For nearly 200 years, western economies have thrived on manufacturing. For most of this period, large-scale industry, and its hungry assembly lines, required so much manpower that jobs were plentiful, available to anyone willing to bend their back to labor. Many countries like Germany and the United States rode industrialism to economic success, producing products desired the world over. The profits earned from these ventures went back into business, expanding industry and fuelling national growth. But now that we stand at the dawn of a new century, the simple math that served the world's nations so well, manufacturing equals jobs, is changing. It began with globalization and it will continue on with the advancement of technologies that will, someday soon, remove man from the production line altogether. The management of this transition,however, is a problem for the 21st century, not for Ms. Stein who,here, casts her attention back to the 1970s where she believes she will find the beginning of these transformative trends.
Pivotal Decade is an examination of the extent to which the economic policies of successive,US administrations, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, converted the United States' economy from one dependent upon industry to one dependent on finance. From the Carter Administration's obsession with trade deficits, to Reagan's deregulation,to Clinton's budget cutting, Ms. Stein reconstructs 30 years of American, federal politics in hopes of bringing to light the decisions which, collectively, steered the US economy away from the stamp factories of the midwest,which for so long powered economic growth, to the trading floors of Wall Street where the health of the economy became increasingly linked with complex, financial instruments. Along the way, we watch while, in the 1970s, Carter's geopolitics (Arab oil and Jewish Israel) trump American prosperity, we look on, in the 1980s, as Reaganomics breaks unions and empowers finance, and we observe while the Clinton presidency holds on for dear life as the rocketship that is the 1990s Tech Boom transforms the American landscape. Each step along the way provides a nail for the coffin for American manufacturing, leaving it to the 21st century administrations to finish the job.
Though Ms. Stein is thorough in her recount of the dozens of decisions that went into the evolution of the American economy, her chronicle is hobbled by two significant flaws. Firstly, Pivotal Decade is not, as its subtitle and premise suggest, a record of how the United States "traded factories for finance in the 1970s." It is, instead, a political history of the last 30 years. As much, if not more, attention is paid to the budgetary negotiations of the Clinton years as the global negotiations of Carter's reign. What's more political campaigns that have nothing to do with the 1970s -- Bush versus Dukakis, Clinton versus Perot, Reagan versus Mondale -- feature so prominently that one would be forgiven for thinking this a campaign biography in the style of Game Change. Secondly, a weak and meandering conclusion fails to tie these 400-plus pages into anything like a coherent narrative. Yes, the reader is educated on American oil dependence, and the collapse of the labor force at GM, and the rise of the stock market in the 1990s, but Ms. Stein never interweaves these strands to provide anything like a telling portrait proving her premise.
Pivotal Decadeis an informative read. Its chapters, individually, are quite engaging, but Ms. Stein has somehow managed to write a book about the failing might of American manufacturing without hardly touching on the massive role Globalization has played in its dissolution. By the 1950s, the United States had mastered capitalism. They proceeded, in the next 20 years, to export it to the world. The cheap labor in these emerging markets became appealing to American business which farmed out its factories to the rest of the world so it could sell its products more cheaply to American consumers. This is, naturally, a tremendously oversimplified version of events. Ms. Stein, however, hardly touches upon these broader forces, choosing instead to focus her attention on the preoccupations of American presidents.
Valuable for its moments of insight, but far too scattered to be conclusive,or convincing. (2/5 Stars)
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