More

More offers a thoughtful, balanced, clearly written, and entertaining account of post-World War II America's love affair with the blessings of economic growth. In the process we learn much about federal efforts, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to sustain it. I learned a great deal about policymaking and economic ideas from Collins' thoroughly researched analysis. * James T. Patterson, author of Grand Expectations:The United States, 1945-1974 *
More is one of those rare books that will actually change how historians perceive the past. Through the prism of government attitudes toward abundance, Robert Collins finds fresh things to say about American presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, challenges current perceptions of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and raises searching questions about how we should evaluate economic policy today. * William E. Leuchtenburg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *
In More, Robert Collins provides a thoroughly historicized account of how American attitudes toward economic growth have evolved in the latter half of the twentieth century. This project, altogether unusual and sorely needed, prompts us to examine critically a vast array of deeply-held beliefs concerning the virtues and costs of economic expansion in a fashion that is as welcome as it is necessary. Moreover, it allows Collins to provide us with a novel and most thought-provoking consideration of the social and political forces that paved the way for the 'Supply-Side Revolution' of the Reagan years. A fine achievement and a most important contribution. * Michael A. Bernstein, University of California, San Diego *
More is a brilliant and fascinating examination of the postwar 'politics of growth' from its liberal heyday between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, through its trials in the 1970s, and into its antistatist reincarnation in the 1980s and beyond. 'Growthmanship,' in Robert Collins' engaging account, is at once an economic panacea, a political compromise, and a cultural consensus * a tangle of aspirations and anxieties that confounded policymakers both when it paid off and when it did not. This is economic history at its best, offering both a subtle and accessible account of growth politics and its dilemmas, and a compelling argument for their importance in framing our broader understanding of the postwar era.Colin Gordon, University of Iowa *
More is essential reading for anyone interested in American growth policy since the New Deal. Thoroughly researched, lucidly written, and fully cognizant of the subject's complexities and ambiguities, it offers not only a fascinating and much needed reconstruction of American growth initiatives and their critics but also a new and persuasive conceptualization of successive growth regimes and divergent political visions and prescriptions. In major respects, it adds to or alters our understanding of New Deal ambivalence, post-New Deal liberalism, anti-New Deal forms of growthmanship, the role of economists in policy making, and current debates about sustainable growth. * Ellis W. Hawley, University of Iowa *
This author deserves credit for making the "dismal science" in this work readable and interesting. Highly recommended. * Library Journal *