What We Are Reading Today: Capitalism in America

Authors: Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge


Capitalism in America: A History is a compelling narrative, which chronologically covers the economic history of the US.
The book by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge has been shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
At age 92, Greenspan remains a towering figure in American finance.
He was the second-longest serving chairman of the Federal Reserve (after William McChesney Martin). 
Greenspan was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and reappointed by three successive presidents from both parties. 
America is now “trapped in an iron cage of its own making,” the authors contend. But “we have shown that America has all the keys that it needs to open the cage. The great question is whether it has the political will to turn them.”

Their prescription for American renewal — reining in entitlements, instituting fiscal responsibility and limited government, deregulating, focusing on education and opportunity, and above all fostering a fierceness in the face of creative destruction — was Republican orthodoxy not so long ago. Before the Great Recession it was embraced by most Democrats as well, and more recently by former President Bill Clinton, the recipient of glowing praise in these pages, stated a review published in The New York Times.