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Great Society: A New History

Amity Shlaes (Goodreads Author)

4.06 · Rating details · 444 ratings · 71 reviews

The author of the New York Times bestsellers The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a provocative and conversation-changing look at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and how its failures reverberate to this day.

In Great Society, Amity Shlaes argues that just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal overshadowed a generation of forgotten men, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Gre ...more

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Jul 29, 2020 Lyn rated it liked it

Amity Shlaes’ 2018 analysis of Johnson’s Great Society programs is informative and enlightening – if a little dry.

Shlaes casts a critical eye on the progressive policies that still shape our lives more than fifty years later. While she is openly skeptical of the results, to her credit, she provides an objective review of the good that was accomplished then and the foundations for a better society that we can see now, particularly in civil liberties and better racial equality.

Shlaes greatest rebu ...more

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Mar 16, 2020 Charles Haywood rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A few weeks ago, I watched "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," and Quentin Tarantino’s movie delivered to me what I have been seeking. Namely, the exact point America careened off the path to flourishing, abandoning our long, mostly successful search for ever-increasing excellence and achievement. It was 1969. As the shadows lengthen and the darkness spreads, perhaps it does not matter when twilight fell. But why twilight fell does matter, and much of the answer can be found in the pages of Amity S ...more

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Jan 12, 2020 Doug rated it liked it

One of the reviews of this book by a prominent newspaper referred to the author as a revisionist historian. I would add the adjective selective. To make her case of the failures of the great society she cherry picks programs that were less than successful and neglects government programs that moved the needle. She also tars and feathers unions particularly Walter Reuther head of the UAW. At least unions help create and sustain the middle class, which today is fighting to survive in an era of dis ...more

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May 23, 2020 John Devlin rated it liked it

Should be required reading for ANYONE who thinks the govt can even ease poverty.
55 years of failure makes more sense in view of the labyrinthine tiers of govt and regulations, policy wonks whose ideas are untethered from reality, and endless politics.

At its core the book highlights that those in govt believe that folks simply can’t help themselves.

Oh, and going off the gold standard was the result of being unable to pay for the breadth of social programs. This was the beginning of the end of Ame ...more

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Feb 07, 2020 Miguel rated it it was ok

The glaring statistic never mentioned in Great Society is that the social programs enacted during the 60’s achieved what they set out to and poverty fell from a high of 19% (’64) to a low of 11% (’74) (https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf...). Shlaes never mentions this inconvenient fact because it would conflict with this work of historical revisionism that subtly attempts to make the case that government programs are bound to fail and have negative consequences. But what can one expect from a ...more

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Mar 04, 2020 Dr. Byron Ernest rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a well written and researched book. The book, for me, was written in such a way that lets the reader determine her/his own views on the subject. I spent a great deal of time pondering and reflecting on the content of the book. Having been a child during the Great Society era, I agree with the fact that the federal government, during this era, redefined its role in the arts, on media (television and radio), and public schools. As, Shlaes taught us, "Washington left no area untouched" (p. ...more

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Oct 18, 2020 Albert rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, history

Earlier this year I read The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes and enjoyed it enough that I added her Great Society: A New History to my reading plans. Great Society is a sequel, or perhaps simply a continuation, of the themes Shlaes introduces in The Forgotten Man. Both are titled “A New History” and some reviewers have described them as revisionist history. I view them as a new perspective on these periods in American history. In both she works outlines her themes and conclusions in her Introducti Earlier this year I read The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes and enjoyed it enough that I added her Great Society: A New History to my reading plans. Great Society is a sequel, or perhaps simply a continuation, of the themes Shlaes introduces in The Forgotten Man. Both are titled “A New History” and some reviewers have described them as revisionist history. I view them as a new perspective on these periods in American history. In both she works outlines her themes and conclusions in her Introduction. The Introduction to Great Society is 17 pages in length and is worth reading at the beginning and again after completing Great Society. Whether you agree or not, Shlaes presentation of her perspective of this period, 1961-1972, and the conclusions she draws are quite impressive. She then proceeds to present a narrative history of the period that provides support for her “take” on the period and her conclusions. Does she twist or misrepresent facts to accomplish this goal? I am no expert, but I don’t think so. Certainly, the events she chooses to highlight and emphasize are the ones that support her argument, which seems justified, and I am not aware of significant events she leaves out that would countradict her logic. Also, to her credit, she does not intervene, interject or interrupt throughout the narrative history in order to make her points. She does not say, “See, this demonstrates...” or even “This series of events shows...”. I think to her credit she brings the narrative history to a close without any wrap-up of her arguments or conclusions. Thus, my recommendation to return to the Introduction and reread it.

