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

Author: Marc Levinson

Narrator: James Foster

Unabridged: 10 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/08/2016

Synopsis

In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson recounts the global collapse of the postwar economy in the 1970s. While economists struggle to return us to the high economic growth rates of the past, Levinson counterintuitively argues that the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly; slow economic growth is the norm—no matter what economists and politicians may say. Yet these atypical years left the public with unreasonable expectations of what government can achieve. When the economy failed to revive, suspicion of government and liberal institutions rose sharply, laying the groundwork for the political and economic polarization that we’re still grappling with today.A sweeping reappraisal of the last sixty years of world history, An Extraordinary Time describes how the postwar economic boom dissipated, undermining faith in government, destabilizing the global financial system, and forcing us to come to terms with how tumultuous our economy really is.

About Marc Levinson

Marc Levinson has a gift for discovering business history stories that cut to the heart of how industries are transformed. He did so brilliantly with the award-winning The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, which was short-listed for the 2006 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Alison on December 22, 2018

Here is another book that I read for a class, this time a class on US economic history after 1865. This book was eye-opening, and focused just as much on the rest of the world as it did on the United States--you get a whirlwind tour of all the major parts of western economic history after World War......more

Goodreads review by Thilina on October 17, 2024

The value of this book is very well summarized by the author himself at the end. "The rediscovery of the 1970s as a critical period in economic history has spurred an outpouring of research around the world. Much of this, however, peers through the lens of domestic politics, losing sight of larger f......more

Goodreads review by Chris on January 06, 2019

If you've taken an international economics course in undergrad at any time in the past 15 years, say using Krugman's textbook on the matter, or an equivalent, you've covered 4/5, or more, of the material in this book. In this respect, the book is a surprisingly standard historical/political analysis......more

Goodreads review by Vinod on August 10, 2017

The Annual GDP growth for the US has dropped from a high of 5% in the sixties to around 1.5% currently. If you look at China or India, they are roughly in the 7% range in the current times. But it wasn’t always like this. If you are curious to learn about the ups and downs of the world economies sta......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on September 07, 2018

A refreshing take on the "low-growth era" of the 1970s onward by someone who doesn't have a political axe to grind. Levinson looks across countries to find the causes of lower growth and to measure the political trends that arose in response to it. He tells the story of the overburdened bureaucracie......more

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