Ronald Reagan

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The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

Bush were a metaphor for leadership change in the whole country. But it was Ronald Reagan who set the tone for politics in the twentyfive years since his election in 1980. At his funeral in June of 2004, President George W. Bush said in the eulogy, ‘‘Ronald Reagan belongs to the ages now, but we preferred it when he belonged to us.’’ The Reagan legacy remained. His 248 Epilogue President George W. Bush bows at the casket of former President Ronald Reagan after giving a eulogy at the funeral service for President Ronald Reagan at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, June 11, 2004. (White House photo by Tina Hager) foreign and domestic policies were the template for all his successors.

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Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997), p. 109. 62. Vanderbilt Television News Archive, June 11, 1984. 63. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. xi. 64. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 15. 65. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, ‘‘Speeches,’’ March 8, 1983. 66. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 144. 67. New York Times, June 21, 1984. 68. New York Times, October 26, 1982. 69. Lawrence I. Barrett, Gambling with History (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 73–74. 70. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, ‘‘Speeches,’’ May 9, 1982. 71.

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Presidents matter, but so do governors, Supreme Court justices, and legislators. The election of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the governorship of George W. Bush in Texas, the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the ‘‘Contract with America’’ all changed the course of politics for the nation as a whole. Their outcome, ratified or rejected in elections, also influenced the cultural agenda for a time. Prologue xi Almost without exception, election outcomes are the chapter divisions in this book. The most important one was 1980, when Ronald Reagan forged a conservative governing coalition that changed the course of American politics.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan’s Path to Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan’s Vision: Selected Writings (New York: Free Press, 1994) RRB: Reagan radio broadcast tapes, Hoover Archives, Stanford University RRC: Ronald Reagan syndicated newspaper column RRIHOH: Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds, Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Free Press, 2001). RRPL: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California, Ronald Reagan Pre-Presidential Files RVA: Richard V. Allen Papers, Hoover Archives, Stanford University UPI: United Press International newspaper syndicate USNWR: U.S.

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MacDougall recorded his awe at how good he looked, “that tanned Texas face, the silver hair, the clean white shirt.” The man was not Ronald Reagan. He was John Connally of Texas. Ronald Reagan was the front-runner among Republicans in every presidential poll. But pundits said this was misleading—that in the earliest innings of a presidential race, first place was a bad place to be. George Romney had been in first place for the Republican nomination in 1967. Edmund Muskie in 1971, and Scoop Jackson in 1975, had been the first-place Democrats. All fell on their faces early in the election year. Ronald Reagan, all agreed, was if anything more vulnerable. At sixty-eight years old, any gaffe, any utterance too far out in right field, any wire-service photo of him falling asleep at some interminable Republican banquet, would be all it would take to finish him.

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same jokes “Familiar Lines”; “Reagan Starts His Race for the Presidency,” London Observer, January 28, 1979; “Reagan: Soviet Ultimatum Near,” Palm Beach Post, January 5, 1979; “Reagan’s Index Cards of One Liners,” CBS News, n.d. “adversarial relationship” “Ronald Reagan: What’s Happening to Our Dollar,” California Business, July 1979. “164 different federal agencies” “Items,” RRB, recorded March 2, 1978; “Inside Ronald Reagan: A Reason Interview,” Reason, July 1975. For 131 taxes in a loaf of bread see “Bureaucrats Cause Inflation,” Akron Reporter, June 23, 1976. can’t hit a home run Michael Deaver, A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan (New York: Harper, 2001), 27. David Frost’s televised interviews James Reston Jr., The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews (New York: Harmony, 2007).

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

Secure in our assessment, we had no problem with the grip-and-grin session we came to expect, if that would indeed help Gorbachev. After all, nobody was better at gripping and grinning than Ronald Reagan. THE AIR FORCE ONE carrying Reagan to Iceland—Sam 27000—had joined the presidential fleet in 1972. Although it was small compared with the 747 that would replace it, it had a history and a scale that Reagan loved. It was good that he did, since he would log more miles on it (630,000) than any of his predecessors. Fittingly, that plane now resides in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, seeming almost airborne on display in its own pavilion. Behind the presidential quarters were the staff conference area and a handful of seats for top presidential aides and secretaries.

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Photographic Insert Eager for the quickly planned event, Reagan and Gorbachev greet each other at Hofdi House on Saturday, October 11, 1986. Neither imagined what was in store for him that weekend. (Ronald Reagan Library) Reykjavik was the second summit for Reagan and Gorbachev, after their meeting at Geneva the year before, in November 1985. At their first session on a chilly Swiss morning, a sprightly, coatless Reagan assisted the younger, overcoated Gorbachev up the steps of the villa. “I felt that we lost the game during these first movements,” grumbled a Soviet spokesman after watching the opening play. (Ronald Reagan Library) Billed as a low-key business meeting, Reykjavik was anything but. A hastily summoned Summit Preparatory Committee met on October 3 with forty-five representatives from various U.S. government agencies (on the left), Soviet agencies (right), and Icelandic officials (behind the photographers) to prepare for the unexpected superpower summit just one week away. (© Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur/Kristjan Ari Einarsson) The government called back the newly crowned Miss World—Iceland’s own Hólmfríður Karlsdóttir—from a goodwill tour of Asia to be available in Reykjavik for press interviews over the weekend.

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Translators sat at the corners, and two note takers sat behind them, out of the photo. (Ronald Reagan Library) On the Saturday night of the summit weekend there was a grand gathering—part peace rally, part street festival—in downtown Reykjavik, before a live Joan Baez concert. (Ólafur K. Magnússon/Morgunbladid) Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, and President Reagan eye each other warily, as Gorbachev and others look on. The five-star general made a surprise appearance in Reykjavik and led the Soviet arms team in making unprecedented concessions during an all-night Saturday session. (Ronald Reagan Library) The official U.S. residence in Reykjavik, which the ambassador had to vacate for the president’s stay, was filled with the antlers of assorted animals the ambassador had shot.

Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh

Unfortunately for then vice president George Herbert Walker Bush, political pundits and other opinion makers of the 1980s, like those of the 1880s, did not take kindly to aristocratic manners, generally seeing them as feminine…. This was a perception held as much—if not more—by Republicans as by Democrats. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s close friend Senator Paul Laxalt, and even Reagan himself regarded Bush as effete and unmanly. Newspaper articles appeared describing his life as one devoted to pleasing others. Conservative columnist George Will dismissed Bush as “lap dog” with a “thin tinny arf.” There are multiple levels of irony here, beginning with the fact that Ronald Reagan, depicted as the epitome of salt-of-the-earth, manly courage, avoided combat during World War II, remaining instead in Hollywood as a coddled actor, while George H.

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This functions exactly the same as the images of moral purity that they work so hard to manufacture, whereby the leaders they embrace—such as Gingrich, Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, even the divorced and estranged-from-his-children Ronald Reagan and Coulter herself (with her revolving door of boyfriends and broken engagements)—are plagued by the most morally depraved and reckless personal lives, yet still parade around as the heroes of the “Values Voters.” Just as what matters is that their leaders present themselves as moral (even while deviating as far as they want from those standards), what matters to them also is that their leaders playact as strong and masculine figures, even when there is no basis, no reality, to the playacting. Like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan never got anywhere near war (claiming eyesight difficulties to avoid deployment in World War II), and he spent his life as a Hollywood actor, yet to this day, conservatives swoon over his masculine role-playing as though he was some sort of super-brave military hero.

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As McGovern put it in a 2007 Los Angeles Times editorial, responding to accusations from Dick Cheney equating “McGovernism” with cowardice and surrender: In the war of my youth, World War II, I volunteered for military service at the age of 19 and flew 35 combat missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. By contrast, in the war of his youth, the Vietnam War, Cheney got five deferments and has never seen a day of combat—a record matched by President Bush. While Republicans have ensured that virtually every asset of America bears the name of Ronald Reagan—including a glorious battleship, the USS Ronald Reagan—right-wing tough guys who never spent a day in the military protested and mocked endlessly when it was announced, in 2005, that a submarine would be named after the Navy veteran Jimmy Carter. Carter is a graduate of the Naval Academy, having attended during World War II.

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

For them, the revolutions of 1989 became the foundation of a new post–Cold War weltanschauung: the idea that all totalitarian regimes are similarly hollow at the core and will crumble with a shove from the outside. If its symbol is the Berlin Wall, coming down as Ronald Reagan famously bid it to do in a speech in Berlin in 1987, the operational model was Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. “Once the wicked witch was dead,” as Francis Fukuyama, the eminent political economist, has put it, “the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation.” It is true that instead of seeking to contain the former Soviet Union, as previous administrations had done, the United States under Ronald Reagan chose to confront it. He challenged Mikhail Gorbachev not only to reform the Soviet system from within but to “tear down this wall.”

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Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, 1993. Peter Robinson’s fascinating book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, 2003, was a key source for the background on Reagan’s immortal speech. Additional references: Hoover Digest, “Tearing Down That Wall,” by Peter M. Robinson, reprinted from the Weekly Standard, June 23, 1997. Also by Robinson, “Why Reagan Matters,” Speech to the Commonwealth Club, January 7, 2004. Ronald Reagan: Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987; Address to the Students of Moscow University, May 31, 1988. I cite James Mann’s masterly history of the George W.

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He challenged Mikhail Gorbachev not only to reform the Soviet system from within but to “tear down this wall.” Yet other factors figured in this equation, not least a drop in oil prices from roughly $40 a barrel in 1980 to less than $10 a decade later, not to mention the Soviet leader’s own actions. Even less well-known is Ronald Reagan’s political evolution. From hardened cold war warrior, he softened both his rhetoric and his policies to the point where his administration became the very model of enlightened diplomatic engagement—the antithesis of hard-right confrontation. Without question, the United States uniquely contributed to the end of the Cold War, from the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe, to containment, to our efforts to help create what today has become the European Union.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

And they’re spreading out all over town. This time I’m gonna get me a gun.” At his announcement in January of his candidacy for California governor, Ronald Reagan had blamed the original Watts riot on the “philosophy that in any situation the public should turn to government for the answer.” Now he denounced Governor Brown. And the New York Times—which had last taken note of the California governor’s race in mid-February, commenting on how little attention the actor Ronald Reagan had been able to garner since “his dramatic and carefully rehearsed television entry into the race” (the paper had sent its Hollywood correspondent to cover it, and he had dwelled on the living-room set with the crackling fire, and props such as the bottle Reagan waved while warning how “social tinkering had caused the layoff of 200 workers in ketchup factories”)—now reported, “A withering crossfire of political accusations emerged today after Tuesday’s violent outbreak.”

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On Mother’s Day last weekend, his parents went to the Columbia campus and brought a veal parmigiana dinner, which the family ate in their parked car on Amsterdam Avenue.” Marx, Mao, Marcuse, Mother: the rot could come from anywhere now. And such was the context, as spring became summer, within which Ronald Reagan’s presidential bandwagon gathered speed. The wealthy California businessmen who’d backed Ronald Reagan’s entrance into politics had been pushing their man toward the presidency since before he was governor. Reagan himself proved diffident. “Ron honestly believes that God will arrange things for the best,” a Republican told David Broder in January of 1968.

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Reagan, the sentimental favorite, ruled himself out by refusing to say whether he was officially running. Now, on May 31, it was Nixon’s turn to supplicate. He arrived armed with his argument that he was the only candidate who could win. His campaign manager, John Mitchell, spun the press silly: “The people here all like Ronald Reagan, but they love Dick Nixon.” It wasn’t so. Strom Thurmond was supposed to be for Nixon. But every time he was asked about Ronald Reagan, he said, “I love that man. He’s the best we’ve got.” After taking the political temperature of the room, Richard Nixon was sorely nervous. He got on the phone to D.C. and begged Strom Thurmond to come down to straighten things out.

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

Courtesy: Special Collections, University Library, UNLV. 2) Elton and Madelaine Garrett Collection, 000644. Courtesy: Special Collections, University Libraries, UNLV. 3) Photo Collection, 004500. Courtesy: Special Collections, University Libraries, UNLV. 4) C3954504. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. “Chronology of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.” 5) C38108-15. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. “Chronology of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.” 6) C10593-21A. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 7) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 8) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 9) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 10) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 11) Photo by Mark Wolfe, January 2, 2006.

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Defense Official Korb to Make Case for Pollard’s Release at Knesset,” Jerusalem Post, December 19, 2010. “predilection to support Saudi Arabia” . . . “Weinberger believes”: Zatuchni and Drooz, “Back Door to the PLO.” “Weinberger’s anti-Israel tilt”: Joe Conason, “ ‘Most Antagonistic’ Toward Israel? That Would Be Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary,” Creators Syndicate, January 10, 2013, https://www.creators.com/liberal/joe-conason/-most-antagonistic-toward-israel-that-would-be-ronald-reagan-s-defense-secretary.html. “Others believed it was more complicated”: Ibid. “redirect” . . . “seem to have differing assessments” . . . “of being hostile” . . . “neglected its ties”: Bernard Gwertzman, “Reagan Aides at Odds,” New York Times, February 15, 1982.

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Clair. “The Truth About the Bohemian Grove.” Counterpunch, June 19, 2001. www.counterpunch.org/2001/06/19/the-truth-about-the-bohemian-grove/print. Conason, Joe. “ ‘Most Antagonistic’ Toward Israel? That Would Be Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary.” Creators Syndicate, January 10, 2013. https://www.creators.com/liberal/joe-conason/-most-antagonistic-toward-israel-that-would-be-ronald-reagan-s-defense-secretary.html. Cooper, Helene. “Obama Turns to Biden to Reassure Jewish Voters, and Get Them to Contribute Too.” New York Times, September 30, 2011. Corpwatch, Global Exchange and Public Citizen. “Bechtel: Profiting from Destruction.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.”44 A showman of extraordinary ability, ideally unschooled in economic history, was required if families were to be convinced to vote against their own economic interest. That leadership was provided by the charismatic and trusted Ronald Reagan. Much of the subsequent success in stripping economic sovereignty from families that we discuss shortly lies with the advocacy role of Friedman and his powerful ability to appeal to wealthy executive suites and, through them, to Ronald Reagan. Similar to prominent twentieth-century scientists such as Francis Crick or Linus Pauling, Friedman’s professional accomplishments lent undue weight to his personal philosophical musings.

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Until the Tea Party election of 2010, almost all Congressional Republicans went along, as Rothbard noted: “conservative Republicans … found themselves adjusting rather easily to the new era of huge permanent deficits.”27 Republican Party Budget Deficits Ronald Reagan’s attributes, especially his joviality, his ability to inspire, and his fear of nuclear weapons, demand admiration. But balancing a checkbook was obviously not one of his talents. Ronald Reagan proved no more resistant to the siren call of deficit spending and easy credit than the most spendthrift Pharaoh, Roman emperor, or Oriental potentate shaving silver coins to debase their monetary base.

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After all, it was the community that hired Earp and sparked the gunfight at the OK Corral, banding together in joint action to improve their lives by creating new opportunity, their eyes set on the future. In contrast, the politician Ronald Reagan chose to demonize the communitarian spirit and the notion that the business community has broad responsibilities to society. Like Ayn Rand, he glorified individualism—precisely the dark societal trade-off rejected by the greatest director of Westerns—over an individual’s responsibility to strengthen community. President Reagan empowered the narcissists among us, instead of the good citizens of Tombstone rightly deified by Ford. In stripping economic sovereignty from families, Ronald Reagan mocked the concept of opportunity symbolized by the visionary families of Tombstone.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Campbell, Iron Lady, 260. 20. Ibid. 21. Thatcher, Downing Street, 485. 3. THE UNITED STATES, 1980: THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 1. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 227. 2. Roger Rosenblatt, “Man of the Year 1980: Ronald Reagan,” Time, January 2, 1981, 3. 3. Reagan wrote in his diary in 1982 that the press was wrong to argue that he was taking aim at the New Deal, and that his real target was the Great Society. See Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 61. 4. Reagan, American Life, 230. 5.

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She was, by contrast, an unabashed admirer of the United States in general and of Ronald Reagan in particular. Her speechwriter Ronnie Miller remarked, “She loved America … and America loved her back.”19 John Campbell, her biographer, believes that “a part of her would really rather have been American.”20 As the Soviet bloc began to crumble, the partnership of Thatcher and Reagan took on a global significance. Thatcher was not exaggerating hugely when she wrote in her memoirs, “The West’s system of liberty, which Ronald Reagan and I personified in the eastern bloc, was increasingly in the ascendant; the Soviet system was showing its cracks.”21 While Thatcher and Reagan’s support of democracy in Eastern Europe fits a narrative in which the advances of economic and political freedom throughout the 1980s were essentially inseparable, elsewhere things were more complicated.

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But while Thatcher may have exaggerated the extent to which she and Ronald Reagan always represented “freedom,” there is no doubt about the potency and importance of their transatlantic partnership and their promotion of free markets. Together with Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping, Thatcher and Reagan were the dominant figures of the Age of Transformation. 3 THE UNITED STATES, 1980 THE REAGAN REVOLUTION All new American presidents seek to capture the spirit of the age in their inaugural addresses. Ronald Reagan did it more completely than most when he stood facing west behind the Capitol building in January 1981 and proclaimed, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.”

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Gordon Gekko, It's morning again in America, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

The search for candidates has begun and no doubt some staffers are already dreaming of the offices they will occupy in the West Wing of the White House. If only American politics were so simple. Lose the flag, capture the flag. We liberals have played this game before and sometimes won. We have had Democratic presidents in four of the ten terms that followed Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, and there were significant policy victories during the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But scratch below the surface of presidential elections, which seem to follow their own historical rhythm, and things turn very dark, very fast. Clinton and Obama were elected and then reelected with messages that were long on hope and change.

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A vision that would orient the Democratic Party and help it win elections and occupy our political institutions over the long term, so we might effect the changes we want and America needs. Liberals bring many things to electoral contests: values, commitment, policy proposals. What they don’t bring is an image of what our shared way of life might be. Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan the American right has offered one. And it is this image—not money, not false advertising, not fearmongering, not racism—that has been the ultimate source of its strength. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated. The Once and Future Liberal is the story of that abdication.

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A new generation of well-educated conservative intellectuals had serious, fresh ideas about reforming (not abolishing) government that they really believed in, making them seem the brightest kids in the class. But it wasn’t careful study of their arguments that convinced millions of Americans to vote for Ronald Reagan. It was the imaginative connection he made with the public that transformed those ideas into an epiphany, a vision of a new way of national life, masquerading as an old one. And this allowed him to cast himself as a homespun, aw-shucks John the Baptist. In the year before the election seven out of eight Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

., pp. 737, 760. 26 LEAST NOTICED WAS THE PLIGHT: Paul Krugman, “LDC Debt Policy,” in Feldstein, ed., American Economic Policy in the 1980s, p. 719. CHAPTER 7: RONALD REAGAN 1 HIS PROTESTANT MOTHER, THE DO-GOODER: Ronald Reagan with Richard G. Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?: The Ronald Reagan Story (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1965), pp. 7–8. 2 ACCORDING TO RONALD REAGAN: Ibid., pp. 8–9. Also on Jack’s anger, see Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan, The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), Chapter 1 in general. Dallek also makes much of Reagan’s fear of a loss of self-control, a more spurious claim, at least to the degree Dallek stresses it. 3 “HE SUCCEEDED IN EVERYTHING HE TRIED”: Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 33. 4 HE SHOWED LITTLE OF THE DEEPER EMOTION: Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 305–6. 5 REAGAN RETAINED: Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 157–60. 6 “THE PROFITS OF CORPORATIONS HAVE DOUBLED”: Dallek, Ronald Reagan, p. 27. 7 GARRY WILLS ARGUES PERSUASIVELY: Wills, Reagan’s America, pp. 288–97. 8 “THE COMMUNIST PLAN”: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?

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Richard Nixon and Arthur Burns Political Expediency 4. Joe Flom The Hostile Takeover and Its Consequences 5. Ivan Boesky Wanting It All 6. Walter Wriston II Bailing Out Citibank 7. Ronald Reagan The Making of an Ideology 8. Ted Turner, Sam Walton, and Steve Ross Size Becomes Strategy 9. Jimmy Carter Capitulation 10. Howard Jarvis and Jack Kemp Tapping the Anger 11. Paul Volcker, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan Revolution Completed Two THE NEW GUARD 12. Tom Peters and Jack Welch Promises Broken 13. Michael Milken “The Magnificent” 14. Alan Greenspan Ideologue 15. George Soros and John Meriwether Fabulous Wealth and Controversial Power 16.

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During the recession, Reed had slashed expenses, fired tens of thousands of employees, and made Citibank a more cautious and conservative lender, but Alan Greenspan cut interest rates sharply beginning in 1991, producing an economic recovery. Citibank returned to profitability. Now profits returned with economic recovery. By the mid-1990s, Reed had remade his reputation and saved the bank’s independence, but he was still not certain the giant bank could survive without a major partner. 7 Ronald Reagan THE MAKING OF AN IDEOLOGY In the 1960s, Ronald Reagan, well into his fifties, became the political leader of the conservative movement. To almost everyone’s surprise, the former actor won election as governor of California in 1966, even as political conservatives were defeated around him. One of his main strengths had been his understanding of the needs and fears of working people, of which he never lost sight.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

“We are intensely interested in the supply side,” she said.52 Reaganomics Ronald Reagan made little mention of taxation during his failed 1976 presidential campaign, nor in the early months of his 1980 campaign. But after losing the Iowa caucuses to George H. W. Bush, Reagan headed into the New Hampshire primary in February 1980 needing a victory to reestablish himself as the front-runner. He found traction with voters by promising to cut taxes, debuting a series of ads that proved hugely popular. Announcer: Ronald Reagan believes that when you tax something, you get less of it. We’re taxing work, savings and investment like never before.

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Clark was a pioneer in the development of national income accounting, but he got a little too excited about the uses of his measuring stick. 60. Ronald Reagan, “Reflections on the Failure of Proposition #1,” National Review, December 7, 1973. 61. Dart broke into the drugstore business by marrying Charles Walgreen’s daughter. After they were divorced, he left Walgreen’s to run Rexall. His second wife, Jane Bryan, was an actress who had appeared in several movies with Reagan, and the two couples became close friends. 62. Ronald Reagan, “Taxation,” November 28, 1978, reprinted in Reagan, in His Own Hand, ed. Kiron K. Skinner et al. (New York: Free Press, 2001). 63.

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Jagdish Bhagwati, one of the profession’s most forceful and uncompromising advocates of free trade, is another longtime opponent of the free movement of capital. See John Williamson and Molly Mahar, A Survey of Financial Liberalization, Essays in International Finance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Department of Economics, 1998). 58. Ronald Reagan, “Milton Friedman and Chile,” December 22, 1976. See Kiron K. Skinner et al., Reagan’s Path to Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan’s Vision; Selected Writings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 98. 59. Economists, even those who disagreed with Friedman’s politics, generally regarded him as a deserving laureate for his academic work. Two letters opposing Friedman’s selection, by laureates in other disciplines, appeared in the New York Times on October 24, 1976.

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

Quoted in Silber, Volcker: The Triumph, 195. 28. Ronald Reagan to Murray L. Weidenbaum, “Handwritten Note on Gordon Luce Correspondence,” 1981, box FG 143033198, Ronald Reagan Library. The author is grateful to Jerry L. Jordan for bringing this evidence to his attention. 29. Murray L. Weidenbaum to Ronald Reagan, memorandum, August 11, 1981, box FG 143033198, Ronald Reagan Library. The author is grateful to Jerry L. Jordan for providing a copy of this document. 30. Ronald Reagan to Gordon Luce, letter, August 14, 1981, Ronald Reagan Library. Copy obtained from Jerry L. Jordan. 31.

