Stephen D. King

An interesting and provocative book that covers a lot of historical and macroeconomic ground in making an argument that the West is going through not a cyclical slowdown that can be addressed by macroeconomic measures but a long-term structural slowdown like that experienced by Argentina starting a century ago or Japan twenty years ago. But Stephen King does not always convincingly link his historical analysis to his present diagnosis (e.g., he believes that one way stagnation becomes self-fulfilling is it leads to anti-immigrant policies, then he says that is exactly what is happening in the United States today, citing Arizona but missing the Federal debate on immigration which undercuts his thesis), some of his economic analysis is contradictory (he can't decide if he likes QE because it prevented a second Great Depression or does not like it because it distracts from addressing what he sees as structural problems), and ultimately it is longer on diagnosis than it is on prescription (which for the United States mainly consisted for more medium-term entitlement reform for fiscal policy, nominal GDP targeting for monetary policy, greater worldwide coordination of financial regulation, and economists being required to study history).… (meer)