The Way We Go and the Long Gilded Age, Essay Example

In his book The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman provides the detailed review of the American history over the last 80 years and tries to investigate the changes in the American economy. The first two chapters of Krugman’s book are called The Way We Go and The Long Gilded Age and introduce readers with Krugman’s vision of the American economic reality. This economic reality is integrally linked to politics, depends on politics, and becomes productive/ unproductive only when supported by appropriate political decisions. Briefly, Krugman’s thesis is that nothing in the American economy happens without politics. For example, “America’s postwar middle-class society was created, in just the space of  few years, by the policies of the Roosevelt administration – especially through wartime wage control” (Krugman 7). In a similar vein, the rise of the economic inequality during the 1980s was the natural consequence of the Republicans’ right-wing takeover in the middle of the 1970s, which gave the institutions of movement conservatism additional power and resulted in a polarizing political change (Krugman 8).

The significance of Krugman’s text is difficult to underestimate: a prominent economist, Krugman expands the narrow economic worldview and looks beyond the boundaries of the conventional economic thinking. Krugman does not simply explore the history of America but tries to link economic changes to changes in politics: for example, the author refers to the Republican Party and its position during the 1870s – the party of the rich and the affluent which controlled the Senate between the Civil War and the Great Depression (Krugman 22). The effective disenfranchisement of the American workers and election fraud contributed to the development of the social and economic inequality in 19^th century America (Krugman 24). “It would be wrong to think that the Long Gilded Age as an era in which there were heated clashes” (Krugman 25), but Krugman’s observations are significant in the sense that they turn economy into a matter of politics. In Krugman’s writing, economy is no longer about economy; rather, it is the result of the complex political decisions.

Krugman’s thesis about economy and politics becomes even more important against the background of the current economic crisis: as professionals are trying to understand the economic prerequisites of the current financial turmoil, its real drivers may readily be of political origin. Krugman speaks about the problems of populism and the economic situation in 1896, which closely resembles the economic complexity at the beginning of the 21^st century in America: the wealthy are terrified, farmers suffer the falling prices, industrial workers are losing their jobs, and the population is angry about the growing burden of debt (Krugman 26). These observations create a picture of cyclical politics which, in turn, promotes cyclical economy. Such “political” economy requires true political leadership, which will help to change the American economy vastly for the better (Krugman 36).

Works Cited

Krugman, P. The Conscience of a Liberal. W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.