…

See Edwin Meese, “Campaign Planning Meeting Notes,” n.d., all April and May 1979 Notes, Meese, Ed—Campaign Planning—Meetings, April 1979/May 1979, Box 103, 1980 Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers, Ronald Reagan Library. 41. Martin, Greenspan: The Man Behind Money, 141. 42. Edwin Meese, “Notes and Agendas from Meeting on Public Policy Issues,” September 8, 1979, Meese, Ed—Campaign Planning—Meetings, September 1979, box 103, 1980 Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers, Ronald Reagan Library. The following account derives from these sources. 43. Greenspan, interview by the author, April 11, 2011. CHAPTER ELEVEN 1.

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“Right Move at the Eleventh Hour: Time Board of Economists Generally Backs Fed’s Decision,” Time, October 22, 1979, 24. 20. “Will the Last Remain First? A Cooler Ronald Reagan Enters the Race,” Time, November 26, 1979. 21. “‘President Reagan,’” New Republic, December 1, 1979. For further doubts about Reagan’s seriousness, see “Where Did He Get Those Figures? G.O.P. Front Runner Seems to Pluck Facts from Thin Air,” Time, April 14, 1980. 22. Notes from a meeting with Milton Friedman, January 21, 1980, folder “Meese, Ed—Campaign Planning—Meetings, January 1980,” Box 103, Ronald Reagan Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers, 1965–1980, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 23. Arthur Laffer, “The Laffer Economic Report,” January 11, 1980, Research Policy (Hopkins/Bandow)—[Correspondence], box 453, Ronald Reagan 1980 Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Library.

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Many American presidents saw in the twentieth-century United States the Kantian superstate of the modern era, the law-giving guarantor of a pax americana.14 Since the 1890s, the messianic and the legalistic strains of Western liberty have combined and collided in American foreign policy. The most eagerly messianic presidents were John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, though Ronald Reagan started no major war during his presidency and found a way to conduct arms control and other negotiations with the despised Soviets. JFK, LBJ and George W. Bush all indulged in high-level military adventures, wars of choice or wars dictated by a love of liberty. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were messianic-legalistic, balancing military ventures with the furtherance of international order and the construction of multilateral arrangements and institutions.

…

To be sure, neoclassicism is no longer the answer. The 1998 Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center stands near the National Mall and is an entirely uninspired assertion of the neoclassical style. It completes the Federal Triangle project of 1929 to 1938, which added a suite of heavy neoclassical buildings to the space between the White House and the National Mall. The enormous Department of Commerce occupies one point on this triangle. It was completed in 1932, and the 1935 Department of Justice grimly occupies another corner. The Ronald Reagan Building of Pei, Cobb, Freed and Parthers hints mutely at a presidential and diplomatic narrative.

…

It contains a Woodrow Wilson Plaza and is home to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Its oversized, anachronistic neoclassicism could be said to underscore the West of Woodrow Wilson and the West of Ronald Reagan, putting them in close proximity to the West of the National Mall. (Wilson and Reagan were both fans of free and international trade.) If so, the Ronald Reagan Building makes these associations with the West without creativity, amounting to an architecturally elevated place for work, for conventions and for the tourists passing through en route to the city’s true monuments and memorable set-piece buildings.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Summitry on the Beach: Schmidt, Carter, Callaghan, and Giscard at Guadeloupe, 5 January 1990 (Jimmy Carter Library) 5.2. G7 Summit, Bonn, 17 July 1978 (Bundesbildstelle) 5.3. A Sweet Embrace, and SALT II: Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna, 18 June 1979 (AP) 6.1. Reagan and Gorbachev in Red Square, 31 May 1988 (Ronald Reagan Library) 6.2. Reagan-Gorbachev fireside chat at Fleur d’Eau, Geneva, 19 November 1985 (Ronald Reagan Library) 7.1. Bush and Deng in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, 26 February 1989 (AP) 7.2. Gorbachev overshadowed in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, 15 May 1989 (AP) 8.1. On Tree Trunks in the Caucasus: Kohl and Gorbachev, 15 July 1990 (Bundesbildstelle) 8.2.

…

Simon Miles, ‘“Quiet Diplomacy:” The Reagan Administration’s Initial Engagement with the Soviet Union’, unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Lexington, Kentucky, 21 June 2014; James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York, 2009). 4. ‘National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 75: US relations with the USSR, 17 January 1983’, in Jason Saltoun-Ebin, ed., The Reagan Files: Inside the National Security Council (Santa Barbara, CA, 2nd edn, 2014), 217. 5. David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (New York, 2009), 44. 6. ‘Minutes, NSC Meeting, Sanctions, 18 June 1982’, in Saltoun-Ebin, The Reagan Files, 185. 7. ‘Letter, Ronald Reagan to Liuba Vaschenko, 11 October 1984’, in Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds, Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York, 2003), 380. 8.

…

‘Letter, Ronald Reagan to Liuba Vaschenko, 11 October 1984’, in Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds, Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York, 2003), 380. 8. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley CA (henceforth RRPL), Robert McFarlane files, Reorganized Archival Collection (henceforth RAC) Box 3, Memorandum, Shultz to Reagan: USG-Soviet relations, 3 March 1983. 9. Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and his Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2005), xi, 37–8. 10. John F. Burns, ‘Gromyko rejects Reagan arms plan’, New York Times, 3 April 1983, 10. 11. Reagan, Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Civilian Airliner, 5 September 1983, The American Presidency Project (henceforth APP) website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 55–84. 20.On Reagan’s pre-presidential career, see Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003); Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Iwan Morgan, Reagan: American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Leo Sands, “Governor Ronald Reagan and the Assault on Welfare” (undergraduate dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2016). 21.Ronald Reagan, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit,” July 17, 1980, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8IWm8m2F8M, accessed September 2, 2020. Reagan spoke these words: “I believe this generation of Americans today also has a rendezvous with destiny.” See also Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 22.Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (1987; New York: Penguin Press, 2000); Debora Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 23.Gerald Ford, a Republican, succeeded Nixon in 1974, but he was never elected, losing his only race for the presidency in 1976. 24.Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), chapters 9–10; Dan T.

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Even before the pandemic struck, developments that ten years earlier would have seemed inconceivable now dominated politics and popular consciousness: the election of Donald Trump and the launch of a presidency like no other; the rise of Bernie Sanders and the resurrection of a socialist left; the sudden and deep questioning of open borders and free trade; the surge of populism and ethnonationalism and the castigation of once-celebrated globalizing elites; the decline of Barack Obama’s stature and the transformational promise that his presidency once embodied for so many; and the widening conviction that the American political system was no longer working, and that American democracy was in crisis—a crisis that the January 6, 2021, assault by a mob on the Capitol so shockingly dramatized. In this dizzying array of political developments, I discern the fall—or at least the fracturing—of a political order that took shape in the 1970s and 1980s and achieved dominance in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. I call this political formation a neoliberal order. Ronald Reagan was its ideological architect; Bill Clinton was its key facilitator. This book is a history of this political order’s rise and fall. It offers a history of our times. The phrase “political order” is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.

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Reaching back to the New Deal order at the beginning of this book also serves the useful purpose of throwing into sharp relief how much the neoliberal order of recent times has differed from what preceded it.1 I then turn to the main event itself—the construction of the neoliberal order. This story unfolds in three acts: The first is the rise in the 1970s and 1980s of Ronald Reagan and the free market Republican Party he forced into being; the second is the emergence in the 1990s of Bill Clinton as the Democratic Eisenhower, the man who arranged his party’s acquiescence to the neoliberal order; and the third explores George W. Bush’s determination to apply neoliberal principles everywhere, in projects as radically dissimilar as building a post–Saddam Hussein Iraq and making America a more racially egalitarian nation.

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

This non-American cannot understand what the fuss is about: in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s term, receipts were 18.2 per cent of GDP. Tax revenue has to rise substantially if the deficit is to close.” Astonishing indeed, but deficit reduction is the demand of the financial institutions and the superrich, and in a rapidly declining democracy, that’s what counts.21 Though the deficit crisis has been manufactured for reasons of savage class war, the long-term debt crisis is serious, and has been ever since Ronald Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility turned the United States from the world’s leading creditor to the world’s leading debtor, tripling the national debt and raising threats to the economy that were rapidly escalated by George W.

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., who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, describes the unsurprising consequences of the 1962 decision as a shift from toleration of “the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”19 One major initiative was a military coup in Brazil, backed by Washington and implemented shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, that instituted a murderous and brutal national security state there. The plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, encompassing the 1973 coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and later the most vicious of all, the Argentine dictatorship—Ronald Reagan’s favorite Latin American regime. Central America’s turn—not for the first time—came in the 1980s under the leadership of the “warm and friendly ghost” of the Hoover Institution scholars, who is now revered for his achievements. The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin Wall fell was a final blow in defeating the heresy of liberation theology, the culmination of a decade of horror in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.”

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Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington “had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action,” which, to general approbation, he termed “a legitimate response” to “terrorist attacks.”9 A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an “act of armed aggression” (with the United States abstaining).10 “Aggression” is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership. A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced “the evil scourge of terrorism,” again to general acclaim from “the world.”11 The “terrorist attacks” that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections.12 Tunis was a preferable target, however; it was defenseless, unlike Damascus.

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

His first words were about his wife, who had returned home: Ronald Reagan, “The President’s News Conference,” October 22, 1987, American Presidency Project website, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=33594&st=&st1=. No one could have missed how distracted Reagan was: Ronald Reagan, “Statement by Assistant to the President for Press Relations [Marlin] Fitzwater on the Stock Market Decline,” October 19, 1987, American Presidency Project website, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=33582&st=&st1=. On Black Monday, he had fielded reporters’ questions: Ronald Reagan, “Informal Exchange with Reporters,” October 19, 1987, American Presidency Project website, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

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We must move quickly before the connection gets settled in the mind of the average citizen” (FI003, FI004, FG006-07, 615488PD, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives). “Certainly, when more than half of the loss has already been regained”: Ronald Reagan, “Informal Exchange with Reporters,” October 21, 1987, American Presidency Project website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=33591&st=&st1=. an effort to deliver a more coherent message: Ronald Reagan, “The President’s News Conference,” October 22, 1987, American Presidency Project website at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

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Bartlett reported that Christopher Cox, then a deputy counsel to Reagan and later SEC chairman under President George W. Bush, “is aware of the concerns I have and has tried to address them.” Memorandum for Gary Bauer from Bruce Bartlett, November 3, 1987, FG999/FI003, FG006-07, 54666480, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives. “it may just get lost in the shuffle”: Memorandum for Gary Bauer from Bruce Bartlett, Subject: Brady Commission, October 29, 1987, FI003, No. 611055 PI, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives. The commission staff, which quickly grew: Anise C. Wallace, “Pension Fund Group Links Specialists to Stock Plunge,” New York Times, December 8, 1987, p. D1. A month earlier, Binns attended a meeting of the CFTC’s financial product advisory committee in Washington to defend program trading.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

For a concise overview, see Ken Hughes, “Richard Nixon: Domestic Affairs,” Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/president/nixon/domestic-affairs, accessed October 27, 2017. 9. Paul Lewis, “Nixon’s Economic Policies Return to Haunt the G.O.P.,” New York Times (August 15, 1976). 10. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks Announcing Candidacy for the Republican Presidential Nomination” (November 13, 1979); “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit” (July 17, 1980). 11. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address” (January 20, 1981). 12. Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation” (January 11, 1989). 13. An image of the ad is available at https://www.buzzfeed.com/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump-spent-nearly-100000-on-an-ad-criticizing-us?

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As the war faded into memory, much of the energy stoked by the events of the Sixties dissipated or was redirected toward trivial pursuits. The nation moved on, only superficially changed by the turmoil it had endured. Dick and Ron Put Things Right Nothing better illustrates the process by which postwar normalcy was restored than the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. During the Cold War, only three presidents managed to win two terms. Nixon and Reagan were two of those three. Their electoral success was well deserved: Nixon and Reagan were, in fact, the nation’s two most consequential chief executives of the late twentieth century, even if more recent events have greatly diminished their legacies.

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Although tensions between the United States and the USSR eased in the mid-1980s, few observers possessed the imagination to conceive of a world in which the Cold War might become a mere memory. For national security professionals, especially those charged with thinking unthinkable thoughts about World War III, the one thought that remained truly beyond the pale was the prospect of the Cold War actually ending. As late as 1988, even with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acting like best buddies, Pentagon propagandists were still insisting that the Kremlin’s “long-standing ambition to become the dominant world power” remained intact, as did its commitment to “a basically adversarial relationship” dictated by the “Marxist dialectic.”

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

It was the craziest thing I had ever heard of: Simply put, it called for each side to keep enough nuclear weapons at the ready to obliterate each other, so that if one attacked, the second had enough bombs left to annihilate its adversary in a matter of minutes. We were a button push away from oblivion." Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 13. 7 Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), June 7, 1981. 8 Martin Anderson, presentation, Oct. 11, 2006, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, "Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary." Also, communication with author, Sept. 10, 2008. 9 Tony Thomas, The Films of Ronald Reagan (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1980), pp. 98-99. 10 Laurence W. Beilenson, The Treaty Trap: A History of the Performance of Political Treaties by the United States and European Nations (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), pp. 212, 219-221. 11 The author covered the Reagan campaign as a reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers, and never picked up on Reagan's nuclear abolitionist views.

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Here, he attends a May Day celebration, date unknown. [Ksenia Kostrova] Katayev in the 1990s. [Ksenia Kostrova] A Katayev drawing on modular missiles. [Hoover Institution Archives] President Ronald Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the concept of missile defense on February 11, 1983. The president wrote in his diary that night, "What if we tell the world, we want to protect our people, not avenge them...?" [Ronald Reagan Library] Reagan unveiled his vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative in a televised speech on March 23, 1983. [Ray Lustig/Washington Post] The nuclear accident at Chernobyl in April 1986 was a turning point for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

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[Hoover Institution Archives] At the Reykjavik summit, October 11-12, 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan came closer than any other leaders of the Cold War Period to agreements that would slash nuclear arsenals. [Ronald Reagan Library] They parted without a deal after Reagan insisted that his cherished dream of missile defense could not be limited to research in the laboratory. [Ronald Reagan Library] Yevgeny Velikhov (right), an open-minded physicist, helped break through the walls of Soviet military secrecy. With Thomas B. Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, near the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, July 1986.

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

Key Sources NSA The National Security Archive is a non-governmental research and archive organisation located at George Washington University, Washington DC. The NSA publishes vast numbers of documents in series of Workbooks, many of which are available online. See: www.nsarchive.gwu.edu REAGAN The Public Papers of Ronald Reagan are held in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. All his speeches can be found online in date order. See: www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches CARTER The key speeches of Jimmy Carter are available online at the American Presidency Project at the University of California. See: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ BUSH The key speeches of George H.

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By the time the film came out this possibility had been closed off, allowing the US Air Force to claim that events depicted in the film could never happen. 11 Excellent accounts of the Cuban missile crisis can be found in Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight; Michael Beschloss, Kennedy Versus Khrushchev; Robert Smith Thompson, The Missiles of October; and from the Soviet side Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’. 12 Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p.245ff. 13 Ronald Reagan, An American Life, p.257 & p.13. 14 See the Acknowledgements for a more detailed outline of the making of the television documentary and the work of the National Security Archive. 15 Octopussy, directed by John Glen, produced by Albert Broccoli, written by George MacDonald Fraser, Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum, and starring Roger Moore and Maud Adams with Steven Berkoff as General Orlov; see Jeremy Black, The World of James Bond. 1 Reagan 1 REAGAN: Inauguration Address, 20 January 1981; and see Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, pp.410–12. 2 The films were Knute Rockne, All American (1940), in which he played a football player, George Gipp, who died of pneumonia, and which gave him one of his most famous lines–‘Win one for the Gipper’; Santa Fe Trail (1940); and Kings Row (1942), during which, after awaking from an operation in which both his legs had been amputated by a sadistic doctor, he screamed the famous question ‘Where’s the rest of me?’

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No matter how sophisticated the systems were, how thoroughly the structures governing the use of nuclear weapons had been prepared and the protocols rehearsed, it was always in the end an individual who had his finger on the button. There was always a single person who had to interpret the situation and ultimately decide what to do. Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980. He summed it up: ‘The decision to launch the [nuclear] weapons was mine alone to make. We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis.

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

But it was active in the microeconomy, ensuring that its industries were able to thrive in the new conditions. Just as the Fed did, Carter initially focused simply on inflation. But Republican Ronald Reagan and primary challenger Edward Kennedy argued that Carter had no real plan to improve the economy, and they were right. The upcoming election forced him to face the nation’s problems that the Fed could ignore. CHOOSING CANDIDATES IN HARD TIMES Ronald Reagan emerged from a large field of Republican contenders who sensed the president’s vulnerability in 1980. Perennial candidate Harold Stassen thought that his time was now.

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Busch, Reagan’s Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 130. 6. Washington Post, Nov. 6, 1980, Bi. 7. During his first term, defense outlays increased by one third. 8. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Economy,” Feb. 5, 1981, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), 78–83. 9. Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery,” Feb. 18, 1981, in Public Papers (1981), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43425. 10. Don Fullerton, “Inputs to Tax Policy-Making: The Supply Side, the Deficit, and the Level Playing Field,” in American Economic Policy in the 1980s, ed.

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A collection of essays, America in the 1970s, declared, “It was during the 1970s in the backlash of political and economic crisis that Americans dealt with a productive uncertainty about the meanings of happiness, success, patriotism, and national identity.”3 A book on the Nixon years attributes the president’s success to “Americans’ yearning for quiet,” but also “anger and resentment.”4 Political and economic crises are simply the background to the culture’s quest for sanity, meaning, or sleep. Other scholars trace rightward trends, culminating in the election of conservative Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Since 1992, when Michael Kazin enjoined historians to write more about conservatism, the profession has answered the call.5 Because most historians today are closer to the left than to the right, many treat their subjects the way anthropologists do theirs. A few argue that post-World War II political culture was never as liberal as assumed.

America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

Kissinger, Diplomacy, 742–47; Sestanovich, Maximalist, 207. Chapter 16. Ronald Reagan: The Revivalist 1. Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 63; Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1, From Grantham to the Falklands (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 580. For the full address, see Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum (hereafter Reagan Library), https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/60882a. 2.

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After eight years at the pinnacle of power, Kissinger’s weakness understandably reflected the accumulations of enemies, mistakes, envy, and honest differences.101 The realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger also needed a complementary blend of ideas from other American diplomatic traditions. CHAPTER 16 Ronald Reagan The Revivalist The Journey to Westminster President Ronald Reagan arrived at the Royal Gallery in London’s Palace of Westminster around noon on June 8, 1982. Earlier that warm summer day, the president had toured the grounds of Windsor Great Park on horseback with Queen Elizabeth II. Reagan had originally hoped to speak at Parliament’s Westminster Hall, but the Labour Party and others blocked the president from that venue.

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See Skinner, Life in Letters, 396 for four points; Wilson, Triumph of Improvisation, 5. 38. Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment, 22–29, 53; “Can Capitalism Survive?” Time, July 14, 1975, 52–63. 39. See Brands, Reagan, 734 for quote on FDR; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 205 on the economy; idem., “Address to a Joint Session of Parliament in Ottawa, Canada,” April 6, 1987, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, January 1 to July 3, 1987 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), 339 on free markets; Skinner, Life in Letters, 391 on four wars. See also Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment, 175–76; Wilson, Triumph of Improvisation, 14, 26. 40.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

America is great because America is good—and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” 48 Although these sentences do not appear in Tocqueville’s work, 49 they proved popular with subsequent presidents, especially Republicans. Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush all used them on inspirational occasions, often when speaking to religious audiences. 50 In a 1984 address to a convention of Christian evangelicals, Ronald Reagan drew explicitly on the providential basis of the slogan: All our material wealth and all our influence have been built on our faith in God and the bedrock values that follow from that faith. The great French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, 150 years ago, is said to have observed that America is great because America is good.

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See John Pitney, “The Tocqueville Fraud,” The Weekly Standard , November 12, 1995, at weeklystandard.com/john-j-pitney/the-tocqueville-fraud . 50. Counting variations of the quote, Gerald R. Ford used it six times as president, Ronald Reagan used it ten times, and George H. W. Bush used it six times. Incidence of use was calculated using the searchable document archive of the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, at presidency.ucsb.edu/advanced-search . 51. President Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Columbus, Ohio,” March 6, 1984, at presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-annual-convention-the-national-association-evangelicals-columbus-ohio . 52.

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Gerhard Schröder, December 31, 2002, quoted in Yascha Mounk, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 220–21. Translated by Mounk. See also pp. 1–6. 13. Mounk, ibid., quote at p. 30; see generally pp. 28–37. 14. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a White House Briefing for Black Administration Appointees,” June 25, 1984, the American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/260916 ; Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on Tax Reform,” May 25, 1985, the American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259932 . 15. William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council,” December 3, 1993, the American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/218963 ; Obama used some version of the phrase 50 times during his presidency, Reagan 15 times, Clinton 14 times, George W.

The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service

Able Archer 83, active measures, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Chicago School, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

REVOLUTION IN EASTERN EUROPE 36. THE MALTA SUMMIT 37. REDRAWING THE MAP OF EUROPE 38. THE NEW GERMANY 39. BALTIC TRIANGLE 40. THE THIRD MAN BREAKS LOOSE 41. A NEW WORLD ORDER? 42. ENDINGS POSTSCRIPT Select Bibliography Notes Index List of Illustrations 1. Ronald Reagan at his inauguration in January 1981 (By courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library) 2. Secretary of State George Shultz in 1985 (Photo by Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) 3. General Secretary Yuri Andropov (Photo by ADN-Bildarchiv/ullstein bild via Getty Images). 4. Konstantin Chernenko with Boris Ponomarëv and Haile Mariam Mengistu in December 1984 (AFP/Getty Images) 5.

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Key to the map of Soviet medium- and short-range nuclear-missile sites (Kataev Papers, Hoover Institution Archives) 13. Detail of the 1988 map of Soviet medium- and short-range nuclear-missile sites (Kataev Papers, Hoover Institution Archives) 14. Reagan’s letter to Gorbachëv, 11 March 1985 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives) 15. Gorbachëv’s letter to Reagan on 10 June 1985 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives) 16. Fireside conversation between Reagan and Gorbachëv: Geneva, November 1985 (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images) 17. Sergei Akhromeev’s poster (January 1986) offering his plan for the stage-by-stage global elimination of all nuclear weapons (Kataev Papers, Hoover Institution Archives) 18.

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Stepanov-Mamaladze Papers Edward Teller Papers Understanding the End of the Cold War: Reagan/Gorbachev Years: An Oral History Conference 7–10 May, 1998, Brown University: a compendium of declassified documents and chronology of events, comp. and ed. V. Zubok, C. Nielsen, G. Grant (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, Brown University, 1998) Dmitri A. Volkogonov Papers Zelikow-Rice Papers National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC Ronald Reagan Presidential Papers (CD-Rom: BACM Research) (abbreviated as RRPP) Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California (abbreviated as RRPL) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii, Moscow (abbreviated as RGASPI) Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford University (abbreviated as RESCA) Anatoli Chernyaev Papers Online sources CIA, At Cold War’s End: US Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989–1991, www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/at-cold-wars-end-us-intelligence-on-the-soviet-union-and-eastern-europe-1989-1991/art-1.html End of the Cold War Forum (abbreviated as ECWF) B.

