capital formation, and public policy in the developed and developing world | 183 |
| 6 | The risk-sharing implications of alternative Social Security arrangements | 206 |
| 7 | Asset market effects of the baby boom and Social Security reform | 247 |
| 8 | Demographic structure and asset returns | 268 |
| 9 | Will bequests attenuate the predicted meltdown in stock prices when baby boomers retire? | 307 |
| 10 | Aging and the private versus public pension controversy : a political-economy perspective | 321 |
| 11 | How would you like to reform your pension system? : the opinions of German and Italian citizens | 333 |
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