Abstract

Once there was a golden age of democratic capitalism. Chastened by the Great Depression and cowed by vigorous labor movements, a generation of leaders forged a new type of political economy in the aftermath of the Second World War that united economic growth with robust welfare regimes. Then in the 1970s something went wrong, and the marriage of prosperity and equality crumbled. From the ashes of a fractured consensus, neoliberalism emerged. Suddenly the language of the market was on everyone’s lips, and deregulation, financialization, and a neologism called globalization carried the day. Franklin Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and General Motors stand on one side of this yawning chasm, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and Goldman Sachs on the other.

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