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And Democrats, running away from their own history, had no message to unite us. Part III The Loneliness of the Reagan-Era Do-Gooder Chapter 13 Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. —Ronald Reagan, August 1986 Ronald Reagan wiped the political slate clean, erasing the history of American class conflict and the Democratic Party’s legacy of standing with the common man. Reagan made Republicans the populists, the party that protected the little guy against a bigger enemy, only this time it was Big Government—taxing your hard-earned money and giving it to people who didn’t deserve it—not Big Business.

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It had been accepted by every American president for thirty years afterward, until Richard Nixon brilliantly divided the New Deal coalition, largely around race. In the early days, polls showed that the Occupy movement’s grievances were broadly shared, even by the white working class, which Nixon and then Ronald Reagan had lured to the GOP. Yet how long before the 99 percent would cleave back into the 51 and the 48 percent? I couldn’t know. For the moment, though, it was amazing to see such broadly shared political discontent surfacing at all. As I headed down the dark canyon of Wall Street itself, I decided to climb the steps of Federal Hall to get a better view of blue-helmeted cops behind barricades, waiting for trouble that never came that day.

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When Romney released 2010 tax returns showing that while he made $21 million off investments, he only paid a 13.9 percent tax rate—a lower rate than middle-class workers—he offered the nation a crash course in our plutocratic tax policy. Unfortunately, some of the politicians who’d worked hardest to protect Romney’s low investment tax rate were Democrats, a complication that hinders the party’s attempt to channel the interests of the 99 percent. Even some of the white working class, the group Ronald Reagan had turned into Reagan Democrats by railing against “welfare queens” everyone knew were black, seemed to be waking up. Right-wing author Charles Murray, who in the 1980s blamed government for encouraging sloth and single parenthood in the black community, published a best seller that said the same thing about the white “lower class”: they were suffering from declining wages and higher unemployment not because of a changed economy, but because they had come to prefer slacking and shacking up to hard work and marriage.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

They brought California governor Ronald Reagan to power to put an end to it. Instead, in ways that neither his supporters nor his detractors have ever fully understood, he rescued it. Part II THE NEW CONSTITUTION 5 Debt The counterculture in middle age—Reaganism: a generational truce—Reaganomics: a political strategy—What did the debt buy?—Immigration, inequality, and debt—Immigration and the failure of democracy—The changing spirit of civil rights—“People of color” and “African-Americans”—Immigration and inequality—The quest for a new elite The victory of Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980 was not just the reaction of an older America against Baby Boom enthusiasms.

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the Obama administration would pay her: Jason Furman and Jim Stock, “New Report: The All-of-the-Above Energy Strategy as a Path to Sustainable Economic Growth,” White House press release, May 29, 2014. “an implicit deal”: William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Quill, 1991), 14. “The national debt tripled under Reagan”: John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: Norton, 2007), 178. “The answer to a government”: Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery,” April 28, 1981. Online at reaganlibrary.gov. Its origins in a restaurant: “Laffer Curve Napkin,” National Museum of American History. Online at americanhistory.si.edu.

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This was an opening to arbitrary power. And once arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for. That seemed to worry people. Skepticism about the civil rights revolution spread quickly in the wider public, if slowly among opinion leaders. In 1966, former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, an opponent of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, unseated California governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, a popular public servant and master campaigner. The episode was so bewildering to the educated classes that Commentary magazine commissioned the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson, himself a native Californian of humble origins, to write a “Guide to Reagan Country” for its readers.

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

., #11 (Winter, 1998), 5–14. 62 Interview, CNN Cold War, Episode 19, “Freeze.” 63 I have drawn, in the following two sections, upon arguments developed in further detail in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 353–79. 64 Speech at Notre Dame University, May 17, 1981, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1982), p. 434. 65 Speech to members of the British Parliament, London, June 8, 1982, Reagan Public Papers, 1982, pp. 744—47. For the drafting of this speech, see Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 197–200. 66 Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, p. 364; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 569–70. 67 The figures are in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 393–94. 68 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, p. 23; Reagan, An American Life, p. 13. 69 Radio-television address, March 23, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, pp. 442—43. 70 Ibid., p. 364.

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For the drafting of this speech, see Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 197–200. 66 Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, p. 364; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 569–70. 67 The figures are in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 393–94. 68 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, p. 23; Reagan, An American Life, p. 13. 69 Radio-television address, March 23, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, pp. 442—43. 70 Ibid., p. 364. Lettow, Ronald Reagan, provides the best discussion of Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism. 71 Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 528. 72 Ibid., p. 523. 73 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 583–99. 74 Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. 118–31. 75 Ibid., pp. 138—41; Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1991, updated edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 65—68. 76 Radio-television address, January 16, 1984, Reagan Public Papers, 1984, p. 45.

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English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 46; Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 69–70. 81 For more on the movie, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086637/. 82 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, pp. 179–86. 83 Chernyaev diary, January 16, 1986, in Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, pp. 45—46. 84 See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 359. 85 Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 191, 193. 86 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, pp. 217–26; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 366n. 87 Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 419. 88 Remarks on Signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, December 8, 1987, Reagan Public Papers, 1987, p. 1208. 89 See the Chernyaev transcript of the Bush-Gorbachev meeting at Malta, December 3, 1989, CWIHP Bulletin, #12/13 (Fall/Winter, 2001), p. 236.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Neoconservatives were in their origin (mostly) Jewish intellectuals who loved to read, write, argue, and debate; in a sense, it was their intellectual brilliance, their ability to reflect, and the nuance and flexibility associated with intellectual debate that was most notable about them, and what set them apart from the paleoconservatives. Of the two presidents in question, Ronald Reagan in my view more clearly qualifies as a neoconservative. Much as his enemies are loath to admit it, Ronald Reagan was an intellectual of sorts: in the first decade or so of his career, all he had to offer were ideas and arguments about communism and the free market, American values, and the defects of the reigning liberal orthodoxy. He also bore a similarity to the City College crowd insofar as he came to anticommunism from the left: he started out as a Democrat and an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and was a labor leader as president of the Screen Actors Guild.

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He and his students thus played a critical role in translating a broad, general set of neoconservative ideas into specific foreign policy preferences. Through Wohlstetter's influence on people like Robert Bartley, the long-time Wall Street Journal opinion page editor, these preferences came to define the hard-line alternative to Kissinger and detente and were incorporated into policy when Ronald Reagan was elected president. The Neoconservative Legacy A constant thread running throughout Wohlstetter's work was the impact on warfare of increasing targeting precision. At the nuclear level, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) made possible a counterforce strike at hardened missile silos, while in conventional warfare precision targeting made obsolete the need to flatten entire cities and their civilian populations as occurred during the Allied bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan.

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Henry Kissinger was a classical realist, a position he held consistently from his doctoral dissertation on Metternich to his magnum opus on diplomacy. 18 His attempt, as national security advisor and then as secretary of state, to seek detente with the former Soviet Union reflected his view that the latter was a permanent fixture in world affairs. The United States and other democracies would have to learn to accommodate themselves, according to The Neoconservative Legacy Kissinger, to its power. It is thus not surprising that most neo-conservatives were broadly supportive of Ronald Reagan's effort to remoralize the struggle between Soviet communism and liberal democracy and did not wince in embarrassment when he spoke of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." On the other hand, from the late 1970s on it became increasingly hard to disentangle neoconservatism from other, more traditional varieties of American conservatism, whether based on small-government libertarianism, religious or social conservatism, or American nationalism.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

In an era when the ‘limits to growth’ were proclaimed, the gnostic supply-siders made claims to knowing the secret of endless wealth: the magic of the market place . . . a theory for the multitude of go-getters, promising that the cornucopia was bottomless.35 This optimism helped Ronald Reagan to get elected, despite George Bush labelling supply-side theories as ‘voodoo economics’ when he was a rival candidate for presidential nomination in the 1980 primaries. Reagan’s campaign advertisements promised tax cuts that would make everyone better off: Ronald Reagan believes that when you tax something, you get less of it. We’re taxing work, savings, and investment like never before. As a result, we have less work, less savings, and less invested.36 Like monetarism, supply-side economics failed to deliver on its promises in practice.

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Coors was on the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), managed plants where unions were banned, and was a staunch Reagan supporter. UK newspaper The Guardian referred to Coors as an ‘ultraconservative businessman who, for all practical purposes, bought the White House for Ronald Reagan in 1980’. Coors supported Ronald Reagan from the 1960s and Reagan often visited the Coors’ family home. The Coors Corporation sponsored Reagan’s radio shows, while the Heritage Foundation supplied him with many of his policy ideas. After Reagan was elected president, ‘Joe became a member of his Kitchen Cabinet, offering staffing and policy suggestions . . .’.4 The initial leadership of the Heritage Foundation was drawn from the youthful staff of conservative politicians in Washington, including Paul Weyrich, who served as the foundation’s first president, and Edward Feulner, who has been the foundation’s long-term president since 1977.

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By 1968 it was running annual Youth Forums in 12 states where high school students learned about ‘the incomparable advantages of the American system, why and how it produces far more than any form of Socialism or Communism, and how it must be protected from the Communist conspiracy which seeks to destroy it’.40 In the 1970s, while continuing its annual Freedom Forums and their Youth equivalents, the National Education Program also produced ‘full-color animated cartoons’; flannel board presentations; a monthly newsletter; a weekly column for newspapers and trade publications; audio-taped and printed speeches; a DoIt-Yourself Materials Kit for organizing a one-day forum; and a number of films on topics such as A Look at Capitalism and The Spirit of Enterprise. One film – The Truth about Communism – was hosted and narrated by Ronald Reagan.41 It distributed ‘Activity Suggestions for Citizenship Leaders’ with advice on how to form a group and recruit people to it and become politically active: High School Juniors and Seniors are mature enough to join the crusade to eliminate citizenship ignorance and apathy. Some of the National Program films, or others on citizenship subjects, should be scheduled for school assembly periods, or in history, civics, and economics classes. . . .

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

(“Movies Watched at Camp David and White House,” Aug. 19, 1988, 1st Lady Staff Office Papers, Ronald Reagan Library.) WarGames was an unusual choice; he usually watched adventures, light comedies, or musicals. But one of the film’s screenwriters, Lawrence Lasker, was the son of the actress Jane Greer and the producer Edward Lasker, old friends of Reagan from his days as a Hollywood movie star. Lawrence used his family connections to get a print to the president. (Interviews.) The following Wednesday morning: Office of the President, Presidential Briefing Papers, Box 31, 06/08/1983 (case file 150708) (1), Ronald Reagan Library; and interviews. This meeting is mentioned in Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 38, but, in addition to getting the date wrong, Cannon depicts it as just another wacky case of Reagan taking movies too seriously; he doesn’t recount the president’s question to Gen.

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CHAPTER 2 “It’s All About the Information” CHAPTER 3 A Cyber Pearl Harbor CHAPTER 4 Eligible Receiver CHAPTER 5 Solar Sunrise, Moonlight Maze CHAPTER 6 The Coordinator Meets Mudge CHAPTER 7 Deny, Exploit, Corrupt, Destroy CHAPTER 8 Tailored Access CHAPTER 9 Cyber Wars CHAPTER 10 Buckshot Yankee CHAPTER 11 “The Whole Haystack” CHAPTER 12 “Somebody Has Crossed the Rubicon” CHAPTER 13 Shady RATs CHAPTER 14 “The Five Guys Report” CHAPTER 15 “We’re Wandering in Dark Territory” Acknowledgments About the Author Notes Index for Brooke Gladstone CHAPTER 1 * * * “COULD SOMETHING LIKE THIS REALLY HAPPEN?” IT was Saturday, June 4, 1983, and President Ronald Reagan spent the day at Camp David, relaxing, reading some papers, then, after dinner, settling in, as he often did, to watch a movie. That night’s feature was WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick as a tech-whiz teenager who unwittingly hacks into the main computer at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and, thinking that he’s playing a new computer game, nearly triggers World War III.

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And because of the seamless worldwide network, the packets, and the Internet of Things, cyber war would involve not just soldiers, sailors, and pilots but, inexorably, the rest of us. When cyberspace is everywhere, cyber war can seep through every digital pore. During the transitions between presidents, the ideas of cyber warfare were dismissed, ignored, or forgotten, but they never disappeared. All along, and even before Ronald Reagan watched WarGames, esoteric enclaves of the national-security bureaucracy toiled away on fixing—and, still more, exploiting—the flaws in computer software. General Jack Vessey could answer Reagan’s question so quickly—within a week of the meeting on June 8, 1983, where the president asked if someone could really hack the military’s computers, like the kid in that movie—because he took the question to a man named Donald Latham.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business climate, card file, collective bargaining, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ending welfare as we know it, George Gilder, haute couture, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herman Kahn, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Joan Didion, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, Project Plowshare, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

The Goldwater offices, down to the most ragged and irregular, were being irrigated by Reagan cash; whenever the show ran, people just sent money to whatever Goldwater outfit they could find. The Arizona Mafia fielded humiliating letters. A friend wrote Kitchel: “In my 30 years in politics I have never heard such glowing tributes as the accolades for Ronald Reagan’s speech.” Another dropped Kitchel a note of congratulations on how he had handled the campaign. “Incidentally,” he added, “Ronald Reagan was terrific.” It was one of the few times in his life that Goldwater was jealous. He never did thank Ronald Reagan, a wounded Nancy Reagan later noted. Wirt Yerger, blunt as ever, called up one of the media chiefs in Washington and asked what it would cost to underwrite another network broadcast of the thing.

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A voice-over: “Ladies and gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan.” There was a convention-style dais draped with red, white, and blue bunting; Goldwater posters on the walls of a hall at USC converted into a soundstage; an expectant crowd sitting in neat rows, seeded, as props, with the kind of hastily lettered signs you’d see at a “real” campaign rally; Goldwater Girls in white cowboy hats (partisans, recruited as extras). Track had been laid down for a dolly camera—one of several cameras. The extras received their instructions; action was called. Ronald Reagan hit his mark. And it was clear within five seconds that this was like no other Goldwater TV show before.

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.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 232, 242-47; and Lemuel R. Boulware, “The New Requirement for Business Success,” speech, in HR, Boulware Folder. 123 “Today,” he would say: Ronald Reagan and Richard Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me? (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1965), 303. “Let’s give it a try”: Anne Edwards, Early Reagan: The Rise to Power (New York: Morrow, 1987), 455. 123 “Shouldn’t someone tag”: Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999), 315-16. “The inescapable truth”: Edwards, Early Reagan, 543-46. 124 For southern California’s competitive edge over the East and statistics, see James L.

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

Kennedy——A Time for Greatness 1964: Barry Goldwater——In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right A Choice, Not an Echo 1964: Lyndon Johnson——The Stakes Are Too High for You to Stay at Home All the Way with LBJ Vote, As If Your Whole World Depended on It 1968: Richard Nixon——Nixon’s the One 1972: George McGovern——Come Home, America 1972: Richard Nixon——Now More than Ever Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion [against McGovern] 1976: Gerald Ford——He’s Making Us Proud Again 1976: Jimmy Carter——A Leader, for a Change 1980: Ronald Reagan——Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago? 1984: Ronald Reagan——It’s Morning Again in America 1984: Walter Mondale——America Needs a Change 1988: George Bush——A Kinder, Gentler Nation 1992: Bill Clinton——Putting People First It’s the Economy, Stupid 1992: Ross Perot——United We Stand Ross for Boss 1996: Bill Clinton——Building a Bridge to the Twenty-first Century 1996: Bob Dole——The Better Man for a Better America 2000: Al Gore——Prosperity and Progress Prosperity for America’s Families 2000: George W.

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There is certainly a time and a place for high-flown, literary language. But to capture a listener’s attention the language doesn’t need to be urbane or erudite—or use words like, well . . . urbane or erudite. It does not necessarily need the uplifting, ennobling tone of Ted Sorenson (John F. Kennedy’s friend and speechwriter) and Peggy Noonan (gifted scribe for Ronald Reagan), the two great speechwriters of our time. The lofty language of Sorensen and Noonan transcends ideologies and generations, moving listeners just as much today as when their words were first spoken by others decades ago. Noonan was once asked to reflect on the craft of wordsmithing and speechwriting, and I think she had it right: Most of us are not great leaders speaking at great moments.

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They haven’t seen the volumes of internal memos that you’ve seen or the pages and pages of talking points that have been developed on your behalf. It needs to sound as fresh and vital to your audiences as it did to your own ears the first time you said it. When it comes to repetition, politicians are seemingly addicted to communication variation. Ronald Reagan was the only politician I ever saw who seemed to enjoy saying the same words over and over again as though it was the first time he had ever spoken them. His message never wavered, and that was a major reason he sustained personal credibility even though a majority of Americans opposed many of his policies during his administration.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

By the time the election came around in 1980—after Iranians took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and kept fifty-two Americans hostage for a year, and a brief economic recession sealed the deal—it wasn’t a big shock when Ronald Reagan won. But exactly what was that election’s “mandate” concerning the political economy? The campaign had run a TV ad with an excellent supply-side-for-dummies voice-over. “Ronald Reagan believes that when you tax something, you get less of it. We’re taxing work, savings, and investment like never before. As a result we have less work, less savings, and less invested.” See, if you pay less in taxes—and only if you pay less in taxes—America’s economic prosperity and stability will be restored.

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By portraying low taxes on the rich and unregulated business and weak unions and a weak federal government as the only ways back to some kind of rugged, frontiersy, stronger, better America. And by choosing as their front man a winsome 1950s actor in a cowboy hat, the very embodiment of a certain flavor of American nostalgia. Of course, Ronald Reagan didn’t cheerfully announce in 1980 that if Americans elected him, private profit and market values would override all other American values; that as the economy grew nobody but the well-to-do would share in the additional bounty; that many millions of middle-class jobs and careers would vanish, along with fixed private pensions and reliable healthcare; that a college degree would simultaneously become unaffordable and almost essential to earning a good income; that enforcement of antimonopoly laws would end; that meaningful control of political contributions by big business and the rich would be declared unconstitutional; that Washington lobbying would increase by 1,000 percent; that our revived and practically religious deference to business would enable a bizarre American denial of climate science and absolute refusal to treat the climate crisis as a crisis; that after doubling the share of the nation’s income that it took for itself, a deregulated Wall Street would nearly bring down the financial system, ravage the economy, and pay no price for its recklessness; and that the federal government he’d committed to discrediting and undermining would thus be especially ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic and its consequences.

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* * * — On the first Sunday of 1976, Washington journalism’s elder statesman at the time, James Reston, the former editor of The New York Times and then its main political opinion writer, wrote a column called “Presidential Job Description.” He said that “a new majority in America,…increasingly self-concerned and even cynical, is not impressed by…the smooth theatrical conservative nostalgia of Ronald Reagan.” Yet over the next month Reagan ran an extremely close second to President Ford in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries and very nearly won the nomination. As that presidential election got going, another leading political journalist noted that “layered over everything” in the political landscape “are apathy, nostalgia and cynicism.”

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

There were CEOs like Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), who bought a Rolls Royce one week and a top-of-the-line Mercedes the next. And of course there were Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft, who came to exemplify a new sort of corporate leader: young, nonconformist, and astoundingly rich. Then there was the man who gave his name to the era, Ronald Reagan, crusader against big government, defender of deregulated markets, standard-bearer of what he called “the decade of the entrepreneur.” For the Great Communicator, no place or industry better exemplified American free enterprise at work than Silicon Valley, and he was particularly enthusiastic about extolling its virtues to foreign audiences.

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From Horatio Alger to Andrew Carnegie to Henry Ford, politicians and journalists lifted up the figure of the ingenious, bootstrapping entrepreneur as an example and inspiration of what Americans could and should do. Only in America could you rise from rags to riches. Only in America could you be judged on your own merits, not your pedigree. In this telling, Silicon Valley seemed just like the latest and greatest example of the American Revolution in action. * * * — Ronald Reagan was right. The high-tech revolution was an only-in-America story. And he and so many others were right to laud people like Jobs and Gates and Hewlett and Packard as entrepreneurial heroes. Silicon Valley could never have come to be without the presence of visionary, audacious business leaders.

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Woodside’s early 1960s fight against the power lines occurred about the same time that Palo Altans were mobilizing against a proposed expansion of the Stanford Industrial Park; by the early 1970s, local activism had resulted in a host of local measures up and down the San Francisco Peninsula that controlled growth and protected open spaces. And, as we will see later, semiconductor pioneers politically mobilized when their industry was in peril. But the chipmakers largely remained aloof from broader regional affairs. They were, as Joan Didion later wrote of the restless and rootless Californians surrounding Ronald Reagan, “a group devoid of social responsibilities precisely because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.”21 ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL In Boston, it was a lot harder to remain unencumbered by history. The high-tech companies of Route 128 not only sat amid Revolutionary War battlefields and nineteenth-century mill towns, but also in a regional economy anchored in the past.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

How could he reject his partner of two terms on the one thing Cheney cared about most? For a man who valued loyalty above almost all else, it cut against the grain. To help make a decision, Bush personally asked White House lawyers to reexamine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel who had also served in the same role for Ronald Reagan, and William Burck, his deputy who had been a federal prosecutor in New York, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised. Now they were in the Oval Office to report back that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” Burck was saying to Bush, tempering his “he did it” judgment just a bit.

…

He could be unguarded with friends, “but if he told you something and it leaked and he suspected you leaked it, you didn’t get a second chance. Finished.” Bush at that point had yet to win public office and was still evolving into the politician he would later become. When he visited the West Wing in those days, he would stop by offices of aides he knew, plop down on a couch, and put his cowboy boots on the coffee table. Ronald Reagan, who had met the Bush children, thought that if any of them had a bright political future, it would be George’s brother Jeb. Their brother Marvin once gave his assessment of each sibling. “George?” he said. “George is the family clown.” Indeed, after their father won the presidency, the younger George attended a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II, lifted his pant legs to show her his cowboy boots, and proudly declared that he was the black sheep in the family.

…

“He didn’t care much for me, because I was the roadblock to his doing what he wanted to do and thought ought to be done, because everything got filtered through me and he never liked the outcome of those policy debates,” Cheney said years later. He also thought a vice president should not participate in meetings of advisers because it would warp the discussion. Heading into a difficult election year with Ford facing a challenge from Ronald Reagan on the right, Cheney and Rumsfeld decided the White House had grown dysfunctional and drafted a blistering twenty-six-page memo urging Ford to stop speaking bureaucratically, “be presidential,” and “fire someone visably [sic].” To clear the way, they offered their own resignations. “The bulk of the problems,” they wrote, “involve Hartmann, the Vice President or Kissinger.”

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

No amount of tax cuts will save American consumers from the ravages of inflation if Congress refuses to eliminate fiscal deficits. Even Ronald Reagan, with all of his rhetoric about scaling back the size of government, was reluctant to pay the political price of confronting Congress over spending. The bubble economy was simply passed to the next generation. The Crisis Managers Volcker, a self-described “Brooklyn Democrat” who was born in Cape May, N.J., was inherited by Ronald Reagan, a converted Democrat and former labor leader and California governor. Reagan understood the connection between money and inflation.

…

During the conflict, Washington ran the private economy with a heavy hand. Rationing and shortages were the shared experience of a generation of Americans. Wartime profits were high for businesses and their executives. “Excess profits” were taxed at punitive rates. In California, a new movie star named Ronald Reagan found that the government took 92 percent of his pay. The Fed Regains Independence Part of the reason for the reluctance of private investors to invest during the Depression was the government’s aggressive manipulation of interest rates through the 1940s. “In April 1942, after the entry of the United States into World War II, the Fed publicly committed itself to maintaining an interest rate of 3/8 percent on Treasury bills,” wrote Bob Hetzel and Ralph Leach of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in a 2001 research paper.