So what are some of the arguments that Shlaes makes that might not be considered mainstream?

The 1960’s was a time, like the 1930’s, when America experimented with the ideas, vision and objectives of socialism or social democracy.

There were successes: the Man to the Moon program, civil rights legislation and Medicare/Medicaid. Shlaes qualifies these successes, particularly Medicare/Medicaid, to a degree but in general doesn’t spend much time on them as a result.

Greatest failures: the war on poverty and the national housing program.

Programs/reforms were not measured for results and were frequently rebranded, concealing questionable results.

The federal government took on a planning role and relegated private business to a support role.

Consequences: inflation, high interest rates, massive federal debt, shift to federal authority over state rights and a widening gap between white and black unemployment rates.

The youth movement in the 1960’s had its impact on the culture of the United States, but it failed to significantly change the political and economic foundations of the country.

I thought this statement towards the end of the Introduction of Great Society best summarized Ms. Shlaes' assessment of this period in America:

“The trouble with the 1960s leftists was not that they were traitors. Few were. The trouble was that they were wrong.”

While I found myself agreeing with many of Shlaes’ conclusions and agreed that sometimes the vision or objective was simply wrong, I felt more often the problems lay in execution. It is often much easier to come up with a potential solution than it is to implement a plan to achieve that desired objective. Regardless, Ms. Shlaes gave me much to think about here and for that I am grateful. ...more

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Jul 12, 2020 Ben rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, economics

Writing narrative history is an often-attempted, occasionally-mimicked, rarely-perfected skill. History, despite the opinions which so commonly fly about about social and traditional media, is complex, and weaving diverse strands of historical stories into a cohesive whole is a difficult feat. The late Thomas Fleming (The New Dealers' War: F.D.R. and the War Within World War II, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought th Writing narrative history is an often-attempted, occasionally-mimicked, rarely-perfected skill. History, despite the opinions which so commonly fly about about social and traditional media, is complex, and weaving diverse strands of historical stories into a cohesive whole is a difficult feat. The late Thomas Fleming (The New Dealers' War: F.D.R. and the War Within World War II, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War) was a master of this craft.

Amity Shlaes has herself developed a reputation as a very fine historical writer, previously detailing respected works on The Great Depression and President Calvin Coolidge. However, her latest book (and the first of her works that I've read), Great Society, left me slightly disappointed. To be sure, I know much more about the political and cultural problems of the 1960s after having read this book, but as a work of narrative history it leaves something to be desired.

Shlaes' effort is to weave a story of not just the "Great Society" programs of Lyndon B. Johnson, but to assess at a high level those programs along with their social and political precursors and progeny. The scope of the book, then, is not just the period of Johnson's presidency, but the entire decade of the 1960s, plus a year or two on either end. Shlaes runs her narrative through a wide range of figures - politicians like Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Romney, and an entire gaggle of Kennedys; businessmen from stodgy old-school GE executives to trailblazing tech innovators; bureaucrats like the earnest Pat Moynihan and the put-upon Arthur Burns; social activists like labor union leader Walter Ruether and socialist Tom Hayden; and, improbably, the cast of Bonanza.

The sheer number of figures makes following the narrative a challenge, a problem compounded by Shlaes often playing fast and loose with her timeline. In one passage, for instance, we see President Johnson shuffling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara off to the World Bank in order to politically neuter him, but a few pages later we find Johnson consulting McNamara about the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. It turns out that the narrative has jumped forward in time several months, only to bounce back, giving the impression that McNamara held two jobs at one time (and wasn't performing either one particularly well).

