The Conscience of a Liberal

The Conscience of a Liberal is a book written by Paul Krugman. It was 24th on the New York Times Best Seller list in November 2007. In the book, Paul Krugman studies the past eighty years of American history in the context of economic inequality. A central theme is the reemergence of both economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Krugman analyzes the causes behind these events and proposes a "new New Deal" for America. The book is a hist... more

The Conscience of a Liberal is a book written by Paul Krugman. It was 24th on the New York Times Best Seller list in November 2007. In the book, Paul Krugman studies the past eighty years of American history in the context of economic inequality. A central theme is the reemergence of both economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Krugman analyzes the causes behind these events and proposes a "new New Deal" for America. The book is a history of wealth and income gaps in the US in the 20th century. The book documents that the gap between rich and poor declined greatly in mid-century, then widened in the last two decades to levels higher than those in the 1920s. Most economists—including Krugman—have regarded the late-20th century divergence as resulting largely from changes in technology and trade, but Krugman writes that government policies had played a much greater role both in reducing the gap in the 1930s through 1970s and in widening it in the 1980s through the present. He... less