…

In 1966, the Fed tightened interest rates to slow domestic price increases, almost leading the United States into a serious recession a year later. Mortgage money was tight, consumer prices were rising, and civil rights protests drove many Southern white voters into the arms of the Republican Party. The GOP picked up several governorships including Ronald Reagan in California and Spiro Agnew in Maryland. The Fed subsequently loosened policy and Congress moved to increase domestic spending in 1967. The intense public protests against the Vietnam War and the slack economy eventually caused President Johnson to declare his decision not to seek another term in March 1968.

Farewell by Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud

active measures, car-free, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, index card, invisible hand, kremlinology, Lao Tzu, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

That France was capable of providing the United States with information that would play a critical role in the orientation of the alliance activities and the consolidation of its means of defense was an entirely new situation, and I was especially aware of it.”13 Marcel Chalet was not mistaken about the impact of the file he had transmitted. When Ronald Reagan was eventually informed by his friend William Casey about the importance of the dossier, he was totally astounded. “This is the biggest fish of that kind caught since the war!” he acknowledged, even though this admission was obviously not to the advantage of American secret services.14 This dossier, indeed, made it necessary to revise many of the certitudes held by the free world. The American president, who was no fan of communist regimes, was thus encouraged to be yet more forceful with the Eastern Bloc. Ronald Reagan’s opinion of François Mitterrand changed radically.

…

Portrait of the Hero as a Criminal CHAPTER 31. Unveiled CHAPTER 32. The Game Is Up CHAPTER 33. “The Network” CHAPTER 34. The Farewell Affair Under the Magnifying Glass of the KGB and DST CHAPTER 35. Hero or Traitor? FOREWORD BY RICHARD V. ALLEN In 1976, five years before the Farewell case, Ronald Reagan nearly unseated President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. The major salient of his attack on Ford was on foreign and national security policy. Reagan rejected “détente,” not because he opposed a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union, but because under Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger “détente” had taken on a special, nearly theological meaning—a supposedly ineluctable process of gradually making the Soviets completely dependent on trade and technology from the West, hence causing them to moderate their behavior in terms of global expansion and military procurement.

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To the contrary, the West was now enjoying a major advance into Soviet front lines. For the past few months, France had had a mole, code name “Farewell,” operating at the heart of one of the most sensitive divisions of the KGB. During a face-to-face meeting, Mitterrand shared this secret with Ronald Reagan and revealed to him the scope of global Soviet industrial pillage. At the time, the American president did not fully understand the impact of the dossier, but he was a fast learner. Soon after, he would refer to it as “the greatest spy story of the twentieth century.” Mitterrand-Reagan private conversation in Ottawa on July 19, 1981.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Trump Organization: no new deals for foreign properties “Full Transcript of Trump Press Conference,” BBC.com, January 11, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/​news/​world-us-canada-38536671. Reagan’s Prophecy Fulfilled New Yorker: Trump golf cover Françoise Mouly, “Cover Story: ‘Broken Windows,’ By Harry Blitt,” New Yorker, March 31, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/​culture/​cover-story/​cover-story-2017-04-10. Ronald Reagan: “government is not the solution, it is the problem” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, “The Reagan Presidency,” accessed April 10, 2017, https://reaganlibrary.gov/​sreference/​facts-admin. Rob Ford and smoking crack “Raw Video Released of Rob Ford Smoking Crack,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), August 11, 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/​news/​news-video/​video-raw-video-released-of-rob-ford-smoking-crack/​article31375481/.

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A near-impenetrable sense of impunity—of being above the usual rules and laws—is a defining feature of this administration. Anyone who presents a threat to that impunity is summarily fired—just ask former FBI director James Comey. Up to now in US politics there’s been a mask on the corporate state’s White House proxies: the smiling actor’s face of Ronald Reagan or the faux cowboy persona of George W. Bush (with Dick Cheney/Halliburton scowling in the background). Now the mask is gone. And no one is even bothering to pretend otherwise. This situation is made all the more squalid by the fact that Trump was never the head of a traditional company but has, rather, long been the figurehead of an empire built around his personal brand—a brand that has, along with his daughter Ivanka’s brand, already benefited from its merger with the US presidency in countless ways.

…

And if that’s all true, why not wreck the place before you leave—figuratively if not literally. It’s a reminder that Trump’s political career would have been impossible without the degradation of the whole idea of the public sphere, which has been unfolding over decades. It could never have happened without the idea that “government is not the solution, it is the problem,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it. And it could never have happened had that message not been followed up with decades of deregulation that essentially legalized bribery, with outrageous sums of corporate money flowing into politics. It’s absolutely true that the system is corrupt. It is a swamp. And people know it.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

If the market is no longer delivering the prosperity promised the citizen in the American dream, then the political system bears more responsibility than our leaders want to admit for the relentless redistribution of income and wealth from the bottom and the middle of the pyramid to the top. Most dangerous of all, such an acknowledgment encourages discussion about who our political representatives actually represent. The Democrats are no more eager to have this conversation than the Republicans are. Ronald Reagan’s election, like Franklin Roosevelt’s half a century earlier, profoundly changed the way that Americans think collectively about the future. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed thoroughly discredited the system of unregulated financial speculation that had driven the country and the world to its economic knees.

…

Increasingly sophisticated attacks from the Republican Right and the growing indifference from within the Democratic Party itself put the New Deal on the defensive. Its intellectual energy sputtered just as the country needed to address the market signals of the erosion of U.S. economic power. Jimmy Carter was the transitional figure. He prepared the ideological ground for Ronald Reagan just as Herbert Hoover had prepared it for Franklin Roosevelt. Contrary to popular impression, Hoover was not a laissez-faire conservative. As secretary of commerce in the 1920s, he increased the regulation of business, advocated more progressive taxation of the rich, and supported a pension for every American.

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But to impress conservatives, he also cut taxes for business and increased military spending. On election day of 1980, despite the daily headlines about the crisis of the Americans being held hostage in Iran (including Carter’s botched rescue attempt), the voter exit polls showed that the economic woes were the chief reasons voters gave for voting for Ronald Reagan. Two months before the election, 62 percent of voters had cited the “high cost of living” as the most important problem facing the nation. Fully 52 percent of American voters supported the imposition of wage-price controls. In his history of Carter’s economic policies, Georgia Institute of Technology economist W.

The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein

business intelligence, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, John Deuss, offshore financial centre, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

• Neil Bush, the son of one American president and the brother of another, who one newspaper observed ran numerous business ventures that had “a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion.” Nonetheless, Bush’s family name has led various natural resource companies to hire him to broker deals in Asia and Africa. • Bretton Sciaroni, a portly American and former ideologue of Ronald Reagan’s White House who played a little-known but vital role in the Iran–Contra scandal but now resides in Phnom Penh, where he is an official adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen, a one-time Khmer Rouge cadre, and opens doors for Western natural resource firms. In large part because they inhabit the shadows of the energy world, the oil literature has largely consigned such middlemen and other characters to the margins of attention, or omitted them entirely.

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During the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s Rich brokered a deal by which Iran secretly supplied Israel, which proved to be a vital economic lifeline.6 Rich also periodically lent a hand to the Mossad’s clandestine operations, among them the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the 1980s. Rich made a fortune by buying oil from Iran during the hostage crisis and from Libya when Ronald Reagan’s administration imposed a trade embargo on Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, as well as from supplying oil to apartheid South Africa. An inveterate sanctions-buster, Rich used offshore front companies and corporate cutouts to try to stay below the radar. He also pioneered the practice of commodity swaps, like the uranium-for-oil deals he brokered in the 1980s between apartheid South Africa and Iran.

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One Western investor I talked to described the situation as “a nightmare,” saying, “Anything having to do with licenses, natural resources, or concessions—that’s where you have problems and where you always have military and government officials looking for money.” For major Western companies trying to navigate this complicated and perilous investment climate, this is where Bretton Sciaroni comes in. The portly Sciaroni makes a most unusual power broker in contemporary Cambodia. A former ideologue of Ronald Reagan’s White House, he played a little-known but vital role in enabling Oliver North’s weapons shipments and assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s. Yet now he is an official adviser to the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a one-time Khmer Rouge cadre. The Cambodian government has bestowed upon Sciaroni the titles of minister without portfolio and his excellency.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

To say that America was a far more unequal society in 1989 than it was in 1973 is a simple statement of fact, not an attack on Ronald Reagan. Think about the parable of the fishermen and the prospectors: The greater inequality of the latter society did not come about because it has worse leadership but because it lives in a different environment. And changes in the environment—in world markets, or in technology—might change a society of middle-class fishermen into a society with dismaying extremes of wealth and poverty, without it necessarily being the result of deliberate policies. In fact, it’s pretty certain that this is what has happened in the United States. Ronald Reagan did not single-handedly cause the incomes of the rich to soar and those of the poor to decline.

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I’m not saying that Clinton’s policies led to that result—they accounted for only part of the good news about the deficit, and hardly any of the rest. But the point is that the supply-siders were absolutely sure that his policies would produce disaster—and indeed, if their doctrine had any truth to it, they would have. Nor, I would argue, do supply-side views spread because they are good politics. True, Ronald Reagan won on a supply-side platform—but one suspects he would have won on almost any platform, and that the taunts of “voodoo economics” actually cost him some votes. Today, the supply-side label is a clear liability. Even promoters of the concept shy away from the label. In 1994, Republican leaders like Gingrich and Dick Armey chose to conceal the extent of their tax-cutting fervor from the voters, who they judged would not trust an economic program based on supply-side assumptions.

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After all, back in 1993 Roberts, in lockstep with other supply-siders, predicted nothing but disaster from Clintonomics: “a bigger deficit, higher unemployment, rising inflation, and a currency crisis to boot.” Faced with the reality of a Dow near 8,000, the lowest unemployment rate in a generation, and the smallest deficit since, well, Ronald Reagan’s first budget, some people would have tried to change the subject. Roberts, however, is made of sterner stuff. But then, what choice did he have? The standard (and true) riposte to Clintonian triumphalism is that Clinton presides over a prosperity he did not create, that the credit for the good news belongs partly to Alan Greenspan but mainly to the resilience and flexibility of America’s private sector.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

“Greed is good,” the fictional Gordon Gekko declared in 1987, but now real people insisted that their moneymaking lust and skill were not merely useful in the aggregate but made them virtuous individually. The year after Wall Street came out, Reagan was reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history. Oh, Ronald Reagan, lovable, shrewd, twinkly, out-of-it, blithe, brilliant Ronald Reagan. The transmutation of presidential politics and governing into entertainment had started a generation earlier, in the 1960s, with John Kennedy. JFK was like a movie star and like a fictional character. He was young and dashing, witty and sexy. He’d been a war hero, and Hollywood made a movie about those heroics, PT 109, while he was president, a production on which he gave notes.

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America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

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And indeed, at the height of the First Great Delirium, the strangest and most astoundingly successful new American religion arose. * * * *1 A century later, in a commencement address at his alma mater, a celebrity alumnus told the story as actual eyewitness history, attributing it to Thomas Jefferson. The 1957 commencement speaker was Ronald Reagan. Later, as president, when he repeated the story at length in a Fourth of July essay he published, his handlers evidently persuaded him to call it a “legend” and delete the Jefferson attribution. *2 It was a high-strung time and place. Two miles away and six years later, former U.S. senator and future president Andrew Jackson won a duel with a man who’d called him a coward and suggested his wife was a slut

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If the nation had been unblighted by Boomer sociopathy, how well could we have been doing? Shockingly well, as it turns out. INTRODUCTION The difference between an American and any other kind of person is that an American lives in anticipation of the future because he knows it will be a great place. —Ronald Reagan (1979)1 The Gipper believed many silly things—in voodoo economics and, in the case of his White House astrologer, just plain voodoo—but one thing Reagan truly knew was that the Americans he would lead were optimistic people, and that their optimism made an otherwise disparate and divided land a functional and thriving nation.

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Thanks to the competent stewardship of prior generations—a mix of the Greatest Generation, the earlier Silents, and a few nineteenth-century fossils—the optimism that led to the Boom in the first place found seemingly endless confirmation in American success. In the three decades following World War II, it would have been ridiculous to pose the question, as Ronald Reagan would when seeking the presidency in 1980, “Are you better off [now] than you were four years ago?”5 The answer was “yes,” always and emphatically. The Boomers’ first decades saw rapid and near-continuous gains in prosperity, education, health, technology, and civil justice, the products of revolutionary choices by earlier generations, underwritten by their saving and sacrifice.

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Spouses could and did collude to work the system, with one falsely alleging cruelty and the other admitting to it, a strategy that while effective required no little perjury. The whole system was unworkable and in 1969, California pioneered “no-fault” divorces, which allowed spouses to part based solely on irreconcilable differences. This law was signed by then governor Ronald Reagan, whose own divorce had paved the way to union with Nancy (or “Mommy,” as he took to calling her).28 Easier divorce was certainly a social good—and one pioneered by earlier generations, not the Boomers. The frequency with which Boomers resorted to divorce, however, proved alarming and generationally unusual.

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), 456, 426. 8. Memoirs, 480. 9. FTC, i. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Memoirs, 605. 13. Ibid., 503. 14. Ibid., 504. CHAPTER 21 1. Memoirs, 209–210. 2. Martin Anderson, Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 164. 3. Ronald Reagan, Reagan: In His Own Hand (New York: Free Press, 2001), 267. 4. Ronald Reagan, Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 96. 5. Milton Friedman, “The Path We Dare Not Take,” Reader’s Digest (March 1977), 110. 6. Milton Friedman, “What Is America?” Saturday Evening Post (October 1978), 16. 7. Milton Friedman, “Will Freedom Prevail?”

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A significant outcome stemming in part from the indexation idea, though, was the indexation of tax brackets to account for inflation. Previously, as a result of inflation, individuals’ tax rates effectively rose with higher average prices (taxpayers were pushed into higher brackets of income taxation). When, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, indexation of tax brackets was implemented as part of the Tax Reduction Act of 1981, a major systemic demand for inflation by politicians was removed. Since then inflation has markedly declined and stayed low, though there is no direct cause-and-effect relationship between indexed tax rates and inflation.

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He remarked during Jimmy Carter’s presidency that “reducing oppressively high marginal rates would do far more to promote effective use of resources” than Carter’s economic plans. He also said at that time, in response to a question about what to do to increase productivity: “Reduce the top rate of the personal income tax (from 70 percent) to 25 percent.”21 During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the top income tax rate was reduced to 28 percent. Friedman writes of the “disastrous effects on incentives”22 of high tax rates. He has always been a “supply-sider”—a term that came in vogue in the late 1970s to contrast with the Keynesian emphasis on demand—as he favors reduction in tax rates to increase productivity and advocates a stable monetary environment.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In the worst formulation, they described the poor as devious “welfare queens.”100 As the next chapter will show, Ronald Reagan, long an opponent of welfare programs, made those associations and claims central tenets of his administration. Under the pressure of neoliberalism, the Great Compression quickly began to unravel. CHAPTER 7 The Triumph of Neoliberalism: 1979–1999 Stagflation and the oil shocks of the 1970s had brought economic malaise to the United States, setting the stage for widespread acceptance of a new, “neoliberal” theory of prosperity, divorced from both equality of condition and equality of opportunity. Over the course of the next decade, Ronald Reagan’s severe tax cuts and George H.

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When the Family Assistance Plan stalled and died, the political will to broaden the social safety net evaporated under economic pressure. Stagflation, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and deindustrialization brought malaise to the United States. These conditions enabled widespread acceptance of an alternative theory of prosperity, discussed in Chapter 7. Divorced from both equality of condition and equality of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, military spending, safety-net slashing, and “trickle-down” economics promoted the idea that the freest markets were most efficient, and the most efficient markets produced the most prosperity. Although direct subsidies to income only represented a very small percentage of the annual U.S. budget, welfare programs and the people who used them came under attack.

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The discourse around the proposal demonstrated that conservatives feared the government was overreaching and that federalized child care threatened the sanctity of the family.78 By the mid-1970s, the residual poverty that remained was largely concentrated in states that had set lower standards for themselves for helping the poor, and the programs were funded by more generous states. Unsurprisingly, residents of wealthier states resented the differential. WELFARE REFORM IN THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION As economic conditions in the United States worsened throughout the 1970s, resentment of welfare expenditure grew. Former California governor Ronald Reagan, running in the 1976 Republican presidential primary, hit on a winning formula by transforming one particular welfare recipient, 47-year-old Linda Taylor, into the embodiment of everything that was wrong with government aid. Reagan never mentioned Taylor’s name on the campaign trail but always invoked a litany of her crimes: “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 social security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands.”

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

It was a different reality. But incomes were growing more unequal in America then, and they continue to grow more unequal in America today. That story hasn’t changed at all. What did change over the years were the speculative explanations as to why incomes were becoming more unequal. It was Ronald Reagan’s fault. No, it was the inevitable result of a maturing global economy. No, it was caused by computers. No, it was caused by the twin epidemics of teenage pregnancy and divorce. Some people denied the Great Divergence was happening at all. Others said it was a fleeting phenomenon. Still others said all would be well once the economy became more productive (i.e., once there was a significant increase in output per hour worked).

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Even if you could get a raise, it had to be pretty big to keep up with inflation, which averaged more than 9 percent during the second half of the 1970s. This was largely due to oil prices, which continued to rise briskly even after the oil embargo was halted early in 1974.27 In short, the economy was lousy for everyone. All Ronald Reagan really had to do to win the 1980 general election was say the following (in his debate with President Jimmy Carter): When he was a candidate in 1976, President Carter invented a thing he called the misery index. He added the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation, and it came, at that time, to 12.5% under President Ford.

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—Former Procter & Gamble lobbyist Bryce Harlow, in a 1984 essay describing the business of corporate representation LEFT-OF-CENTER POLITICIANS AND ACTIVISTS have long argued that the federal government caused the Great Divergence. And by “federal government,” they generally mean Republicans, who have controlled the White House for most of the past thirty years. According to this narrative, the policy changes initiated by President Ronald Reagan and carried forward by the Bush presidencies, père et fils, effected a long-term shift in American demographics. The leftist intellectual Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, once summarized these policies as “a bizarre anti-welfare-state Keynesianism for the rich.” There can be no question that Reagan and his Republican White House successors, in attempting to reduce government’s size, made it less beneficial to people at lower income levels and more accommodating to people at higher income levels.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Martin’s Press, New York, 1988), p. 140. 15 Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, p. 44. 16 Milton Friedman, “The Goldwater View of Economics,” The New York Times, October 11, 1964. 17 Paul Samuelson, The New York Times, October 25, 1964. 18 Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), Hollywood actor, California governor, and 40th president of the United States. 19 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, The Reagan Revolution (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1981), p. 237. 20 Ibid. 21 Ronald Reagan, “Time for Choosing,” address broadcast on television, October 27, 1964. 22 Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich (1943– ), born Newton Leroy McPherson. After completing a doctoral dissertation on Belgian education policy in the Congo from 1945 to 1960, he taught at West Georgia College before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1978.

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ALSO BY NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (2007) Older: The Biography of George Michael with Timothy Wapshott (1998) Carol Reed: A Biography (1994) Rex Harrison (1991) The Man Between: A Biography of Carol Reed (1990, in United Kingdom) Thatcher with George Brock (1983) Peter O’Toole: A Biography (1981; in United Kingdom, 1983) KEYNES HAYEK Nicholas Wapshott W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK ■ LONDON TO ANTHONY HOWARD CONTENTS PREFACE ONE The Glamorous Hero How Keynes Became Hayek’s Idol, 1919–27 TWO End of Empire Hayek Experiences Hyperinflation Firsthand, 1919–24 THREE The Battle Lines Are Drawn Keynes Denies the “Natural” Order of Economics, 1923–29 FOUR Stanley and Livingston Keynes and Hayek Meet for the First Time, 1928–30 FIVE The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Hayek Arrives from Vienna, 1931 SIX Pistols at Dawn Hayek Harshly Reviews Keynes’s Treatise, 1931 SEVEN Return Fire Keynes and Hayek Lock Horns, 1931 EIGHT The Italian Job Keynes Asks Piero Sraffa to Continue the Debate, 1932 NINE Toward The General Theory The Cost-Free Cure for Unemployment, 1932–33 TEN Hayek Blinks The General Theory Invites a Response, 1932–36 ELEVEN Keynes Takes America Roosevelt and the Young New Deal Economists, 1936 TWELVE Hopelessly Stuck in Chapter 6 Hayek Writes His Own “General Theory,” 1936–41 THIRTEEN The Road to Nowhere Hayek Links Keynes’s Remedies to Tyranny, 1937–46 FOURTEEN The Wilderness Years Mont-Pèlerin and Hayek’s Move to Chicago, 1944–69 FIFTEEN The Age of Keynes Three Decades of Unrivalled American Prosperity, 1946–80 SIXTEEN Hayek’s Counterrevolution Friedman, Goldwater, Thatcher, and Reagan, 1963–88 SEVENTEEN The Battle Resumed Freshwater and Saltwater Economists, 1989–2008 EIGHTEEN And the Winner Is . . .

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He appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve a lifelong Democrat, Paul Volcker,96 with a mission to raise interest rates to choke off the demand that was thought to be the root of inflation. Carter’s failure to bring prices under control in time for the November 1980 election was a gift to his Republican rival, the handsome, affable, twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan, who asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The answer was a resounding no. It was not only Carter who was on trial, but also John Maynard Keynes. Thirty-four years after the great man’s death and more than forty after publication of his General Theory, Keynesianism appeared to have run its course.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

And for the ultimate example in standing alone, we conservatives owe a great debt to a towering figure from Arizona, Senator Barry Goldwater, who more than fifty years ago stood alone when it was extremely difficult to do so, and in so doing started a movement of conservatives that twenty years later would see the election of one of our greatest presidents, Ronald Reagan. That this book takes its name from Senator Goldwater’s seminal book is an homage to both his fierce independence and his visionary leadership. Goldwater’s fight was for the soul of the country, and so, too, is ours. When he wrote this in his own time, he may as well have been writing it in ours: “Though we Conservatives are deeply persuaded that our society is ailing, and know that Conservatism holds the key to national salvation—and feel sure the country agrees with us—we seem unable to demonstrate the practical relevance of Conservative principles to the needs of the day.”

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The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline….These principles are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation….To suggest that the Conservative philosophy is out of date is akin to saying that the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle’s Politics are out of date. —BARRY GOLDWATER, The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960 Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. —RONALD REAGAN, March 1961 AS A KID, for as long as I can remember, a 3x5 card, stained with vegetable oil, cookie dough, and brownie mix, was pasted on our refrigerator. It read: “Assume the best, Look for the good.” To-do lists, wedding invitations, school pictures, ribbons from the county fair came and went over the years, but that card remained.

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But if I didn’t know better, I would say that we had not been in our right minds in the days leading up to the presidential election in 2016. What does it say about conservatives that our message by then was so different from the words that my parents taught me, so different as to amount to a rejection of the optimistic vision of Ronald Reagan or the extraordinary decency of George H. W. Bush, or the principled constitutionalism of Barry Goldwater? What does it say that we had instead succumbed to what can only be described as a propaganda-fueled dystopian view of conservatism? And what does that, in turn, say about our stewardship of America and its institutions?

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Indeed the fortunes of these two sectors have been moving in opposite directions—as finance has triumphed, manufacturing has slumped. The economic policies pursued by both Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—from a high exchange rate to financial and labour market de-regulation—were highly favourable to finance. One of the effects of Reaganomics was an overvalued dollar, hardly dream conditions for exporters. William Benedetto, head of corporate finance for Dean Witter Reynolds—one of America’s largest stock brokerage and securities’ firms—called Ronald Reagan’s eight-year Presidency ‘an investment banker’s dream world.’96 But while Wall Street flourished, key industrial sectors from timber and steel to chemicals and high-technology, sweated.

