Reddit reviews The Conscience of a Liberal

>Look at the last Great Depression; it might have lasted a decade, it might have been very worrying for people living through it, but when it was finally over with and we'd recovered, America was a world superpower and enjoying prosperity like never before.

You're conveniently ignoring the fact that America came out on top at the end of WWII because (a) our government took on massive amounts of debt and taxed the rich at the highest rates in history to invest heavily in our manufacturing sector; (b) that manufacturing sector and the greatly improved infrastructure that came with it were left completely intact after the war because we weren't bombed to oblivion like Europe; and (c) because of said bombing of Europe, our former economic rivals were in complete shambles and unable to compete with us for a long time.

If you want to use the Depression & WWII as a precedent, you're effectively saying we should bomb the hell out of our competitors (say, China), have the government take even more debt than now and jack up taxes on the rich to 94%, then use that money to build the best damn manufacturing sector in the world that can now dominate the world without competition. (Which actually wouldn't work as well this time around anyway because our "competitors" are actually our customers, too, and buying a LOT from us.)

>the EXPERIENCES of the Great Depression helped instill a national idea of "things getting better" and renewed optimism for the future.

This is true in the sense that it did seem to make them a wiser generation, but then a few decades later we had another crisis because their kids & grandkids forgot or ignored those lessons. What makes you think if we go through another Depression that the lessons won't eventually be forgotten again?

Edit: reworded some things for clarity

Edit 2: For further investigation I recommend this book to you as well. In it Krugman argues that the higher tax rates in the wake of WWII actually helped build the middle class, and as those rates got cut down--especially starting with Reagan--the American middle class and the way of life it created was cut down with them.

Edit 3: Hat tip to cuteman's comment for pointing out that the majority of the funding for manufacturing came from government debt, not taxing the rich.

I’m a huge Paul Krugman fan, and this topic is a perfect example of when liberalism and economics can clash in a big way (not to say that they are related, but Krugman wrote The Conscience of a Liberal so that’s why I bring it up). So while it might be on some small level a good thing to have rent control for that particular family who benefits from it on an anecdotal level, it just doesn’t work in the big picture long term if cities zone for growth.

Rent control is popular because it seems to help out the little guy, but in the long term it creates ghettos and traps renters from ever leaving.

Before you jump all over me for generalizing and making value judgements; macroeconomics is the definition of making generalizations and my labels aren’t judging.

Your answer is sufficient.

I also blame the Republican Party starting with the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration was the first time the Republican Party started using culture war issues to win elections while their governance did little more than gut welfare programs and ignore labor unions.

Source: Conscience of a Liberal

Feel free to politicize your answer to best accommodate your teacher. Sociologists are pretty liberal, so s/he might appreciate the more partisan answer.

> I guess kind of how ideas were formed, how did the Democratic Party become progressive/liberal, how did the Republican Party become conservative?

Although it is not the main topic of the book, The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman does a pretty decent job of examining how the Democratic Party became liberal + how the Republican Party became conservative. He spends a lot of time going over the New Deal, how it turned the South Democratic, and why the South flipped back to the GOP. There's also a pretty lengthy examination of how conservatives became the dominant faction of the GOP.

Ofc, a couple of chapters are pure policy talk and he ties much of the ideological shifts to economic factors (he is a Nobel laureate in economics so it makes sense) but overall it was a good read.

How about a Nobel economist?
https://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Liberal-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393333132

Yeah I'm with you, I do want to hear the other side. I did read Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, where IMO he does make a strong case for why universal health care is a very efficient system. But that doesn't address medical innovation. We could have a very efficient system in terms of getting care to everyone (and I'm all for that), but what if the trade off is that medically we stay stuck in the year 2012 for decades? Extreme, I know, but it presents the situation starkly.

Side note: I did reply below with what I hope is a decent elaboration of the "free market" argument for medical innovation. Hopefully someone with more knowledge can destroy my arguments, because I do learn the most when that happens.

This right here. Faced with a political system that has been grinding to a halt for may years, and a tiny economic elite waging war on society, this book helps explain how the US came to its current crisis.