Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies

Abstract

A number of scholars have shown how the pivotal developments of the 1970s shaped the contours of the America we currently inhabit. Judith Stein has been among those who have helped lead the way in grasping the significance of the post-1960s decade. In her last book, the masterly Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (1998), Stein took 1970s liberals to task for failing to develop an industrial policy that protected manufacturing jobs vital to both black and white workers and the health of the liberal coalition. The storied civil rights and antiwar conflicts of the 1960s might have created tensions and problems for the liberal order, Stein's work suggested, but liberals’ failure to develop a viable political economy during the following decade proved toxic for liberalism. In her current book, Stein enlarges and deepens that argument, pulling back from an industry-based analysis to offer a full-scale survey of America's failure to construct a political economy that generated broadly shared prosperity in the post-1960s era.