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The question of inequality was and remains a sensitive one in the United States, a nation that likes to see itself as having created the most opportunistic society in the world. ‘Even mentioning income distribution leads to angry accusations of “class warfare”’ is how Krugman put it.17 In 1989, George H W Bush had succeeded Ronald Reagan as President and continued the broad economic policies of his predecessor—a mix of freer markets, smaller government and lower taxes. Republican administrations from the 1980s had long claimed that ‘Reaganomics’—as President Reagan’s free-market experiment was known—had been highly successful, helping to boost growth and prosperity for all.

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Under their influence, she came to believe that Britain had created an economic model that killed incentives and stifled enterprise, that only freer markets and personal wealth accumulation would bring a more efficient, entrepreneurial and prosperous nation. A year after coming to power she was joined in this crusade by an even more powerful soul-mate, Ronald Reagan. The new American President, who was also heavily influenced by neoconservative thinkers, shared Mrs Thatcher’s belief in the dangers of big government and the virtues of a weakened state and low taxes. Central to this new economic philosophy was the idea that the rich should be allowed to get richer.

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

And when Washington’s bureaucrats aren’t wasting your tax dollars on idiotic projects that they always bungle, they are telling you how to run your business, compiling regulation upon regulation into a bookshelf of legalese that no one can ever hope to understand or obey. “Every businessman has his own tale of harassment,” thundered Ronald Reagan in 1964. “Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.” It has been forty-five years now since Reagan’s electrifying vision of homegrown tyranny fueled Barry Goldwater’s run for the nation’s highest office; it has been four decades since a diluted version of it propelled Richard Nixon to the presidency.

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Admittedly, cynicism seems like an unlikely quality to find in a movement whose rank and file get misty-eyed contemplating the flag, the family, the founding fathers, and the Boy Scouts, and who can be moved to hold candlelight vigils to protect Ten Commandments monuments. Change the subject to government, though, and you will have opened the floodgates of sarcasm, disbelief, contempt, and ridicule. It was sunny Ronald Reagan who claimed to find terror in the phrase “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” And it was Reagan’s economic adviser David Stockman who, in 1981, penned this bitter verdict on the Carter administration that he was preparing to terminate. “Much of the vast enterprise of American government was invalid, suspect, malodorous,” he wrote with disgust.

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Jamba was officially sponsored by a long-forgotten Washington group called Citizens for America whose leading members were typical conservative plutocrats: oil barons, Wall Street kings, and agribusiness lords. The group’s founder, Jack Hume, was one of the California millionaires who had funded Ronald Reagan’s political career from the beginning. (“He made a substantial investment and has backed Reagan ever since” is one apt description.)46 To represent its conservatism to the world, though, this 24-karat group did not choose a contented white yachtsman snoozing in an easy chair, but a black African fond of camouflage and handguns; a ferocious warrior who single-handedly kept a real rebellion burning against the government of his country year after year.

Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government by Paul Volcker, Christine Harper

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, income per capita, inflation targeting, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, Nixon shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning

To his credit, only once did he express concern about our tightening of policy. Ronald Reagan: A New President By the beginning of 1981, with a new Republican president in office, we were back in the trenches, fighting to restrain monetary growth. The much predicted recession finally arrived in full force. But it was hard to see progress on the inflation front. Interest rates and the money supply, while increasing at a slower rate, remained stubbornly high. The Fed board remained determined to carry on. There had been, of course, much speculation about President Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor and California governor, and his new administration’s attitude toward economic policy.

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The president recorded that: see entry for Tuesday, June 7, 1983 in Ronald Reagan, “The Reagan Diaries” (HarperCollins, 2007), 158. It split symmetrically: CQ Almanac, 1983, https://library.cqpress.com/cq almanac/document.php?id=cqal83-1198874. I was summoned to a meeting: The 3:30 p.m. July 24, 1984, meeting in the library is recorded in Reagan’s daily schedule, although it says Edwin Meese, Richard Darman, and Michael Deaver were present and to my memory they were certainly not. Reagan didn’t write anything about the meeting in his daily diary. See https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/white-house-diaries/diary-entry-07241984/.

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April 28, 1980 First Pennsylvania Bank announces it has received a $1.5 billion rescue, sponsored by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve. May 22, 1980 In midst of sudden recession, Fed rolls back most of the credit controls implemented in March. October 2, 1980 Monetary policy tightening ahead of the election incites mild presidential criticism. November 4, 1980 Ronald Reagan elected president. January 20, 1981 Reagan takes office, nominates Donald Regan as Treasury secretary. January 23, 1981 Volcker has lunch with Reagan at the Treasury Department along with Donald Regan, Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) chief Murray Weidenbaum and others. June 30, 1982 Mexico is world’s largest borrower, with $21.5 billion owed to US banks alone.

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

British Empire, declining real wages, disinformation, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker

His atrocities were revealed in this book so conclusively that "only the most light-headed and cold-blooded Western intellectual will come to the tyrant's defense," said the Washington Post. Remember, this is the account of what happened to one man. Let's say it's all true. Let's raise no questions about what happened to the one man who says he was tortured. At a White House ceremony marking Human Rights Day, he was singled out by Ronald Reagan for his courage in enduring the horrors and sadism of this bloody Cuban tyrant. He was then appointed the U.S. representative at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where he has been able to perform signal services defending the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments against charges that they conduct atrocities so massive that they make anything he suffered look pretty minor.

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There was an article in the local Marin County newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, and I think that's all. No one else would touch it. This was a time when there was more than a few "lightheaded and cold-blooded Western intellectuals" who were singing the praises of Jose Napoleon Duarte and of Ronald Reagan. Anaya was not the subject of any tributes. He didn't get on Human Rights Day. He wasn't appointed to anything. He was released in a prisoner exchange and then assassinated, apparently by the U.S.-backed security forces. Very little information about that ever appeared. The media never asked whether exposure of the atrocities-instead of sitting on them and silencing them-might have saved his life.

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Here was an Iraqi democratic opposition who ought to have some thoughts about the matter. They would be happy to see Saddam Hussein drawn and quartered. He killed their brothers, tortured their sisters, and drove them out of the country. They have been fighting against his tyranny throughout the whole time that Ronald Reagan and George Bush were cherishing him. What about their voices? Take a look at the national media and see how much you can find about the Iraqi democratic opposition from August through March (1991). You can't find a word. It's not that they're inarticulate. They have statements, proposals, calls and demands.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

As of spring 2016, the lowest spending for national defense during the 1970s was $76.7 billion in FY1973; the highest was $116.3 billion in 1979. By FY1983, the defense budget had exceeded $200 billion; by FY1989, it had exceeded $300 billion. 5.Opening phrase of a 1984 campaign ad for Ronald Reagan, at Museum of the Moving Image, “The Living Room Candidate: 1984 Reagan vs. Mondale,” www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1984/prouder-stronger-better (accessed Mar. 20, 2016). 6.Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981,” American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43130 (accessed Mar. 20, 2016). 7.For the story of the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph and its subject, see BBC News, “Picture Power: Vietnam Napalm Attack,” news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4517597.stm (accessed Apr. 5, 2016). 8.As of early 2008, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) began to deliver public testimony in a campaign called Winter Soldier, which culminated in a four-day event in March 2008 near Washington, DC; see www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier; www.ivaw.org/blog/press-releases; www.ivaw.org/blog/press-coverage (accessed Apr. 5, 2016).

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Astronautics can also lead to military systems which, once developed and deployed, may make hopes of disarmament, arms control, or inspection more difficult to fulfill.” Quoted in Sean N. Kalic, US Presidents and the Militarization of Space 1946–1967 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), 44. 29.Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” Mar. 23, 1983, transcript, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1983/32383d.htm (accessed Apr. 22, 2017). 30.Steven R. Weisman, “Reagan Proposes U.S. Seek New Way to Block Missiles,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 1983. 31.“Boost-phase intercept has the big advantage, especially for small states, that is for North Korea, that you can get close.

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During the first few years following the 1973 peace accord and the departure of combat troops, the war’s opponents may have expected that the US military budget would stage a retreat. Yet Office of Management and Budget figures show only a brief pause before a renewed escalation in spending—an escalation that became dramatic during the next administration.4 Soon, promised the soon-to-be president, Ronald Reagan, it would be “morning again in America.”5 Reagan’s first inaugural address, in 1981, officially heralded the era of ubiquitous heroism and insistent patriotism—heroes, whose “patriotism is quiet but deep,” were to be met “every day . . . across a counter.”6 People hung the Stars and Stripes from their porches.

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

.: Economic Policy Institute, 2008), pp. 220–24. 6 More than half of all the money: See Lawrence Bebchuk, “The Growth of Executive Pay,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 21, no. 2 (2005): 283–303. 7 By 2007, financial and insurance companies: See Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) Tables, Section I: Domestic Product and Incomes, “Real Gross Value Added by Industry,” 2009. 8 In 2009, the twenty-five best-paid hedge-fund managers: See AR: Absolute Return + Alpha, annual survey, 2009. 9 in 2007, Ford’s financial division: Securities and Exchange Commission Filings. 10 according to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan: Ronald Reagan campaign address, “A Vital Economy: Jobs, Growth, and Progress for Americans,” October 24, 1980. 11 Moreover, they had no clear memory: See Technology Triumphs, Morality Falters, Section 5: “America’s Collective Memory,” the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, January 3, 1999. 8.

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Others see the reversal of the pendulum as the inevitable result of declining confidence in government. In their view, the era that began with the Vietnam War and continued with the Watergate scandal culminated in the tax revolts and double-digit inflation of the late 1970s—which, according to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, occurred not because Americans were living too well but “because the government [was] living too well.” Confidence in government did drop, but proponents of this view have cause and effect backward. The tax revolts that thundered across America starting in the late 1970s were not so much ideological revolts against government—Americans still wanted all the government services they had had before, and then some—as against paying more taxes on incomes that had flattened.

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The rich and powerful also had substantial influence “in conditioning the attitude taken by people as a whole toward [the] rules,” as Eccles wrote in describing the pre-Depression years. They generously financed think tanks, books, media, and ads designed to persuade Americans that free markets always know best. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman, and other apostles of free-market dogma reiterated a simple story: The choice was between a free market and big government. Government was the problem. Free markets were the solution. But how could the public have been so gullible as to accept this story?

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

“Playboy Interview: Donald Trump,” Playboy, March 1990, https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990. 44. Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland,” July 6, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-people-poland/. 45. Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on the Canadian Elections and Free Trade,” November 26, 1988, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/112688a. Chapter Four: White Terror 1. Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump Seems to Connect President Obama to Orlando Shooting,” Washington Post, June 13, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/13/donald-trump-suggests-president-obama-was-involved-with-orlando-shooting/. 2.

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Naipaul astutely said of Eva Perón: “Even when the money ran out, Peronism could offer hate as hope.”34 But Trump lacked the emotional toughness of Evita. Trump desperately craved the elite admiration that a more astute demagogue would have despised and refused. Trump could have made political capital out of being the first president since Ronald Reagan not to have attended Yale or Harvard. But no. Instead of seizing the opportunity to identify more closely with his supporters, Trump revealed himself, as journalist Jonathan Chait bitingly observed, as a snob who secretly despised his supporters. Chait spotted an especially revealing moment at a Trump rally in West Virginia in 2018.

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While the job goes undone, the United States and the world careen toward conflict and crisis. Chapter Three World War Trump American presidents have more power over foreign affairs than domestic policy. Much more than at home, it is abroad that a president can define the United States according to his own ideas. Those ideas—Jimmy Carter’s commitment to human rights; Ronald Reagan’s anticommunism—shape the world and the future. Donald Trump, too, had a vision, and we all will be coping with those consequences for many years to come. For Donald Trump, life is a struggle for dominance. In every encounter, one party must win, the other must lose. The tough will prevail. The weak will be victimized—and they will deserve it.

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy

company town, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Vita, our animated young Ukrainian guide, first takes us to the 30-kilometer exclusion zone and then to the more restricted 10-kilometer one—two circles, one inside the other, with the former nuclear power plant at their center and a radius of 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) and 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), respectively. We get to see the Soviet radar called Duga, or Arch—a response to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative—by today’s standards a low-tech system. It was designed to detect a possible nuclear attack from the East Coast of the United States. From there we proceeded to the city of Chernobyl, its nuclear power station, and the neighboring city of Prypiat, a ghost town that once housed close to 50,000 construction workers and operators of the destroyed plant.

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The Central Intelligence Agency in the United States had made even grimmer estimates, putting the growth rate at 2 to 3 percent, and later reducing even that estimate to approximately 1 percent.3 With its goals for communism nowhere in sight, the economy in a tailspin, the Chinese launching their economic reforms by introducing market mechanisms, and the Americans rushing ahead not only in economic development but also in the arms race, under the leadership of the unfailingly optimistic Ronald Reagan, the Soviet leadership had lost its way. The people, ever more disillusioned with the communist experiment, had become despondent. And yet, with the communist religion in crisis, it suddenly appeared to have found a new messiah in a relatively young, energetic, and charismatic leader: Mikhail Gorbachev.

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A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.” The common wormwood, after which the town of Chernobyl was named, is not exactly the same shrub as the wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) mentioned in the Bible, but it was close enough for many, including President Ronald Reagan, to conclude that the Chernobyl accident was prophesied in the Bible.5 The biblical prophecy aside, Chernobyl remained the capital of the north Ukrainian wilderness for most of its history. In early modern times, the rule of Kyivan princes over the region was replaced by that of Lithuanian grand dukes, and then of Polish kings.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Slight, quick-witted, and irascible, he viewed the tortuous derivations of general equilibrium theory as largely a waste of time and effort: to him, the efficacy of free markets was self-evident. Martin Anderson, one of Ronald Reagan’s economic advisers, has described Friedman as “the most influential economist since Adam Smith.” That may be an exaggeration, but nobody did more than Friedman to resurrect laissez-faire ideas. In academic venues, in his long-running column in Newsweek, and in two much-read books, Capitalism and Freedom, first published in 1962, and Free to Choose, which he and his wife, Rose, put out in January 1980, just as Ronald Reagan was beginning his successful run for the White House, Friedman furnished conservative politicians with a consistent and well-articulated set of ideas and policy proposals.

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But among economists there was still a deep and pervasive faith in the vitality of American capitalism, and the ideals it represented. For decades now, economists have been insisting that the best way to ensure prosperity is to scale back government involvement in the economy and let the private sector take over. In the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan launched the conservative counterrevolution, the intellectuals who initially pushed this line of reasoning—Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, Sir Keith Joseph—were widely seen as right-wing cranks. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and many other progressive politicians had adopted the language of the right.

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Frank Nothaft, the chief economist at Freddie Mac, ran through a list of “economic fundamentals” that he said justified high and rising home prices: low mortgage rates, large-scale immigration, and a modest inventory of new homes. “We are not going to see the price of single-family homes fall,” he said bluntly. “It ain’t going to happen.” As the housing boom continued, Nothaft’s suggestion that nationwide house prices were unidirectional acquired the official imprimatur of the U.S. government. In April 2003, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, in Simi Valley, California, Alan Greenspan insisted that the United States wasn’t suffering from a real estate bubble. In October 2004, he argued that real estate doesn’t lend itself to speculation, noting that “upon sale of a house, homeowners must move and live elsewhere.”

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

The West, in the summer of 1979, was in poor condition, and Europe was not producing the answers. Creativity would have to come from the Atlantic again, and it did. Margaret Thatcher emerged in May, and Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980. 21 Atlantic Recovery: ‘Reagan and Thatcher’ Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher each brought to bear some of the core beliefs of their civilization, which included (among others) Hollywood and a belief in facts. Ronald Reagan had been an actor, a Rooseveltian Democrat, and he had escaped from a past in a way that commanded respect - his father a drunken failure, his mother a shrew. He had pushed his way forward, via a degree in simple-minded verities at an obscure college, through sports-commentating, to Hollywood.

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General Galtieri (centre) with Admiral Lambruschini (left) and Brigadier General Graffigna, Buenos Aires cathedral, May 1980; Arthur Scargill, Orgreave colliery, May 1984 44. and 45. Couples. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, June 1984; Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu with folkloric Romanian children, c. 1985 46. and 47. More couples. Elizabeth II and Rupert Murdoch, Wapping, February 1985; General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Pope John Paul II, Warsaw, June 1987 48. and 49. Cold War spin-offs. President Mohammed Najibullah meeting Soviet troops, Kabul, October 1986; Prime Minister Turgut Özal meeting Ronald Reagan, April 1985 50. and 51. The end. The East German leader Egon Krenz about to lose his job, with Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, November 1989; Boris Yeltsin earlier in the same year It was of course a racial matter.

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Still, he had only managed to win the nomination because the other candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, scored black marks for divorcing his wife of thirty-one years, and Goldwater manoeuvred himself into what appeared to be grotesquely reactionary positions - the abolition of graduated income tax, the bombing of North Vietnam, a denunciation of Eisenhower’s administration as a ‘dime store New Deal’. His electoral ship sank with all hands, though Ronald Reagan found a lifebelt. The mood was now for political change, though, looking back, it is difficult to see quite where the urgency for this lay. The racial problem in the USA was indeed a great blot, and had been seen as such even in the days when the Constitution proclaimed equality. But there was much to be said for taking things carefully, even just applying the existing laws that protected individuals in the Anglo-Saxon manner.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

David Sedaris, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

That is why the “city on a hill” is the image from Winthrop’s speech that stuck and not “members of the same body.” No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of “mourn together, suffer together.” City on a hill, though—that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that’s why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that’s why we are Ronald Reagan. Remember this? In 1987, when President Reagan finally went on national TV to apologize for his underlings’ secret and illegal weapons sales to Iran in exchange for hostages and to purchase weapons for anticommunist Nicaraguan death squads, he said, “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages.

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According to Foxe, when Tilleman saw the large pile of kindling that was to be used to burn him alive, he asked his executioner if most of the wood “might be given to the poor, saying, ‘A small quantity will suffice to consume me.’ ” In “Christian Charity,” Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time also when Christians . . . must give beyond their ability.” Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles’ times.” (It is so curious that this sermon, in my lifetime, would become so identified with the Communist-hating, Communist-baiting Ronald Reagan, considering Winthrop just proclaimed that a follower of Christ must be willing to renounce property. Utter Commie talk.) After the Old Testament Israelites, the colonists’ second-favorite biblical role models are the first-century churches founded by Christ’s apostles and the missionary Paul.

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To him, the city on the hill was also something else, something worse—a warning. If he and his shipmates reneged on their covenant with God, the city on a hill would be a lighthouse of doom beckoning the wrath of God to Boston Harbor. Talking about Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” without discussing Ronald Reagan would be like mentioning Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and pretending Whitney Houston doesn’t exist. Whitney and Reagan’s covers were way more famous than the original versions ever were. Winthrop’s sermon, as a supposed early model for the idea of America, became a blank screen onto which Americans in general and Reagan in particular projected their own ideas about the country we ended up with.

Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

He had gone out of fashion in the 20th century as the rise of communism showed the potential of the economic model set out by Karl Marx (Chapter 3), while the Great Depression of the 1930s encouraged policymakers to seize on the writings of John Maynard Keynes (Chapter 5), who argued for more government intervention to correct the failures of the market. However, by the 1980s communism was in retreat across Russia and Eastern Europe and the dominance of the state and the trade unions was seen as a brake on economic growth. Enthusiasm for his theories received a second wind. Two politicians, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US – and their advisers – seized on his ideas to justify rolling back the state and deregulating labour and financial markets. According to a popular urban myth, Thatcher was said to carry a copy of The Wealth of Nations in her famous handbag, and in her own book, Statecraft, she described Adam Smith’s invisible hand as a ‘bracing blast of freedom itself’. 20 The Great Economists According to Bruce Chapman, one of Reagan’s Deputy Assistants in the White House, Smith was a hero to Reagan since he studied classical economics at college.

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Speaking at a memorial service for Reagan, Chapman also recalled that ties with little Adam Smith busts on them ‘festooned every male conservative chest in Washington. You had a wide range of choices: there were green Adam Smith neckties, maroon Adam Smith neckties, red, white and blue Adam Smith neckties. If Ronald Reagan had been allowed to run for a third term I imagine there would have been Adam Smith hats and Adam Smith raincoats.’1 The interpretation by some modern writers that Smith in his famous phrase about the butchers and bakers was saying that self-interest – or even greed – alone was a sufficient guide to human economic actions has caused a furious debate.

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In 1981 she told the House of Commons that she was a ‘great admirer’ of Professor Hayek and urged ‘some’ of her fellow MPs to read his works. In a letter to congratulate Hayek on his 90th birthday in 1989, she wrote that the ‘leadership and inspiration that your work and thinking gave us were absolutely crucial and we owe you a great deal’. Across the Atlantic the new US President Ronald Reagan counted both Hayek and Friedman as friends. He too took a leaf out of Hayek’s book in devising his election campaign, telling voters that he would ‘get the government off our backs [and] out of our pockets’. He took an axe to the federal government and cut taxes – although critics said that his massive increase in defence spending provided a classic Keynesian boost to aggregate demand.

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

It was July 1984, and the second-term Arkansas governor, not yet forty years old, knew where to find opportunity. The convention itself would be a morose affair, with party regulars dutifully ratifying former vice president Walter Mondale as their nominee. Four years earlier, Mondale had been number two on the Jimmy Carter–led ticket that surrendered forty-four states to Ronald Reagan. For a while, Democrats had believed Reagan’s triumph to be a fluke, especially when a nasty recession pushed unemployment to over 10 percent early in his term. But by the summer of ’84, the economy was resurgent, patriotism was in full bloom (Los Angeles would soon host the Summer Olympics), and America’s grandfatherly president was enjoying some of the best poll numbers of his tenure.

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People wouldn’t mind if they knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way.” It was all too much. The Arkansas governorship still came with a two-year term back then, and when Bill Clinton faced the voters again in 1980, he did so with the presidential race at the top of the ticket. Nationally, Ronald Reagan trounced President Jimmy Carter, piling up victories in every corner of the country. Most stunning was Reagan’s strength in the South, a region where the Republican Party had barely existed since the Civil War. The GOP had been gaining strength in Dixie, but Carter, the old Georgia peanut farmer, had seemingly restored his party’s grip on the region in 1976.

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“We need a message that the Democratic Party is a home for them, and that’s what Cuomo is saying.” Those watching at home, wrote Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, “saw yet another star born on TV: Mario Cuomo, the keynote speaker and New York governor who might this morning lay claim to the title Son of the Great Communicator. “Like Ronald Reagan, the absolute standard by which all others are judged, Cuomo appears to have mastered the art of speaking directly to the television audience while only appearing to be speaking to an assembled throng.” Mario Cuomo had come to San Francisco just another Democratic governor from the Northeast.

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Valley of the Heart’s Delight: “Valley of the Heart’s Delight: Santa Clara Valley, California,” http://santaclararesearch.net. CHAPTER 7: THE BIG CON Edwin J. Gray: Ronald Reagan, “Nomination of Edwin J. Gray to Be a Member of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board,” February 17, 1983, Public Papers of the Presidents. Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation: Kenneth B. Noble, “Political Foot Soldier; Reagan’s Friend at the Bank Board,” New York Times, May 29, 1983. “All in all, I think”: Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act,” October 15, 1982, Public Papers of the Presidents. an astonishing array of schemers: William K.

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After it became apparent that the Justice Department was in the process of terminating Lerach’s legal career, Dillon called Lerach to inform him that there was still a book to be done, but it would be about Lerach, not coauthored by him. Pat subsequently called Carl and invited him to be his coauthor. Carl, who had just days before finished a book with his father, Lou Cannon, comparing the presidencies of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, gave his friend a succinct initial response: “No.” Obviously, that answer was not the last word. Pat subsequently informed Bill Lerach that he and Carl had signed a contract to write a book about Lerach’s life and career. Lerach’s response was, “Well, I guess if someone is going to do it, I’m glad it’s going to be you two.

