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    An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
    An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
    An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
    Audiobook10 hours

    An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy

    Written by Marc Levinson

    Narrated by James Foster

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateNov 8, 2016
    ISBN9781522655565
    An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy

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    Reviews for An Extraordinary Time

    4/5

    17 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A great historical view of economic development across the world is provided by the author. The book brings to light this unique point that growth is a complex phenomenon, and is not necessarily explained by economic policies.
    • 3/5
      I thought that this book was generally boring but it spurred quite a heated discussion in my book group.
    • 3/5
      I read this recently, but don't remember anything about it--and then I remember that I don't remember anything about it because it's a pretty standard telling of the economic history. I had expected much more. But it's well-written, and if you're unfamiliar with the story, easy enough to get through. And, of course, it's an important story.
    • 3/5
      I thought that this book was generally boring but it spurred quite a heated discussion in my book group.
    • 4/5
      Levinson does a good job of telling us in detail about the world economic downturn beginning in 1973 and of its lingering to the present. But I found the explanation of WHY this happened to be less than fully satisfying. He puts a lot of emphasis on the decline of productivity without fully explaining why the decline took place. Still, the book is well worth reading.
    • 4/5
      This book raises but doesn’t really answer the question: what if the productivity gains of the 1950s to 1970s were exceptional and unrepeatable? Levinson basically uses that as a hypothesis, arguing that countries around the world—including Communist countries—experienced a huge flowering of production, in part driven by the rebuilding of all the institutions and physical assets that had been destroyed in WWII. Thus, explanations specific to individual countries’ policies may be missing the point—almost everyone in the West experienced this huge uptick, and then stagnation, though to different degrees. (China is basically missing from this story, though the USSR and Japan are not.) People thus expected government policies to be able to restore economic prosperity when they couldn’t, and that fueled a conservative backlash in many countries. If the same pattern holds true for China, only twenty years behind, we might have even more problems than we now think.