With Paul Pierson, the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Pierson’s teaching and research focuses on American politics and public policy, comparative political economy, and social theory. He is the author of many books, the most recent of which is American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper.
About the book:
In American Amnesia, Pierson and co-author Jacob S. Hacker, trace the economic and political history of the United States over the last century to show how a viable mixed economy has long been the dominant engine of America’s prosperity.
They show how the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development, wherein government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity.
Though the mixed economy was the most important social innovation of the twentieth century, spreading a previously unimaginable level of broad prosperity, extraordinarily, it has become anathema to many current economic and political elites. And as the advocates of anti-government free market fundamentalist have gained power, they are hell-bent on scrapping the instrument of nearly a century of unprecedented economic and social progress. In American Amnesia, Hacker and Pierson explain how—and why they must be stopped.