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The Methodists and their lawyers were about to run into the buzz saw named Lerach. Before this case was over, he would present so much compelling evidence that the Methodists would sue for peace before they could even put on their first witness. THE CASE WAS ASSIGNED to Judge Ross G. Tharp, a folksy Ronald Reagan appointee with a handlebar mustache and a resemblance to the comedic actor Dabney Coleman. Tharp’s unease with the case was almost physical, and he did nothing to hide his discomfort at presiding over the lawsuit against a venerated Protestant denomination. The Methodists’ legal defense consisted of three lines of argument: the first was procedural, the second constitutional, and the third an assertion that was more a public policy position than a legal theory.

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

It looked beautiful hanging there. Then Artie came over. As soon as he saw it, he started snorting and acting pissed off. “Ugh,” he said, “what a fool.” I said, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, Reagan, I mean, Jesus.” “That’s a great picture. I found it in Tijuana.” He said, “Do you know who this is?” “Well, it says below, ‘Ronald Reagan.’ ” “He’s the governor of the state of California.” I said, “Really! That’s amazing. That’s twice as good. I have the governor of the state of California hanging here.” “Yeah, he used to be in Westerns,” Artie said. — With Franco as my training partner, I could concentrate on my competition goals.

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You could put down $100,000 to buy something for $1 million, and the next year it would be worth $1.2 million, so you’d made 200 percent on your investment. It was crazy. Al Ehringer and I flipped our building on Main Street and bought a city block for redevelopment in Santa Monica and another in Denver. I traded up my twelve-unit apartment building for a thirty-unit one. By the time Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and the economy slowed, I’d achieved another piece of the immigrant dream. I’d made my first million. — Conan the Barbarian might still be stuck in the comic books today if John Milius hadn’t reentered the picture in 1979. He took Oliver Stone’s script, chopped it in half, and rewrote it to cost much less, but still $17 million.

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I’d had my Jeep outfitted with a loudspeaker and siren for showing off or scaring other drivers out of my way. But now when we drove around town, I’d sink a little lower in the seat, hoping that no one would see me. It was weird pulling up at the gym every day: like most of the people there, I was known as a Republican, and now here I was with the Teddy stickers. Personally, I was hoping that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, but no one was asking my opinion; it was Maria they wanted to see. Hollywood, of course, is a big liberal town, and her family connections went deep. Her grandfather Joe Kennedy had been heavily involved in movies, running no fewer than three studios in the 1920s, and the Kennedys were famous for involving entertainers in political campaigns.

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

THE HIGH PRIESTESS OF THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 26 “called her ‘The Margaret Thatcher of financial regulation’”: Wendy Gramm, Mercatus Center Distinguished Senior Scholar, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, mercatus.org/wendy-gramm. 27 “Unfortunately, this legislation does not deal”: Ronald Reagan, Remarks on Signing the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, October 15, 1982, www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1982/101582b.htm. 28 “Ronald Reagan’s dream of carrying out a sweeping”: Richard Hornik, “Shortening the Tether on Bankers,” Time, August 17, 1987. 29 “the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act restrictions on securities activities”: Ronald Reagan, Statement on Signing Competitive Equality Banking Act of 1987, August 10, 1987, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

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They never had a chance, though; they were facing a juggernaut: The combined power of the Wall Street lobbyists allied with popular President Clinton, who staked his legacy on reassuring the titans of finance a Democrat could serve their interests better than any Republican. Clinton’s role was decisive in turning Ronald Reagan’s obsession with an unfettered free market into law. Reagan, that fading actor recast so effectively as great propagandist for the unregulated market—“get government off our backs” was his signature rallying cry—was far more successful at deregulating smokestack industries than the financial markets.

…

A tip-off to the answer might be that the lobbying forces—the power of that massive wealth to control politics which Obama in his speech referred to as “the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation”—did not stop functioning with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, and that to some degree, even a politician who read the danger signs so well could succumb to the very forces that he had earlier decried. CHAPTER 2 The High Priestess of the Reagan Revolution Ronald Reagan called her his favorite economist, and Wendy Lee Gramm seemed to deserve the praise. Both while she was an academic economist and after Reagan appointed her to various regulatory positions in his administration, she excelled in articulating antiregulatory rhetoric that marked her as a true believer in what would later be labeled the “Reagan Revolution.”

Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, clean water, David Brooks, disinformation, failed state, Farzad Bazoft, guns versus butter model, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

But it would be wrong to overlook the impact on the victims, who endure a lasting “culture of terror [that] domesticates the expectations of the majority” and undermines aspirations towards “alternatives that differ from those of the powerful,” in the words of the Salvadoran Jesuits who survived the project of “democracy promotion,” in a conference they sponsored in 1994. This book is concerned with the immediate consequences of Ronald Reagan’s war on terror, declared as he entered office. The war was redeclared by George W. Bush. The immediate consequences should be too well known to review, and should not have surprised those who are familiar with the continuities of policy and the way they are interpreted within mainstream articulate opinion.

…

The doctrine of “change of course,” which allows any past horror to be cheerfully dismissed, is highly functional within a terrorist culture. It is presented in its most vulgar form by 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Krauthammer, who assures us that “today’s America is not Teddy Roosevelt’s or Eisenhower’s or even that imagined by Ronald Reagan, the candidate.” Now “democracy in the Third World has become, for the right as well as the left, a principal goal of American foreign policy.” While it is true that “liberty has not always been the American purpose,” now all has changed: “We believe in freedom,” and the past can be consigned to oblivion along with all that it teaches us about American institutions and the way they operate.7 As for the present, it will be rendered with the same scrupulous concern for accuracy and honest self-criticism that was exhibited during past eras when, we now concede in retrospect, there may have been an occasional blemish.

…

It is the conclusion that anyone who gave the matter a moment’s thought would at once draw from the story that had been displayed on the television screen and the front pages for the preceding months. But the media were oblivious to these truisms. Doves and hawks alike pondered the prospects in ways to which I will return, but without any recognition of the fundamental absurdity of a “peace plan” under which Nicaragua disarms in exchange for a pledge of good behavior from Ronald Reagan and his cohorts.13 It was assumed on all sides that the Reagan administration would undergo the familiar miraculous conversion, that it would suddenly change course, would become law-abiding and would comply with agreements without monitoring or any meaningful supervision. There were concerns that Nicaragua would lie and cheat in the manner of all Communists, but no questions about the likelihood that the United States would live up to an unverifiable commitment.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But it was in the United States that the Volcker shock caused the first political casualties. Construction of new homes fell by half. Auto sales, running at an annual rate of fourteen million units in October 1979, dropped below ten million. The unemployment rate jumped nearly two percentage points. Although the recession would be brief, it was enough to elect Ronald Reagan president.7 RONALD REAGAN WAS AN ICON OF THE RIGHT. A FORMER ACTOR and corporate pitchman, he had served two terms as governor of the fast-growing state of California. He said the right conservative things, praising free enterprise and small government, and even the blunt promise to “send the welfare bums back to work,” which had carried him to the governorship in 1966, came with a smile and a friendly wave.

…

The global political climate warmed to market-oriented thinking because other ideas appeared to have failed. The demand for smaller government, personal responsibility, and freer markets transformed political debate, upended long-established public policies, and swept conservative politicians like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl into power. In the rich world, the postcrisis years brought a massive shift in income and wealth in favor of those who owned capital and against those whose only asset was their labor. In the poor world, they fueled a boom and subsequent bust among countries eager to join the advanced economies.

…

But as domestic automakers and auto parts manufacturers shed some three hundred thousand jobs during the course of 1980, and as automobile output fell by one-fourth, the pressure for government action ahead of the November 1980 presidential election was impossible to ignore. In the midst of a closely fought campaign, Carter, who had publicly opposed sanctions against car imports from Japan, changed his stance. His opponent, Ronald Reagan, proudly heralded his support for free trade, but he told workers at a Chrysler plant in Detroit that autos were a special case; the US government, Reagan asserted, should “convince the Japanese one way or another, and in their own best interests, the deluge of their cars into the United States must be slowed while our industry gets back on its feet.”27 Faced with the implicit threat of US trade sanctions, MITI announced “voluntary restraints” on car exports to the United States on May 1, 1981, barely three months after Reagan’s inauguration.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

These unprecedented political and economic traumas destroyed the classical laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century and created a different version of the capitalist system, embracing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and the British and European welfare states. Then, forty years after the Great Depression, another enormous economic crisis—the global inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s—inspired the free-market revolution of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, creating a third version of capitalism, clearly distinct from the previous two. Forty years after the great inflation of the late 1960s, the global economy was hit by another systemic crisis, in 2007-09. The argument of this book is that this crisis is creating a fourth version of the capitalist system, a new economy as different from the designs of Reagan and Thatcher as those were from the New Deal.

…

Yet the many conservative politicians, financiers, and business leaders who vehemently denounce the credit expansion of the precrisis period as a fraud and illusion never seem to consider the logical implication: If most of the wealth created from the 1980s onward was a fraud, the same must be true of the free-market reforms that supposedly created this imaginary wealth. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher allegedly reversed the structural deterioration of Anglo-Saxon capitalism that began in the late 1960s by creating the free-market system described in this book as Capitalism 3.0. But postcrisis conventional wisdom implies that the Thatcher-Reagan reforms merely disguised the capitalist system’s malaise behind a froth of financial bubbles.

…

In the past forty years, dozens of relatively small events could have changed the course of history and transformed economic conditions the world over. Imagine if Deng Xiaoping had died in the Cultural Revolution alongside his mentor Liu Shaoqi. Or if Gorbachev had been passed over for the Soviet leadership. Or if John Hinckley’s bullet had been aimed an inch higher at Ronald Reagan’s chest. Or if Argentina had not invaded the Falklands, saving the government of Margaret Thatcher. Or if the hanging chads in Florida had fallen for Al Gore instead of George W. Bush. Any of these events would certainly have transformed the pace of change, but would they have moved history in a different direction?

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

What is tragic right now is that we have people—leading people—who choose to leave audiences in ignorance or even encourage stupidity.” That same ignorance can be found in sectors of the business community, where scorn for the government and regulation has become the norm. Who can ever forget Ronald Reagan’s famous campaign line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Of course, every businessperson in America wants lower taxes and less regulation. Most Americans do. But every one of us also benefits from, indeed depends upon, the five pillars of the American formula.

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That will require us to cut spending, to raise taxes, and to invest in the sources of our strength, all in a coordinated way. But before we discuss that, let’s step back for a moment and ask: How in the world did we get into this position? Present at the Creation From the end of World War II until Ronald Reagan’s presidency, American budget history was pretty boring. The federal government ran manageable annual budget deficits and the economy steadily grew, so our debt-to-GDP ratio fell. Since the big change occurred during the Reagan presidency, we decided to ask someone who was present at the creation: David Stockman, the budget director during Reagan’s first term and a sharp critic of recent American fiscal policy.

…

Recall the words of former vice president Cheney, whom we quoted earlier: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Reagan not only did not prove that deficits don’t matter; he did not believe that deficits don’t matter. This is a fiction that would be manufactured later by a new generation of conservatives either out of ignorance or for their own selfish or ideological reasons. “Ronald Reagan never called them taxes,” recalled former senator Bennett, the Utah Republican. “They were ‘revenue enhancements.’ [Senator] Pete Domenici described it to me once: he said, ‘We went down to the White House and said, “Mr. President, we can’t survive on this level of revenue.” And, Reagan said, “Okay, maybe we ought to have some ‘revenue enhancements.’”’

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

Look at the way each sentence sets up the next: the Battle of France is over; the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Then the final two sentences that flow inexorably on to their conclusion in the speech’s title. This is his finest hour. You are on fire, sir. RONALD REAGAN Tear Down This Wall The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 12 June 1987 The most successful electoral politician of any era of American politics, Ronald Reagan was, to use a coinage of George W. Bush, the most mis-underestimated president of modern times. He was also, as much as Wilson and Eisenhower, a war leader. Reagan’s war was the Cold War and it ended in a decisive victory.

…

Kennedy: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You, Washington DC, 20 January 1961 Barack Obama: I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America, Grant Park, Chicago, 7 November 2012 Pericles: Funeral Oration, Athens, Winter, c. 431 BC David Lloyd George: The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice, Queen’s Hall, London, 19 September 1914 Woodrow Wilson: Making the World Safe for Democracy, Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress, 2 April 1917 Winston Churchill: Their Finest Hour, House of Commons, 18 June 1940 Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall, The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 12 June 1987 Elizabeth I of England: I Have the Heart and Stomach of a King, Tilbury, 9 August 1588 Benjamin Franklin: I Agree to This Constitution with All Its Faults, The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 17 September 1787 Jawaharlal Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Constituent Assembly, Parliament House, New Delhi, 14 August 1947 Nelson Mandela: An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die, Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria, 20 April 1964 Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 10 July 1991 William Wilberforce: Let Us Make Reparations to Africa, House of Commons, London, 12 May 1789 Emmeline Pankhurst: The Laws That Men Have Made, The Portman Rooms, 24 March 1908 Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (La Pasionaria): No Pasarán, Mestal Stadium, Valencia, 23 August 1936 Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream, The March on Washington, 28 August 1963 Neil Kinnock: Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations?

…

Critics have drawn a straight line that runs through the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the peril of the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond. Kennedy’s rhetoric has both a lineage and a legacy. The lineage runs in the commitment to liberating the oppressed around the globe, which is an echo of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism. The legacy ensues in the echoes from 1963 that are audible in the first inaugural addresses of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and in George W. Bush’s rhetoric against tyranny in his second Inaugural, after 9/11. ‘When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ That could have been Kennedy; in fact it was Bush. Bear in mind, though, that the calculation changes over time, and the same words in defence of liberty have one charge in 1961 and quite another forty years later.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

They didn’t have the educational background or the qualifications to move somewhere else—nor did they have the financial means. The 1980s were the critical turning point. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off. Margaret Thatcher came into office in May 1979, right around the time I realized I was part of the working class. Ronald Reagan followed soon after, in January 1981. Together, Thatcher and Reagan dominated the 1980s, my teenage years and early adulthood and my transition to university.

…

In the 1980s, in the same timeframe as factories closed and demand for labor declined in the United Kingdom and the United States, the USSR faltered. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan precipitated the end of the Soviet Union as well as the Cold War through the pressures their interactions with Mikhail Gorbachev imposed on him, at a time when he was attempting the reform of the entire Communist system. But in fact, domestically, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev were all engaged in the same reform project—out with the old, in with the new. Each adopted a top-down approach notable for its absence of broader social consultation and its politically polarizing effects.

…

America is a rich country where millions of people have become so desperate and starved of opportunity, and others so disillusioned with the existing system of government, that they cling to whatever populist messages political leaders serve them, no matter how absurd or harmful. Postindustrial decline in the United States began with global economic and technological shifts away from large-scale heavy and extractive industry in the 1980s under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Over the next four decades, this affected some localities far more than others. It hollowed out towns and communities in specific regions through the steady loss of employment and educational and other opportunities. Economic or spatial inequality (the term economists and geographers use for geographic economic disparities) in the United States was further exacerbated by the Great Recession of 2008–2010.

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, global pandemic, Live Aid, medical residency, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, sugar pill, trickle-down economics

Earlier in the week on the local news, the irrepressible television anchor Sue Simmons openly wondered, “Just what is wrong with Rock Hudson?” He had raced to the American Hospital in Paris for secret treatment for “fatigue and malaise,” she told us, and while there he took a phone call from his old friend Ronald Reagan, wishing him well. At the office we wondered if he was chasing Montagnier’s experimental AIDS drug HPA-23. Of course we wished it was AIDS. We wished the worst for poor Rock Hudson. We had also wished catastrophe for Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, both of whom had received blood transfusions after foiled assassination attempts recently. We prayed for a day when the disease struck someone who mattered, prayed for a weaponizing of AIDS, and when I finally saw the Post headline I knew our terrible wishes had come true: “ROCK HAS AIDS—And He’s Known for a Year.”

…

In the early 1950s: See Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher, The Virus and the Vaccine (New York, NY: Macmillan, 2004); and David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). These were grave: Correspondence, Jonas Salk to President Ronald Reagan, November 6, 1986. He invited: Crewdson, Science Fictions, 288–89. Numerous Nobel Prize: Jonas Salk, correspondence to President Ronald Reagan, November 6, 1986, included letters forwarded from David Baltimore, Paul Berg, Renato Dulbecco, Robert Holley, Salvador Luria, Daniel Nathans, Howard Termin, Lewis Thomas, and Rosalyn Yallow. It did little good: Jonas Salk, correspondence to James Watson, February 19, 1987.

…

“If world-famous Ryan”: “Aids and Passive Genocide: 30,534 Unnecessary Deaths from PCP Due to Scandalous Failure to Prophylax: Testimony Given at FDA Hearing Concerning the Approval of Aerosol Pentamidine as Prophylaxis Against PCP,” first published in AIDS Forum 2, no. 1 (1989). “It is a national”: MC, “AIDS Research: Missed Opportunities, and Misplaced Priorities.” Ronald Reagan was: Frank Newport et al., “Ronald Reagan from the People’s Perspective: A Gallup Poll Review,” Gallup, June 7, 2004. he and Dworkin: Email from RD to author, June 16, 2014. Sometimes it seemed: MC, “Gay Pride Rally Speech, June 29, 1991,” MCUA. On Saturday, June 25: Phil Zwickler, “Lesbian and Gay Pride 1988,” NYN, July 11, 1988.

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The Islamists condemned the rule of infidel powers that tried to prevent the return of Muslims to God. In the United States neoconservatives raged against the compromises with evil that the Nixon Administration had carried out. America, they claimed, was selling its birthright for a short period of peace with the enemy. The Soviet Union, claimed Ronald Reagan in his race against Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, had its sights set on global hegemony. It was for the United States to resist it. “We did not seek world leadership,” Reagan said, “it was thrust upon us. It has been our destiny almost from the first moment this land was settled.

…

The Soviets were furious, but Kissinger told them that the Administration would overcome these problems. In the election campaign of 1976 Ford came under increasing pressure from fellow Republicans who wanted to repudiate détente. The problem with Nixon’s approach, they claimed, was that it made the United States into just another country in the world. Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California who ran against Ford for the nomination in 1976, claimed on the campaign trail that under Messrs. Kissinger and Ford this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best.… Our nation is in danger.

…

The Cold War was still uppermost in his mind. In the end he settled on a military rescue operation, which failed spectacularly when two US aircraft collided in the Iranian desert. The botched effort in April 1980 led to Vance’s resignation as secretary of state and probably doomed Carter’s chances for reelection. A month later Ronald Reagan, vowing to break with détente and make America great again, won the Republican nomination for president. But if the Americans had trouble with Islamism in Iran, the Soviets faced such trouble of their own farther north. In Afghanistan a Marxist party had come to power through a military coup in April 1978.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Bill and the Making of Modern America (Washington, DC: Brassay’s, 2000), p. 287. 26 Ronald Reagan, Reagan: A Life in Letters, eds. Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson (New York: Free Press, 2003), p. 143 (“won’t fly”). 27 Ronald Reagan with Richard G. Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me? (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965), p. 273 (“most electric house”); Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 111 (“more refrigerators”), ch. 6; Nancy Reagan with William Novak, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 128 (Hoover Dam). 28 General Electric, “Ronald Reagan and GE,” webpage at http://www.ge.com/reagan/video.html.

…

Government policies at both federal and state levels started to promote greater efficiency through tax incentives, regulations, and mandates. California was a pioneer. The state was rocked hard by the 1973 oil crisis not only because of its dependence on the car but also because its utilities burned a lot of oil. The next year, Governor Ronald Reagan, convinced by arguments about frugality and reducing energy waste, overruled his own staff and approved the establishment of the California Energy Commission. Thus did Ronald Reagan become the progenitor of the commission that set about writing increasingly strict rules for energy efficiency that became a model across the United States. Other states followed.8 Utilities began to promote conservation through information programs and by sending energy auditors out to poke around in attics, measuring insulation, and in basements, to check out furnaces.

…

They did succeed in creating a whole new federal bureaucracy, an explosion in regulatory and litigation work for lawyers, and much political contention. But the controls did little for their stated goals of limiting inflation—and did nothing for energy security. In 1979, after a bruising political battle, President Jimmy Carter implemented a two-year phase-out of price controls. When Ronald Reagan took over as president in January 1981, he speeded things up and ended price controls immediately. It was his very first executive order. This shift from price controls to markets was not just a U.S. phenomenon. In Britain, the government shifted from a fixed price for setting petroleum tax rates to using spot price.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

That paved the way for the aberration of communism but also for the third great revolution: the invention of the modern welfare state. That too has changed a great deal from what its founders, like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, imagined; but it is what we in the West live with today. In Western Europe and America it has ruled unchallenged since the Second World War—except for during the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, inspired by classical liberal thinkers like Milton Friedman, temporarily halted the expansion of the state and privatized the commanding heights of the economy. We dub this a half revolution because, although it harked back to some of the founding ideas of the second “liberal” revolution, it failed in the end to do anything to reverse the size of the state.

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A comprehensive history of how the West established its lead in state making would be a monumental undertaking: Samuel Finer’s great history of government, which he left unfinished when he died, runs to 1,701 pages.1 Here we have decided to eschew any attempt to be comprehensive: We plan to focus on the three great reinventions that have redefined Western government and to view those reinventions through the prism of three great thinkers: Thomas Hobbes (an anatomist of the Nation-State who also paved the way for the Liberal State), John Stuart Mill (the philosopher of the Liberal State, who also foreshadowed the Welfare State), and Beatrice Webb (the godmother of the Welfare State, who also personified its excesses). In chapter 7 we examine the half revolution against government through Milton Friedman, whose ideas had such an impact on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. These thinkers occupied different positions in the spectrum from theory to practice. Hobbes wanted to produce a philosophy of politics. The Webbs wanted to change the world. Mill and Friedman occupied a position halfway between the two—they produced profound works of political economy but also played an active role in politics, Mill as a member of Parliament and Friedman as an adviser to presidents and prime ministers.

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The Washington Post conceded in 1963, “No other American economist of the first rank can match Freidman’s forensic skills and persuasive powers.”8 Partly because he knew how to get his message out. He wrote a regular column in Newsweek and frequently contributed to newspapers. And partly because he was not scared of politics. He was a leading adviser to Barry Goldwater in 1964 and a close ally of Ronald Reagan thereafter: In 1973 he joined Reagan in giving a series of stump speeches in favor of California’s Proposition 1 (which limited the size of the budget).9 The bond was personal: Reagan “just could not resist Friedman’s infectious enthu­siasm.”10 Confronted by this onslaught, even Friedman’s sparring partner, Galbraith, admitted that “the age of Keynes” had given way to the “age of Friedman.”11 The most important reason for Friedman’s success, though, was that history was increasingly on Friedman’s side.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

He rolled to the convention, winning forty-four primary contests. In the general election, Helms’s Congressional Club spent $4.6 million on Reagan’s campaign as he marched to victory over Carter.60 “Jesse Helms and Tom Ellis saved Ronald Reagan’s career,” recalled Reagan adviser Charlie Black; “without them, he wouldn’t have been president.”61 Veteran political analyst Mark Shields concurs, writing that “without Jesse Helms’s all-out support in Ronald Reagan’s losing 1976 presidential primary fight with President Gerald Ford, the Gipper would never have won the White House in 1980 and 1984.”62 Reagan seemed to agree, too. On Helms’s seventieth birthday, in 1991, the president wrote him a letter.

