Can American Studies Do Economics?

Abstract

The international financial crisis that surfaced in August 2007 has done the impossible convinced large portions of the U.S. public and the media that U.S. economic policy has major flaws. It is now a little easier than it was in 2006 or 1996 to find mainstream criticism of Wall Streets impact on the economy, of wage stagnation and job insecurity, of very high levels of economic inequality, and of glaring racial disparities in measures such as family assets and mortgage defaults. At the same time, the critics do not generally believe that flawed U.S. economic policies indicate a flawed U.S. economic model. Most of them attribute various crises to excessive Bush II pandering to its favored special interests big pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, oil corporations, the wealthiest 1 percent, among others. Tax cuts for the rich, installment of the Medicare prescription plan, inadequate support for renewable energy research these are discrete policy mistakes that could, in most accounts, be redressed by Democratic-party-style reforms on topics where polls indicate that solid majorities are fed up with Republican positions. Little of the commentary is suggesting the need for a structural redesign of American capitalism, or is criticizing capitalism as such. Even Naomi Kleins The Shock Doctrine, the most widely circulated recent left-wing critique of U.S. economic policy, attacks extreme capitalism rather than capitalism itself.