Marshall Steinbaum in the Boston Review:
The year 2014 was a heady moment in the economic policy world. That spring, French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to astounding commercial and intellectual success. The book painted a devastating picture of the post–Cold War economic order, uniting groundbreaking empirical evidence with a comprehensive theory explaining the vast accumulation of wealth and power at the top of the global economic pyramid. And it appeared at a moment when the apparatus of the Democratic Party needed just such a shock.
Recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, itself a consequence of Clinton-era financial deregulation, had been too long and too weak in the making; inequality ratcheted ever upward and jobs continued disappearing overseas. These trends signaled that the policies, rhetoric, and personnel of the Obama administration simply weren’t up to the task. Piketty’s reception, though not without pushback, helped cement consensus that something had to be done, kicking off a spirited effort within the progressive policy world to reform the Democrats’ approach to the economy.
Now that Trump has dealt a decisive deathblow to the post-Obama political system, it’s worth taking stock of where that moment went.
More here.
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