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Today, he is floated as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.30 Negative partisanship is neatly summed up in the popular phrase “Own the libs,” which has become a depressingly accurate three-syllable encapsulation of how politics works today. Around 2016, the phrase went viral because it captured the glee conservatives took in actions and words that “triggered” liberal “snowflakes”—such as wearing, to Whole Foods, a T-shirt featuring Ronald Reagan portrayed in the famous Che Guevara pose.31 But as the political scientist Lilliana Mason details in her essential book Uncivil Agreement, this is more or less how our political system functions today.32 Theoretically, neither negative partisanship nor polarization advantages one party over the other.

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The fact that Republicans appear to be effectively locked out of California’s Senate seats for the foreseeable future is part of the larger problem facing their party, and a result of choices they have made in recent years. Republicans used to regularly win statewide office in California—think Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. They held the governor’s mansion as recently as 2011. But as a party, the GOP has decided to focus its appeal on an ever-narrowing slice of the white population rather than seeking ways to compete in diverse states like California, often against the advice of many in their party who have urged a different approach.

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

When we expand our view beyond income to take in the broader canvas of the winner-take-all economy, the argument for thinking that the gains of America’s top-heavy economic growth “trickled down” becomes even weaker. This is not just a story of relative income erosion. The fallout of the winner-take-all economy has reached broadly and deeply into the security of the middle class—and, as recent events reveal, the entire American economy. Trickle-Up Economics Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Our own version of the question is, “Are you better off than you were a generation ago?”—or, more specifically, “How much better off are middle- and lower-income Americans than they were a generation ago?” The answer has substantial implications for how we judge the economic trends of the last thirty years.

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Extremely generous new depreciation rules and a vast expansion of tax loopholes sharply reduced overall taxes on corporations. Top income tax rates came down sharply, as did the capital gains tax (again). The top rate of taxation on the estate tax was cut from 70 percent to 50 percent, and the level of the individual exemption was raised substantially. ERTA was Ronald Reagan’s greatest legislative triumph, a fundamental rewriting of the nation’s tax laws in favor of winner-take-all outcomes. But in a deeper sense it was the nature of the conflict that had changed the most. Both parties were now locked in a determined struggle to show who could shower more benefits on those at the top.

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The story of this imbalanced struggle—and how it has furthered the politics and economics of winner-take-all—is the next part of our saga. Part III Winner-Take-All Politics Chapter 7 A Tale of Two Parties If any political figure is associated with the post-1970s transformation of American politics and the rise of a new (and newly unequal) economy, it is surely Ronald Reagan. To detractors and admirers alike, he is the obvious leading man in the drama of the New Deal’s demise. Reagan was simultaneously the conservatives’ most eloquent advocate and their most successful candidate. He was, in a word, a game-changer. There was American politics before Reagan, and American politics after Reagan.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

Money-making becomes sexy This academic work was being done against the backdrop of the ‘loadsamoney’ culture of the 1980s, which heralded an era of self-gratification and the pursuit of material goods. This happened on both sides of the Atlantic with the economic boom ushered in by the Margaret Thatcher–Ronald Reagan reforms. Blatant money-making became culturally acceptable – even desirable – and the new mindset started to colonize the business world. Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan swept aside many of the constraints on business and liberalized the economy in a celebration of corporate success. At the same time, tax rates were slashed. Ronald Reagan reduced the US top rate of tax from 70 per cent to 28 per cent and cut corporate tax from 48 per cent to 34 per cent. Similarly, when Margaret Thatcher became UK prime minister in 1979, she cut the top rate of income tax from 83 per cent to 60 per cent – seen at the time as a huge concession to top earners.

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Margaret Thatcher was elected in the UK amid a backlash against organized labour and was set on crushing trade union power to set free the supposed entrepreneurial spirits she wanted to foster among the corporate set. She also launched a series of privatizations of companies such as British Gas and British Telecom, which saw the former civil servants running these businesses suddenly pitched into the premier pay league. Similarly, Ronald Reagan came to power during a period of deep recession and stagflation – characterized as double digit economic downturn accompanied by double digit rate of inflation – in 1981. He was convinced that tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of markets and business, and control of the money supply to counter inflation, would improve the economy for all through the so-called ‘trickle-down effect’.

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David Cameron, Conservative prime minister of the UK coalition government in 2010, was quick to scrap the 50p top rate of tax that was briefly imposed in April 2010 by Gordon Brown’s Labour administration to help pay for the banking crisis. Donald Trump has passed an extensive tax bill in the US that marks the biggest changes to the tax base since Ronald Reagan’s reforms in 1986, slashing top rates in a direct benefit to the wealthy. The bill includes a deep cut to corporate taxes from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. Unions and campaigners have strongly argued for some of those tax breaks to be passed on to the workforce and a handful of companies have increased wages, but this has not been widespread.

On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

If the USSR were to warn about the threat posed by Denmark or Luxembourg to Soviet security and the need to “contain” this dire threat, perhaps even declaring a national emergency in the face of this grave danger, Western opinion would be rightly enraged. But when the mainstream U.S. press and a liberal Congress, echoing the Administration, warn ominously of the need to “contain” Nicaragua, the same thinkers nod their heads in sage assent or offer mild criticism that the threat is perhaps exaggerated. And when in May 1985, Ronald Reagan declared a “national emergency” to deal with the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” posed by “the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua,” the reaction in Congress and the media—and in much of Europe—was not ridicule, but rather praise for these principled and statesmanlike steps.

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One, regularly invoked to frighten the domestic population, is that Ho Chi Minh (or whoever the current sinner may be) will climb into a canoe, conquer Indonesia, land in San Francisco, and rape your grandmother. While it may be difficult to believe that these tales are presented seriously by the political leadership, one should not be too sure. Leaders of the calibre of Ronald Reagan may well believe what they say. The same may be true of more serious political figures, for example, Lyndon Johnson, probably the most liberal President in American history and in many ways “a man of the people,” who was undoubtedly speaking honestly when he warned in 1948 that unless the U.S. maintained overwhelming military superiority, it would be “a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife”; or when he said in a speech in Alaska in 1966, at the height of U.S. aggression in Vietnam, that “If we are going to have visits from any aggressors or any enemies, I would rather have that aggression take place out 10,000 miles from here than take place here in Anchorage,” referring to the “internal aggression” of the Vietnamese against U.S. military forces in Vietnam: There are 3 billion people in the world [Johnson continued] and we have only 200 million of them.

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It was necessary to respond in the usual manner: by international terrorism, embargo, pressures on international institutions and allies to withhold aid, a huge campaign of propaganda and disinformation, threatening military maneuvers and overflights as part of what the Administration calls “perception management,” and other hostile measures available to a powerful and violent state. Near hysteria was evoked in the U.S. government when Nicaragua accepted the draft of the Contadora treaty in 1984, shortly after Ronald Reagan had informed Congress that the purpose of the contra war was to compel Nicaragua to accept the treaty and Secretary of State Shultz had praised the draft treaty and denounced Nicaragua for blocking its implementation. Hysteria reached a still higher peak when Nicaragua conducted elections described by the professional association of U.S.

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Salaries were rising, and the higher tax rates had fallen and fallen for those who were paid enough to be affected; the generous cuts came at the start of the decade, but the biggest of all was in 1988, when the top rate went down from 60p to 40p, which put up the disposable income of the well-off by up to one-fifth overnight. It was one of those rare cases when London led the way, and Washington followed. When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president of the USA in January 1981, the phenomenon known in Britain as Thatcherism was already almost two years old. The politics of the 1980s was dominated by Margaret Thatcher – who was prime minister from May 1979 to November 1990 – in a way that no other decade is associated with one individual.

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President Jimmy Carter was at first reluctant to sell, having staked his reputation on disarmament talks, but changed his mind after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. A deal was announced in the Commons on 15 July 1980. Four months later, Carter was defeated by his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Reagan and Thatcher were soulmates. In time, their relationship would be the closest there had ever been between an American president and a British prime minister. But in the short term, Reagan’s arrival complicated her plans because he wanted to scrap the old Tridents and replace them with updated versions.

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‘I cried a lot in the car, saying I couldn’t get out, couldn’t cope,’16 she later told her biographer, Andrew Morton. When the couple paid a visit to the White House, the press corps stationed outside was twice as large as it had been for the Pope a week earlier, though Diana was not yet so famous that Ronald Reagan had remembered her name – he raised a toast to ‘Prince Charles and Princess Andrew.’ Early in her first pregnancy, Diana slipped out of the palace to buy wine gums; the photographers spotted her, and the news was all over the tabloids. This worried the palace to such an extent that the editors of twenty-one national newspapers, plus the BBC and ITN (but not including Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun) were called to the palace to hear a plea from Michael Shea, backed up by the Queen, for the Princess to be allowed privacy.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Liberal activists have repeatedly been followed by more conservative successors—FDR by Dwight Eisenhower (by way of Truman), Lyndon Johnson by Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan. America’s powerful tradition of laissez-faire liberalism also reasserted itself after the Second World War. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) was condensed in Reader’s Digest and read by millions. Milton Friedman became a television star. Ronald Reagan campaigned on the idea that government was the problem rather than the solution. But can America continue to preserve its comparative advantage in the art of creative destruction?

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The American people had already given up on him by the time he discovered his inner crusader. They looked to a new man to deliver America from the furies that had consumed them. Ronald Reagan was not only determined to do battle with the devils that were destroying America, he also had something positive to bring to the equation—a burning faith in the power of entrepreneurs to revive American capitalism. Ten THE AGE OF OPTIMISM RONALD REAGAN WAS ONE of America’s most unusual presidents. He was trained in Hollywood rather than in an Ivy League university or an established political machine. He didn’t bother himself with the details of government: whereas Jimmy Carter worried about who should be allowed to use the White House tennis courts, Reagan talked metaphorically about building a city on a hill.

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America has the world’s highest standard of living apart from a handful of much smaller countries such as Qatar and Norway. It also dominates the industries that are inventing the future—intelligent robots, driverless cars, and life-extending drugs. America’s share of the world’s patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today. The American economy is as diverse as it is huge. The United States leads the world in a wide range of industries—natural resources as well as information technology, paper, and pulp as well as biotechnology. Many leading economies are dangerously focused on one city: most obviously the United Kingdom but also South Korea and Sweden.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

., Steve Wynn called his friend Donald Trump over and introduced him to a man who would soon set the course for his unlikely political rise: David Bossie. — By the time he met Trump in the late 2000s, Bossie, then still in his early forties, was already a hardened veteran of Washington’s political wars. Smitten with Ronald Reagan as a teenager growing up in Boston, he became youth director of Bob Dole’s 1988 presidential campaign, and then a foot soldier in Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution when the GOP took back the House of Representatives in the 1994 election. Not long afterward, the beefy, buzz-cut, hyperintense Bossie (who still resembles a Dick Tracy villain) landed a job as chief investigator for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

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Foster in the gulf, his darkening view of the wider world grew to encompass his civilian commanders—above all Carter, whose pusillanimous hesitancy, and failure of leadership when he did finally act, Bannon held directly responsible for damaging American prestige. Bannon’s experience as a naval officer in the gulf did more than sour him on Democratic politics. It pushed him into a different party. He became enraptured with a hawkish, outspoken, confrontational, and struttingly pro-military Republican, Ronald Reagan, whose searing critique of Carter’s weakness matched his own views. Bannon’s years abroad also opened his eyes to what struck him as a gathering threat. It was not the sort of immediate, existential danger posed by the Soviet Union. Rather, this was a more distant menace that loomed just over the horizon: Islam.

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The two decades in between, he realized, had done nothing to stanch the threat of radical Islam to the United States—in fact, Islamic terrorists had struck with greater force than anyone imagined they could and had chosen as a target of their attack the very Wall Street financial district where he had long toiled for Goldman Sachs. The Iranian hostage crisis first impelled Bannon toward Ronald Reagan, whose strength he was certain was vital to preserving America’s safety and influence in the world. Having long ago left the military, he didn’t have any obvious outlet to respond to the new attacks—a middle-aged Hollywood investment banker can’t exactly walk into a recruiter’s office and reenlist.

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

Finally, whenever extremists emerge as serious electoral contenders, mainstream parties must forge a united front to defeat them. To quote Linz, they must be willing to “join with opponents ideologically distant but committed to the survival of the democratic political order.” In normal circumstances, this is almost unimaginable. Picture Senator Edward Kennedy and other liberal Democrats campaigning for Ronald Reagan, or the British Labour Party and their trade union allies endorsing Margaret Thatcher. Each party’s followers would be infuriated at this seeming betrayal of principles. But in extraordinary times, courageous party leadership means putting democracy and country before party and articulating to voters what is at stake.

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The Democrats, whose initial primaries were volatile and divisive, backtracked somewhat in the early 1980s, stipulating that a share of national delegates would be elected officials—governors, big-city mayors, senators, and congressional representatives—appointed by state parties rather than elected in primaries. These “superdelegates,” representing between 15 and 20 percent of national delegates, would serve as a counterbalance to primary voters—and a mechanism for party leaders to fend off candidates they disapproved of. The Republicans, by contrast, were flying high under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Seeing no need for superdelegates, the GOP opted, fatefully, to maintain a more democratic nomination system. Some political scientists worried about the new system. Binding primaries were certainly more democratic. But might they be too democratic? By placing presidential nominations in the hands of voters, binding primaries weakened parties’ gatekeeping function, potentially eliminating the peer review process and opening the door to outsiders.

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Prominent insiders and conservative opinion leaders began to make the case against Trump. In March 2016, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a high-profile speech at the Hinckley Institute of Politics in which he described Trump as a danger to both the Republican Party and the country. Echoing Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, Romney declared that Trump was a “fraud” who had “neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.” Other party elders, including 2008 presidential candidate John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham, warned against Trump. And leading conservative publications, including the National Review and the Weekly Standard, rejected Trump in blistering terms.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

,” asked Joseph Stiglitz: “That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means.”39 5 It Takes a Democrat Let me suggest a different framework for understanding the Clinton years, something even grander than The Clinton Wars, or Nasdaq!, or even Bill’s Postpartisan Journey to Self-Discovery. Here is what I propose: How the Market Order Got Cemented into Place. It wasn’t Ronald Reagan alone who did it. What distinguishes the political order we live under now is consensus on certain economic questions, and what made that consensus happen was the capitulation of the Democrats. Republicans could denounce big government all they wanted, but it took a Democrat to declare that “the era of big government is over” and to make it stick.

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Anyone inquiring how an obscenity like this came to pass—how it is that the home of the free outstripped what we used to call “captive nations” as well as countries philosophically dedicated to wholesale imprisonment like apartheid South Africa—anyone looking into these things soon realizes that this cannot be laid simply and neatly at the doorstep of the Republican Party and Those Awful Wingers. It is true that the Republican Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, and that the Republican Ronald Reagan escalated it. But the Democrat Bill Clinton—the buddy of Bono and Nelson Mandela, the man repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—easily bested both of these Republicans as well as all other presidents in his zeal to incarcerate.8 Alexander writes as follows of Clinton’s 1994 crime law: Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier.

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“The United States has arrived at a new consensus,” wrote Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in an influential 1998 book on (what they believed to be) the eternal battle between markets and government: in their minds, markets had won a complete victory.17 It wasn’t the microchip that brought us this togetherness, or optical fiber, or the Internet. The economics department of the University of Chicago didn’t win this victory, nor did the fall of the Berlin Wall bring it about. Not even the election of Ronald Reagan was sufficient, on its own, to make the market consensus happen. It required something else—it required the capitulation of the other side. That the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism is not some perverse conviction held by out-of-touch eggheads like me.

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Instead of the global embrace of market forces that historians see beginning in the seventies, we were now to understand that socialism had never been vanquished at all, that nearly every so-called conservative politician in those years was actually a liberal in disguise, that no one (with the peculiar exception of Ronald Reagan) had really been faithful to the free-market dogma.7 The era of regulatory permissiveness that allowed the financial crisis to happen had to become unmentionable, deliberately erased. It could not have happened, since conservatives knew now that progressives and crypto-socialists had controlled both parties and called the shots from the days of Woodrow Wilson to those of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke.

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Like family farmers before them, entrepreneurs are thought to be sacred: they are individualism in the flesh, the plucky strivers who have always made the American economy go. If you put aside details like the benefits that mom-and-pop stores generally don’t provide their workers, small business can sometimes seem like the last redoubt of Jefferson’s independent yeomanry. In a 1983 speech commemorating Small Business Week, for example, Ronald Reagan started off by saying, “Every week should be Small Business Week, because America is small business.”* It just got sappier from there: “entrepreneurs are forgotten heroes”; they’re “the faithfuls who support our churches, schools, and communities, the brave people everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our homes and families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America.”15 Oh, they’re the salt of the earth.

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Obvious realities would be disregarded in the bureaucrat’s zeal for rule-following; time would be wasted; business would not get done. It was as though our government wished to punish productive effort! Stories of Invasive Regulators were a constant feature of the comfortable midwestern milieu into which I was born. Ronald Reagan tossed them off all the time on his way to the White House. The plot of Ghostbusters (1984) turned on just such a small-business set piece. And the Republican Revolution of 1994 was largely driven by small-business anecdotes like these—that is, if the account of that revolution written by the then president of the U.S.

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

What happened instead was a great boom in private spending, home purchases in particular, that kept the economy humming until the Great Depression was a distant memory. And it was the fading memory of the Depression that set the stage for an extraordinary rise in debt, beginning roughly in 1980. And yes, that coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan, because part of the story is political. Debt began rising in part because lenders and borrowers had forgotten that bad things can happen, but it also rose because politicians and supposed experts alike had forgotten that bad things can happen, and started to remove the regulations introduced in the 1930s to stop them from happening again.

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And thanks to regulation, banks grew much more cautious about lending than they had been before the Great Depression. The result was what Yale’s Gary Gorton calls the “quiet period,” a long era of relative stability and absence of financial crises. All that began to change, however, in 1980. In that year, of course, Ronald Reagan was elected president, signaling a dramatic rightward turn in American politics. But in a way Reagan’s election only formalized a sea change in attitudes toward government intervention that was well under way even during the Carter administration. Carter presided over the deregulation of airlines, which transformed the way Americans traveled, the deregulation of trucking, which transformed the distribution of goods, and the deregulation of oil and natural gas.

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First, even though the United States avoided a debilitating financial crisis until 2008, the dangers of a deregulated banking system were becoming apparent much earlier for those willing to see. In fact, deregulation created a serious disaster almost immediately. In 1982, as I’ve already mentioned, Congress passed, and Ronald Reagan signed, the Garn–St. Germain Act, which Reagan described at the signing ceremony as “the first step in our administration’s comprehensive program of financial deregulation.” Its principal purpose was to help solve the problems of the thrift (savings and loan) industry, which had gotten into trouble after inflation rose in the 1970s.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”32 The sense of humanity and social responsibility that Carter encouraged took on a different tone after his term ended in defeat. As economist Jeffrey Sachs pointed out during an interview on Tavis Smiley on PBS, the 1980s introduced a dramatic and calculated shift in the War on Poverty: “But then came [President Ronald] Reagan and the backlash … when Ronald Reagan came into office, and he came into office on a platform that said government is not the solution, it’s the problem… . He started to dismantle. He gave tax cuts to the rich, started to cut the base out of our education spending, social safety net; [he] stopped investing in infrastructure—the things that make America productive.”33 Reagan was “no friend to America’s cities or its poor,” Peter Dreier, chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, boldly asserted in a commentary shortly after the former President’s death.

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Johnson declares “War on Poverty” 1969 13.7 percent Johnson’s Great Society efforts help reduce poverty 1973 11.1 percent National poverty rate at an almost 20-year low 1979 12.4 percent Vietnam War, Conservative backlash, poverty ticks up 1983 15.2 percent A recession from mid-1981 to late 1982 takes its toll on the poor 1989 13.1 percent Economy steadies, poverty rate drops in Ronald Reagan’s 2nd term 1992 14.5 percent Reagan drastically slashes government benefit programs, poverty rises 1993 15.1 percent Ten-year gains reversed; Poverty back to 1983 level 1994 14.5 percent Economy perks, poverty level slightly reduced 1996 13.7 percent Poverty rate drops, Clinton introduces drastic welfare reform efforts 2000 11.3 percent Poverty rates fall dramatically due mostly to the opulent 1990s 2007 12.5 percent Poverty ticks up, 37.3 million in poverty before the recession begins 2008 13.2 percent Another 2.5 million fall below the poverty line 2009 14.3 percent 6.3 million more in poverty since 2007 2010 15.1 percent The largest percentage of long-term poor in five decades Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate: 1959 to 2010 The biggest blows to the already shrinking middle class were record unemployment and a housing bubble that burst, resulting in the foreclosure of nearly 4 million homes.

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In the runup to his re-election in 1996, Clinton out-GOP’d the GOP by signing a draconian welfare-to-work reform bill. Although the legislation reduced the numbers on welfare, it pushed unskilled people into a workforce that had no use for them. The effort may have helped win an election, but it reduced poverty by only 2.5 percent—from 13.7 percent in 1996 to 11.2 percent in 2000. Ronald Reagan may have shifted the dialogue and outreach to the poor, but what’s amazing, as Jeffrey Sachs noted during the PBS interview, is that the dialogue of denial, denigration, and dismissal of the poor continued throughout the Clinton administration: “The Bush era with more tax cuts, and tragically, it’s continued through the first years of the Obama administration.”

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

The violence of Latino immigrants, the perceived permissiveness of cocaine users, and the threat to the innocence of American children galvanized conservatives into a firm rebuttal of liberal America. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President, and in the autumn the Republicans also took control of the Senate for the first time since 1952. In 1981, then Vice-President George Bush Sr launched a special task force to take on the traffickers, firing the first salvo in an invigorated war on drugs. In the decade that followed, the political agenda was defined by ‘culture wars’ between liberals and conservatives. The latter emphasized moral renewal and respect for the law. But as it pertained to the growing market for illegal drugs, Ronald Reagan’s crusading zeal was to have many unforeseen consequences.

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I thought about the era of alcohol prohibition in the United States and this era of drug prohibition, and it led me to think that prohibition, in the way that we were going about it, was doing more harm than good.’ Eric Sterling was a legal counsel to Congress in 1986 and was instrumental in drafting that year’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs. He too has gone on to become a trenchant critic of how the law has been manipulated to serve the war on drugs. ‘Historically, federal law enforcement was limited to smuggling, robbery of the mails, and counterfeiting money,’ he told me. ‘The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was the first federal drug law.

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The United States Congress was less gung-ho in its support for the Contras, however, and passed amendments which prohibited the use of government funds ‘for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua’. This meant that the Contras were strapped for cash to buy weapons. The Iran-Contra scandal is a well-known blot on Ronald Reagan’s copybook. Colonel Oliver North was found to have sold weapons to the Iranian government, supposedly an enemy of the White House, in order to raise money for the Contras. A lesser known chapter in the story, and one that throws the integrity of the Republicans’ war on drugs into real doubt, is that the CIA also approved and supported the Contras’ trafficking of cocaine into the United States.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

But they were the seeds of a revolution for the Republican Party, at least when properly cultivated by Ronald Reagan a decade later. Reagan’s first run for the presidency was also a defeat. On November 20, 1975, he announced he would challenge a wildly unpopular president of his own party, Gerald Ford. No one knows for sure whethert sn “ Dw Reagan really thought he could win. But no one expected that he would come so close to dislodging a sitting president. In 1980 he was the logical pick for his party’s nomination. He easily defeated the unpopular incumbent, Jimmy Carter. People forget how important ideas were to Ronald Reagan. By the end of his term, his opponents had painted him as little more than an actor on a very important stage.

