Review by Choice Review
Long discarded by most economists, the concept of secular stagnation is revived in Solo's assertion that the US economy normally requires a continuous government deficit-based spending infusion to attain full employment and stable prices, notwithstanding the stagflation experience of the 1970s. That period of rising government expenditures and increased inflation and unemployment presumably did not indicate that Keynesianism had failed but rather resulted from the power of corporations and trade unions to set prices and wages for which the author recommends the remedy of price/wage control in the corporate and industrial sector. He presents this as part of a comprehensive proposal to restructure policy-making in the US government: the government together with major corporations would enter into the economy as dual managers in planning industrial policies, much in the way that Japan does. While Congress would articulate broad public goals, the dual managers in major industries would plan competitive strategies, growth, conservation, technical preeminence, etc. Solo does not explain why selective price and wage controls have not worked in postwar US. Nor does he consider the enormous literature critical of industrial policy; the uniqueness of the cultural heritage of Japan that favored planning; and the success of noninterventionist policies in other Asian countries and elsewhere in the world. For upper-division undergraduate and graduate readership.-H. I. Liebling, Lafayette College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
