Inequality and American politics according to Krugman. Unlike Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, which the title plays off of, Conscience of a Liberal is not really a manifesto of "Liberal" principles or values. Instead the book tries to convey two main ideas that are more political and historical: 1) Inequality in America is driven more by political and social forces than by market forces. 2) Republicans owe their political success purely to greed and bigotry (oh and cheating). To

A great review of the development of the politics of inequality and rise of movement consevrativism in the United States in the last hundred years & a great overview of the problems of US healthcare pre-Obamacare.

What's with the well-reasoned arguments and incontrovertible facts, Paul? Enough with the "evidence" and "studies". I mean, why do you want to show that your arguments are correct with actual data. Jeez. But seriously, folks. Krugman writes like the really good teaching economist that he is. This book rocks.He's got a great - if not entirely original - dissection of the right wing movement's growth. Ditto arguments on income inequality and health care. He's got this great teaching manner that is...

It can be interesting--and often a little sad--to look at political books written three presidential elections ago, and see what they predict about the future of America. Here Krugman--less prophetic in sociology than economics--predicted an end to movement conservatism and race-baiting. Now in the era of Donald Trump, we see that, although movement conservatism may be mortally wounded, it still thrashes about mightily in its death throes, and racism--alas!--is still alive and well.Paul Krugman,...

It is interesting to read this book, which was written a couple of years before Obama was elected, now that it is a couple of years after his election. This is an important book and one I would encourage you to read. There was a time when America was a country that was interested in equality and was not really a ‘class’ society – but more a ‘middle-class’ society. There were rich and poor people, but mostly there was a kind of extended middle. That is no longer the case. Now the US is perhaps be...

In this book, Krugman starts to note that, under democracy, in a country with high level of inequality the victory in elections will always belong to the candidate with more progressive views about taxation. That's a result known as "Median voter theorem". But why this doesn't happen in the United States? Krugman went to the end of nineteenth-century to show that in the Gilded Age America was unequal and still elected politicians associated with the interests of elites. Then he explains that it

In the 1990s Paul Krugman famously asserted that 70% of the wealth that had been accumulated between 1977-1989 belonged to the top 1% of the population. Those facts still remain, but history has distorted the legacy of President Reagan, turning an actor and communicator into a great policy maker. The truth is that for the average American, Ronald Reagan was anything but a great policy maker. In fact, he was the ultimate creator of the income inequality that we live with today.In 2007, with a cri...

You want to understand how the two major political parties came to be what they are today.You're curious about how racism and the history of slavery play an uncomfortable but undeniable role in America's resistance to provide her citizens with the care and basic support other wealthy nations deem fundamental.Also you're an elitist baby-killing commie.Well, that means you want to read this book.Krugman demystifies the surge of movement conservatism and calls on liberals to be progressive in their...

Top notch analysis from a brilliant commentator. Does economic inequality lead to political polarization or is it the other way around? Krugman believes that political change ultimately forms economic reality more than the reverse. He says that the middle class of the post war era was a creation of government policy and not a naturally event arising from economic rules. He calls the postwar period, in which income extremities were both pushed towards the middle The Great Compression. He looks in...

Krugman is a rare thing: an economist who makes good predictions. He's also one who cares about how economics affects people.I was reading along, getting an overview of income inequality at the turn of the 20th century, and I just couldn't take any more. Over my lifetime it's gotten steadily worse until we are once again in a time of Gatsbys, and it pisses me off so much I want to scream. Every time anyone says anything good about Reagan I want to point out that real wages have been falling sinc...

The weakness of this book is that it is largely preaching to the choir. Yes, the national Republican Party is run by a bunch of lying bastards who hate minorities, the poor, democracy, and Christianity. BUT...you've either accepted that or you've closed your eyes in denial. Writing a partisan tract isn't going to change anyone's mind.The best part of the book is a history of the evolution of the Republican party in the twentieth century. Krugman layers this with comparisons of how the economy is...

The Concience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman plays off the title of Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative.Although Krugman's book was published in 2007 (Goldwater's back in the 1960s), it remains worth reading. In fact, it is prescient in two major ways.First, Krugman focuses hard on income inequality, which is a hot topic in 2014. His argument is that over the last 30+ years, taxes on the wealthy have gone down, social programs have been constrained, unions have been busted, and the

The genius of the political theater is it offers only two options: bad and worse. Krugman is bad as he is a stooge of Wall Street casino capitalism, peddling propagandist economic models that hide how big banks transform money from a public utility into private rent-seeking for the rich and debt peonage/austerity for the rest. In other words, neo-feudalism. But within the political theater of sanctioned discourse, Krugman is by no means the worst. On his NYT platform, he will argue for the Liber...

Anyone anxious about America’s widening political polarization and economic inequality should read The Conscience of a Liberal. In lucid, reader-friendly style, Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman draws on the latest historical, political and economic research to answer a central question: did worsening inequality spawn a billionaire elite, that later began funding Republicans’ shift to the far-right? Or did far-right think tanks and politicians, allied since the 1970s with white evangelical church grou...

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman takes us on a journey from the New Deal's advent to its creation; relates the resulting three-decade era of relative prosperity, equality, and bipartisanship; navigates the rise of "movement conservatism" and the assaults on the New Deal (and thus on equality) which occurred from the early 1970s through the present; and finally prescribes an agenda for the (predicted) Democratic congressional majority and presidency in 2009, with a focus on socialized health insur...

The first 100 pages is the best history of the two party system that I have ever read! I first became interested in Klugman when I read an editorial in the NYTimes about universal health care. The article reflected how I felt about the subject exactly. When I heard he had written a political book, I had to read it.Klugman is an economist who teaches at Princeton, and writes a weekly column for the Times. He is an accomplished writer, and this book is an easy read and real page turner. I highly r...

I found Chapter 8, Politics of Inequality, the most informative. The chapter outlines how George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came to lead the country and how it's tied to William F. Buckley defending the right of the South to prevent blacks from voting— the white community is so entitled because it is, for the time being, the advanced race. And how they praised Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who overthrew a democratically elected government in the name of church and property.Another passage that ca...

I remember Paul Krugman once remarking that his NYT editors would consistently cut down the length of the columns he submitted so he started submitting columns below the mandated word count. Being so economical with his words has helped him craft a clear and concise treatise on why espousing liberal ideas consistently makes economic and, just as importantly, moral sense. Krugman displays courage in unabashedly defending progressive ideas despite being a professor and author in a field that gener...

Paul Krugman is, hands down, the most thoughtful and reasonable economist I have ever read. He just won the Nobel Prize in Economics but that is not what makes him readable. He has written a LOT and many of the things he has written are, and are intended to be, quite accessible to the general audience. He also writes an Op-Ed for the New York Times.He has convinced me that Barack Obama should draft him to give advice on the economic catastrophe. He has written extensively on The Great Depression...