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Introduction There is a feeling today among too many Americans that we might not make it. Not that the end is near, or that doom is around the corner, but that a distinctly American feeling of inevitability, of greatness—culturally, economically, politically—is gone. That we have become Britain. Or Rome. Or Greece. A generation ago Ronald Reagan rallied the nation to deny a similar charge: Jimmy Carter’s worry that our nation had fallen into a state of “malaise.” I was one of those so rallied, and I still believe that Reagan was right. But the feeling I am talking about today is different: not that we, as a people, have lost anything of our potential, but that we, as a republic, have.

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He is among the most prolific legal academics and the most prolific judges in the history of the nation. He is certainly among the most influential. His book Economic Analysis of Law (1973) founded the law and economics movement. Since then he has written fifty more books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of judicial opinions. He was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan thirty years ago. Whatever we can say, we can be certain, Posner is no socialist. Among Posner’s fifty-some books are two that deal specifically with the financial crisis.4 And at the core of Posner’s argument is an insistence that we understand the rationality behind this insanity. As he write.="1ems, criticizing a government report on the crisis: The emphasis the report places on the folly of private-sector actors ignores the possibility that most of them were behaving rationally given the environment of dangerously low interest rates, complacency about asset-price inflation (the bubbles that the regulators and, with the occasional honorable exception, the economics profession ignored), and light and lax regulation.5 This is the idea that I want to pursue here: that the gambling that Wall Street engaged in made sense to them given (1) “the environment of dangerously low interest rates,” (2) “complacency about asset-price inflation,” and (3) “light and lax regulation.”

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

But their weekly contributions, seen as moving pictures, betrayed profound differences not only in their economics but in their world views. Samuelson, like Keynes, had an elegant pen, and the care and pleasure with which he chose his words is evident. Like Keynes, he could draw upon a deep hinterland of knowledge way beyond the dry stuff of economics. Like Ronald Reagan, who began his weekly radio broadcasts with a joke, Samuelson liked to start his columns with a humorous quote, then, having raised a smile, he moved to the substance of his mini-essay. So when, for example, in 1966, commenting on whether the federal government was applying the right fiscal remedies, Samuelson found himself hovering between two minds, he wrote that “like Oscar Wilde, who spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out, I am oscillating.”10 He could mix it with intellectual giants.

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Even at the high point of his popularity, he remained pessimistic about the permanence of the shift in public opinion towards conservative solutions. “The reaction may prove short lived and be followed, after a brief interval, by a resumption of the trend toward ever bigger government,”63 he said. 12 No Hollywood Ending Friedman’s monetarism is given another chance by Ronald Reagan, the most conservative postwar president. But Volcker remains in charge at the Fed In November 1980, Jimmy Carter was roundly defeated in the presidential election. While contemporary observers tended to blame his downfall on a bungled rescue of American hostages held in Tehran by Islamist revolutionaries, just as important to Carter’s defeat were the high interest rates imposed by Paul Volcker at the Fed.

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As Hayek had predicted, “The politician, acting on a modified Keynesian maxim that in the long run we are all out of office, does not care if his successful cure of unemployment is bound to produce more unemployment in the future. The politicians who will be blamed for it will not be those who created the inflation, but those who stopped it.”1 The ailing U.S. economy was only one of the many reasons voters felt they wanted a fresh start. They chose as president Ronald Reagan, a former movie star and California governor. He knew something about economics, albeit a pre-Keynesian version. As a young man in Illinois, as the Great Depression was about to engulf America, Reagan had studied classical economics and sociology at Eureka College, attaining a C grade. Like Friedman, Reagan had established his conservative credentials by lending his support to the maverick 1964 Goldwater campaign in a masterly televised speech, “A Time for Choosing,”2 which set out his ultraconservative agenda.

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

It’s now occupied by parallel but separate and often opposing societies—quiet, ultraconservative local wealth; some lingering Hollywood glamour and its consort, decadence; and the latest iterations of fast money earned everywhere from cyberspace to infotainment to the lower depths of the financial industries. They may look askance at each other but they mix and mingle (even in bedrooms); in many ways the apogeal product of their union was Ronald Reagan, the movie star turned politician who emerged as a force in the Republican Party, backed by ultraconservative wealth, and became a Bel Air resident himself in 1989. Though Richard Nixon, another Southern Californian, also moved to La-La Land, and Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton loved to party there, it was Reagan who was the apotheosis of its will to power.

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Beverly Park In February 1979, the Teamsters finally lost the Higgins Canyon land; the government-appointed asset manager sold off the 355 troubled acres for $7.9 million to a group of about twenty wealthy investors. The only one publicly identified at the time was Henry Salvatori, a multimillionaire oilman from Bel Air and member of the so-called kitchen cabinet of California conservatives who were then within months of placing Ronald Reagan in the White House—though both his family and the developers now say he wasn’t involved. The investors did include hair salon mogul Vidal Sassoon, a stereo component manufacturer named Bob Craig, local supermarket owner Bernie Gelson, a local car dealer, and Gerald Breslauer, a Hollywood money manager, as well as a number of his clients, including director Steven Spielberg, then flush with cash from Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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Schick’s blades were made in Cuba until Fidel Castro took over the island nation and expropriated Schick’s factories that year, turning Frawley into an arch anticommunist and a vocal and financial supporter of conservative politicians and causes, beginning with then vice president Richard Nixon. Frawley and Alfred Bloomingdale of the department store family then put on the largest anticommunist youth rally in history, where the entertainers George Murphy (a song-and-dance man and Frawley protégé), John Wayne, Pat Boone, Ronald Reagan, Dale Evans, and Roy Rogers appeared before a hundred thousand schoolchildren. Frawley subsequently became a nationally known figure of controversy when he tried to cancel a million-dollar advertising deal with ABC after it ran a program he felt was anti-Nixon. Frawley was renowned for his business prowess if not always for his politics or ethics.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

* There was one huge difference, which was that money did not leave the country; instead, it left the private sector for the safety of U.S. Treasury obligations. But the effect on the private sector financial system was the same. 3 WALL STREET RISING 1980– In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. —Ronald Reagan, inaugural address, January 20, 19811 On December 9, 1985, the cover of Business Week featured John Gutfreund, the CEO of Salomon Brothers and “The King of Wall Street.” “Merrill Lynch remains the best-known Wall Street house and Goldman Sachs the best-managed, but Salomon Bros. is the firm most feared by its competitors,” wrote Anthony Bianco.

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Instead, like many historical phenomena, this development emerged from a confluence of factors: exogenous events, such as the high inflation of the 1970s; the emergence of academic finance; and the broader deregulatory trend begun in the administration of Jimmy Carter but transformed into a crusade by Ronald Reagan. The eventual result was an out-of-balance financial system that still enjoyed the backing of the federal government—what president would allow the financial system to collapse on his watch?—without the regulatory oversight necessary to prevent excessive risk-taking. Like many major trends, this one was not entirely visible to its participants at the outset.

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Jagdish Bhagwati argued in 1998 that trade in dollars was not the same as trade in goods, because free capital flows would generate financial crises whose potential costs needed to be taken into account.48 But the belief in free movements of capital, like the belief in efficient markets, became strong enough in some circles to shrug off the need for empirical justification.49 The Efficient Market Hypothesis, like the doctrine of free capital flows, provided ready ammunition for anyone who wanted to argue that banks should be allowed to do as they pleased, that financial innovations were necessarily good, and that free financial markets would always produce optimal social outcomes. Even so, it might have remained only a cry in the academic wilderness or an esoteric Wall Street doctrine. But it had the fortune of being in the right place at the right time—of coinciding with a once-in-a-generation shift in the American political climate. The election of Ronald Reagan marked a crucial turning point in American political history. Although Richard Nixon had already shown how to build a new Republican majority by capitalizing on resentment against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the culture of the 1960s, it was Reagan who gave that movement a usable political ideology.

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

Phil Condit, who’d risen to sales and marketing roles, talked about leapfrogging the A320 with futuristic “prop-fan” planes (with engine blades whirling in the open like a submarine’s rotors) that never came to fruition. Sutter, by then the industry’s éminence grise, visited the White House twice, in 1985 and in 1986. On the first occasion it was to accept the U.S. National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan, who leaned in and spoke softly into the engineer’s ear as he handed over the medal. (Asked later what was said, Sutter had to tell people Reagan had explained where to find the footmarks on the floor to pose for photographs.) The next year, he was named to the White House commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster, alongside Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, and other aerospace luminaries.

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Executives displayed posters of the keys in their offices and held contests for the best examples of self-renewal. In 1988, Sandy sent a survey to managers about a system of voluntary contributions he’d developed, in hopes of cutting the federal deficit. Participants would get “Modern American Patriot” certificates, lapel pins, and medallions stamped with President Ronald Reagan’s signature for their participation. “I sent mine back demanding a statue of Reagan that glowed in the dark,” C. W. Bradshaw, a former McDonnell Douglas human resources manager, told the Los Angeles Times. “The St. Louis corporate mentality is amazing. They are suckers for anyone with a new fad that will put them at the forefront of corporate culture and make the business magazines.”

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Most galling to Boeing veterans was the influence amassed by what they saw as a failed rival: John McDonnell and Stonecipher became Boeing’s two largest individual shareholders. They both joined the board, as did two other former McDonnell Douglas directors, giving them four of the twelve board seats—a powerful decision-making bloc. The others were Ken Duberstein, the former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan, and John Biggs, a St. Louis native who ran the investment firm TIAA-CREF. They brought government and financial connections, in contrast to the Boeing board, traditionally stocked with practical-minded leaders of Pacific Northwest firms like the timber company Weyerhaeuser. Larry Clarkson, then a senior executive at Boeing, recalls running into T.

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

In my first book, The Russians, I sought to give American readers an intimate human picture of what Russians were like beneath the veneer of Soviet communism and why they behaved the way they did. In The Power Game: How Washington Works, I went inside the American political system and the games politicians played in the era of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter to describe how power really works in Washington and why some leaders succeed and others fail. In this book, I provide a reporter’s CAT scan of the Two Americas today, examining the interplay of economics and politics to disclose how the shifts of power and of wealth have led to the unraveling of the American Dream for the middle class.

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—Business Week, May 1978 1978 IS A YEAR LARGELY FORGOTTEN or overlooked by many political commentators, but the legislative session of the Ninety-fifth Congress that year was one of the most pivotal in our modern political history. The power shift in favor of pro-business policies began not under Ronald Reagan and the Republicans in the 1980s, but earlier—under Jimmy Carter, in the Democratic-controlled Congress of the late 1970s. In part, that was because Jimmy Carter came to Washington in 1976 with a reform agenda to help the middle class, but as a one-term governor of Georgia, he was unprepared for the rough-and-tumble of the Washington power game.

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But there was a growing sentiment among medium-sized corporations, small businesses, and retailers that labor had gone too far and had gotten too strong. Anti-union feeling was particularly on the rise among the Sun Belt business community, some of it stirred up by the blazingly anti-union rhetoric of Barry Goldwater, the right-wing Republican presidential candidate in 1964, and by Ronald Reagan’s run for the presidency in 1976. With employee health and pension costs rising sharply and a growing gap between union and non-union wages, even employers accustomed to unions were taking a harder line. Some business leaders were determined to roll back union power. The National Association of Manufacturers, with thirteen thousand member companies, set up its own Council on Union-Free Environment to try to get rid of unions as the go-between for management’s dealings with employees.

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire by Dale van Atta

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, book value, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, financial innovation, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, index card, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, profit motive, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, stock buybacks, three-martini lunch, urban renewal

Under his leadership, it soon quadrupled its membership and carried significant weight on Capitol Hill. Concurrently, Bill helped the Chamber itself become a lobbying juggernaut. In retrospect, it’s clear that Bill’s high-profile political activism was timely. There is little doubt that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s promise to “get the government off the backs of the people” was key to his dramatic victory over Carter in 1980. With a government more in sync with what Bill had outlined, America’s economy boomed during Reagan’s two terms. There was not one federally ordered increase of the minimum wage during those eight years—yet many more low-income workers were employed and were paid higher wages than they had been during the Carter era.

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The news photos of two distinguished men in a canoe in a pool were picked up by newspapers across the country. Some called it Bill Marriott’s “Northwest Passage.”1 The opening duties for the Des Moines and Sea-Tac hotels prevented Bill from being present during a historic event for the new president of the United States, Ronald Reagan. His election victory had been a personal victory for the Republican Marriotts. J.W. funded the transportation and lodging for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir so they could appear in the inaugural parade. The Marriotts had invitations to all the inaugural events. Bill and Donna attended the inaugural gala and had grandstand seats for the parade.

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Larry Smith, the founder and designer of Scarab powerboats, thought one of his outboards could beat the record, so he approached veteran racer Michael Reagan, considered one of the top five powerboat racers in the world, to be the team leader and primary driver. Reagan was the oldest son of President Ronald Reagan. Michael Reagan was leery of using his celebrity in a stunt race to promote Scarab, so he redesigned the event as a fund-raising effort for the U.S. Olympic Committee. Reagan signed up corporate sponsors, with Anheuser-Busch being the most energetic and generous. As a result, Reagan named the diesel craft Bud Light.

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

So how could Congress and the White House agree on serious changes to the tax code when our country is ferociously divided? The fact is, we’ve done it before, in a time of severely divided government. In the mid-1980s, a strong conservative in the White House and a strongly liberal Speaker of the House—that is, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill—reached agreement on the biggest transformation of the federal income tax since the tax was created in 1913. The Tax Reform Act of 1986, passed by a divided Congress and signed by a Republican president, was widely admired; it was precisely the kind of change that almost all tax experts favored.

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The government then was divided, with a conservative president from California battling a liberal House of Representatives led by a Democrat from Massachusetts. With leaders of both parties constantly maneuvering for political gain, Washington was gridlocked on the major issues. There wasn’t much hope for significant progress in any policy area and certainly not on tax reform. The election in 1980 of President Ronald Reagan, an unabashed tax hater, launched a flurry of tax laws that pushed rates down, up, down again, and up again with no clear pattern. In Reagan’s first months in office, he successfully pressured Congress to pass the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981—known inside the Beltway as ERTA—giving big tax cuts to every individual and corporate taxpayer.

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“The trade-off between loophole elimination and a lower top rate became obvious,” Bradley wrote later; “the lower the rate, the more loopholes had to be closed to pay for it.”8 Bradley stuck to the mantra of “broad base, low rates” for years, telling anybody who would listen that a significant cut in tax rates would win the votes needed to broaden the base. “The key to reform was to focus on the attractiveness of low rates, not on the pain of limiting deductions.” The enticement of low rates also helped land a crucially important supporter for tax reform: Ronald Reagan himself. As a major Hollywood star, Reagan had been a member of the financial 1% in the 1950s, when the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. The sting of the annual tax return, Reagan used to say, was one of the factors that converted him from a liberal labor union leader to a conservative champion of business.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

The profamily constituency meanwhile could point to their inÂ�fluÂ�enÂ�tial new orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tions like the Moral Majority, the Religious Round Table, and the Concerned Women for America; the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment; and the success of Anita Bryant’s antihomosexual campaign in Florida.9 Disappointed by the nation’s first born-Â�again president, Georgian 3 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - Â�M ART Jimmy Carter, the New Christian Right swung its support to another Sun Belt governor in 1980. The Moral Majority registered 2.5 million new evangelical voters, the new conservative political action committees raised 8 million dollars, and Ronald Reagan informed evangelical opinion-Â�makers in Dallas, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.”10 Reagan’s overwhelming victory and the growth of his evangelical base forced a sea change in the political and cultural landscape, moving the right from marginal fringe to controlling center. The new Republican coalition comprised a pair of strange bedfellows: laissez-Â�faire champions of the free market unevenly yoked to a broad base of evangelical activists.

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“Business is in poor repute these days,” counseled a retail industry magazine, “and for some obvious reasons: anti-Â�establishment social upheavals spurred by Vietnam, Watergate and its attendant corporate scandals, oil price inÂ�flaÂ�tion, consumerism and the ecology movement.”3 “The young take for granted the affluence which is the rule,” groused Newsweek, and California governor Ronald Reagan wanted to know what gave these arrogant children the right to sneer at the very men who had brought them the world’s highest standard of living.4 Although business’s crusade against economic illiteracy in the 1970s 145 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - Â�M ART was not entirely new, the source of hostility to business ends and means came as a shock.

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On average Benson’s activities pulled in $1 million annually from donors like Gulf Oil; defense contractor Boeing Aircraft gave the program $1 billion.96 In a 1961 report that censured a national campaign of “rabid, bigoted, one-Â�sided” presentations illegally incorporating active-Â�duty military ofÂ�fiÂ�cers to red-Â� bait the federal government, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara singled out Benson for criticism along with professional anticommunists like Billy James Hargis, the fundamentalist radio preacher who memorably libeled the National Council of Churches as a communist front, and Fred Schwarz, founder of the Christian Anti-Â�Communist Crusade and an early promoter of Ronald Reagan.97 The Journal of Higher Education observed disapprovingly in 1967 that Harding served as “a kind of war college .€.€. dedicated to the teaching of conservatism.”98 But in Searcy this was now a compliment. The NEP spawned Harding’s American Studies program, with over half a million dollars in operating funding for the first five years.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

Why would we be more likely to vote for a handsome young president but not a good-looking young congressperson? Data in presidential versus congressional elections indicates that youth voter turnout isn’t the culprit. Some sort of creeping mistrust of the elderly or the advent of televised elections aren’t skewing the results, either. The oldest-elected president, Ronald Reagan, took office at age 69, with the fourth-oldest, George H. W. Bush, succeeding him at 64. They brought up the average. Gerrymandering and changing campaign finance laws don’t seem to explain the data, and the losers in presidential elections actually tend to be the same average age as the winners.

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Here they are: President Years in Elected Political Office Zachary Taylor 0 Ulysses S. Grant 0 Herbert Hoover 0 William Howard Taft 0 Dwight D. Eisenhower 0 George Washington 1 Chester Arthur 1 Woodrow Wilson 2 Abraham Lincoln 2 Grover Cleveland 5 George W. Bush 5 Franklin D. Roosevelt 5 Rutherford B. Hayes 7 Jimmy Carter 8 Ronald Reagan 8 Here we have one-third of our presidents, most of whom had less time in elected office than it takes to get a political science degree. Now let’s look at what they did before president: President Occupation(s) Prior to Presidency Zachary Taylor US Army Lieutenant > Major General > President Ulysses S.

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Eisenhower Military Officer > WWII Supreme Allied Commander > University President > President George Washington Continental Congress Delegate > General > President Chester Arthur New York Port Collector > Vice President > President Woodrow Wilson University President > Governor > President Abraham Lincoln State Legislator > Congressman > Prairie Lawyer > President Grover Cleveland Sheriff > Mayor > Governor > President George W. Bush Businessman > Governor > President Franklin D. Roosevelt State Senator > Assistant Secretary of the Navy > Governor > President Rutherford B. Hayes Military Officer > Congressman > Governor > President Jimmy Carter Peanut Farmer > State Senator > Governor > President Ronald Reagan Actor > Governor > President The first thing you’ll notice is that no two presidents in this group had the same climb up the ladder. You may have also noticed that there are a lot of military men in this list. And governors, too. Then there are some weird ones. Philanthropist? University president?

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going by George Friedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, It's morning again in America, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

D863.F75 2011 909.83’1—dc22 2010043116 eISBN: 978-0-385-53295-2 v3.1 For Don Kuykendall, Friend I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are. —FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. —RONALD REAGAN It is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his position to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity. —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AUTHOR’S NOTE INTRODUCTION: REBALANCING AMERICA CHAPTER 1 THE UNINTENDED EMPIRE CHAPTER 2 REPUBLIC, EMPIRE, AND THE MACHIAVELLIAN PRESIDENT CHAPTER 3 THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE RESURGENT STATE CHAPTER 4 FINDING THE BALANCE OF POWER CHAPTER 5 THE TERROR TRAP CHAPTER 6 REDEFINING POLICY: THE CASE OF ISRAEL CHAPTER 7 STRATEGIC REVERSAL: THE UNITED STATES, IRAN, AND THE MIDDLE EAST CHAPTER 8 THE RETURN OF RUSSIA CHAPTER 9 EUROPE’S RETURN TO HISTORY CHAPTER 10 FACING THE WESTERN PACIFIC CHAPTER 11 A SECURE HEMISPHERE CHAPTER 12 AFRICA: A PLACE TO LEAVE ALONE CHAPTER 13 THE TECHNOLOGICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC IMBALANCE CHAPTER 14 THE EMPIRE, THE REPUBLIC, AND THE DECADE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Major American Trade Relations Countries with a U.S.

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Yet at the same time it is the most democratic, as the presidency is the only office for which the people, as a whole, select a single, powerful leader. In order to understand this office I look at three presidents who defined American greatness. The first is Abraham Lincoln, who saved the republic. The second is Franklin Roosevelt, who gave the United States the world’s oceans. The third is Ronald Reagan, who undermined the Soviet Union and set the stage for empire. Each of them was a profoundly moral man … who was prepared to lie, violate the law, and betray principle in order to achieve those ends. They embodied the paradox of what I call the Machiavellian presidency, an institution that, at its best, reconciles duplicity and righteousness in order to redeem the promise of America.

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At home he defied a Supreme Court ruling and authorized wiretapping without warrants as well as the interception and opening of mail. Yet his most egregious violation of civil liberties was to approve the detention and relocation of ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. Roosevelt had no illusions about what he was doing. He was ruthlessly violating rules of decency in pursuit of moral necessity. Ronald Reagan also pursued a ruthless path toward a moral purpose. His goal was destruction of what he called the evil empire of the Soviet Union, and he pursued it—in part by ramping up the arms race, which he knew the Soviets could not afford. He then went to elaborate and devious lengths to block Soviet support for national liberation movements in the Third World.

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

“We’re not very funny people. We’re all work and no play.” “Then could you maybe change your voice? I don’t want to lie here thinking, even for one second, that there’s a possibility of you being hot.” “How does this sound?” Lisa’s voice morphed into that of Ronald Reagan. “Better.” “Well then, Zack, I’d like you to think of me as a friend.” How can you argue with Ronald Reagan? It’s like crushing baby chicks with gumboots; no wonder he ruled the planet for eight years. “Thanks.” “No problem.” “The food here blows.” “Yes, it’s unfortunate-looking, but take solace in knowing that you’re helping science. You’re a hero, Zack.”

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“Don’t worry, Zack. Our new blood-removal techniques are invisible and painless.” “How comforting.” I stood up and walked over to the table to poke the green gel rhomboid on my plate. I took a small taste: a broccoli smoothie. “How long am I here for?” “A few weeks, maybe.” “I’ll go nuts.” Ronald Reagan said, “You’ll be helping your country, Zack. I know we can all count on you.” “At least get me a TV.” “No TV, Zack, sorry.” “Some games, then. Magazines . . . a Mac . . . maybe even some books.” “I’m afraid we can’t let you have any information in your room that might skew your mood.” “Not even logos on the furniture and toilet, I noticed.”

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A moment of pride here: of all of us, I was the only one who didn’t mind speaking to Lisa, the feminine voice they’d worked so hard to perfect. But then, I’m one of those people who have no problem with the default ring tone on their mobile. I went two years with Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” until friends finally did an intervention at the gym’s fifth birthday party. Zack chose to work with “Ronald Reagan,” which is very Zack; at one point I think he almost convinced Ronald to speak in a Scooby-Doo accent. Julien chose the voice of a French pop star named Johnny Hallyday. Diana chose Courteney Cox Arquette and Harj chose Morgan Freeman, which was probably the best pick. Harj understands hierarchy.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game