Taking aim at market fundamentalism

The story of the long-standing fight between our nation’s economic conservatives and progressives can be told at varying levels of outrage.

Here’s a low-level version: in the 1800s, the federal government neglected Americans facing poverty and harsh working conditions, but the next century brought an explosion in federal interventions. Enacted over fierce corporate opposition, these initiatives gave assistance and protection to Americans who needed it—the poor, the elderly, workers, students, and more. Big business struck back around 1980, helping lead millions of people to unfairly demonize what came to be known as big government. But the previous advances in social welfare stayed largely intact due to persistent support from the majority of Americans. We’re now in an era in which progress is continuing (if in fits and starts) on health care and other issues. The challenges we face today are immense and at times maddening, but history shows that hope isn’t naive; it’s reasonable.

That’s decidedly not how the story is framed in The Big Myth. Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway present US economic history in brash, sometimes scornful terms. Although the book is information rich (clocking in at 565 pages with a small font and some 2,000 footnotes), it also reflects the social media and cable TV ethos of our era: it amplifies negatives and filters out positives, offering a snort of indignation to the ideologically predisposed but little to sustain readers who want to be part of the solution.