These challenges with the book are probably a bit nit-picky, because Shlaes' overriding goal is obviously to show the failures in the attempts to centrally plan the economy (and foreign policy, and society at large), and in this goal she generally succeeds. At both the beginning and the end of the book, Shlaes invokes F.A. Hayek to show the problems with planning, noting that government agents, whether elected politicians or the new class of bureaucrats that found employment in the 1960s, simply do not have the right information, or enough of it, to make the millions of decisions that take place every day in a complex society - and that, when these figures attempt to do so, unintended consequences that often dwarf the initial problem rear their ugly, inevitable heads. This was a problem encountered, and occasionally acknowledged, by the planners of FDR's New Deal, and it's no surprise to find that the Great Society-era planners had no more success in overcoming the laws of nature than their New Deal predecessors had.

Towards the end of the book, Shlaes captures nicely the problem that faced the planners of the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon administrations. After detailing Nixon's Camp David summit, at which it was decided that price and wage controls would be enacted and the gold standard abandoned in order to deal with the inflation and unemployment brought on by a decade of failed spending and planning, Shlaes writes:

"The story of the 1960s was public reform upon reform: first community action, then housing, then the random tinkering with the currency system, then guaranteed income and the assault of the lawyers. Like the Vietnam record, the record of the 'Best and the Brightes' at home suggested that planning was far tougher than authorities pretended. Indeed, the only reason they all had to make these momentous choices at Camp David at this time was that all the earlier reforms proved so costly that foreign governments were losing faith in the United States. Might not this effort at managing the economy, the most extravagant planning hubris of all, fail as well?"

The answer implied, obviously, is yes, though the question is pregnant with enough possibilities that one could plausibly anticipate a sequel. But until then, Shlaes has provided a useful, if not particularly succinct, history of the 1960s, one which resonates with many of the problems (riots, cultural self-flagellation, politically-motivated violence, campus turmoil) that we are experiencing in 2020.

"There is nothing new underneath the sun," wrote the author of Ecclesiastes. Reading Great Society in 2020 once again proves that statement's veracity. ...more

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Mar 09, 2020 Bob Costello rated it it was amazing

Amity Shlaes makes the case that a number of folks from the left and the Democrat party in the 1960's wanted to turn America into a socialist society. LBJ Great Society policies were a disaster. Government bureaucrats checking public housing projects at night to make sure husband were not living with their wives and kids. Polies that encourage families to break-up. Very good book with lots of details on the players. I highly recommend it. She is a great writer and very easy to read. ...more

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Dec 30, 2019 Drtaxsacto rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book deserves two appendices - one from Daniel Patrick Moynihan who wrote in an article for Public Interest (reprinted in the National Interest - https://nationalaffairs.com/public_in...) - "Our best hope for the future lies in the extension to social organization of the methods that we already employ in our most progressive fields of effort. In science and in industry ... we do not wait for catastrophe to force new ways upon us... We rely, and with success, upon quantitative analysis to po This book deserves two appendices - one from Daniel Patrick Moynihan who wrote in an article for Public Interest (reprinted in the National Interest - https://nationalaffairs.com/public_in...) - "Our best hope for the future lies in the extension to social organization of the methods that we already employ in our most progressive fields of effort. In science and in industry ... we do not wait for catastrophe to force new ways upon us... We rely, and with success, upon quantitative analysis to point the way; and we advance because we are constantly improving and applying such analysis." The other is from Frederich Hayek and predates the period discussed by Shlaes. "The Uses of Knowledge in Society" (https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-k...) takes the opposite point to Moynihan - that it is impossible for those in the center to know or anticipate the individual knowledge that each of us possess. Had he known the Moynihan article Hayek would have torn it to shreds. The period immediately before and after the creation of the Great Society, that mishmash of programs which spent tons of money and accomplished little (there are plenty of other books which demonstrate the folly of most of those programs) was one of ascendancy of the Moynihan point of view. Hayek argued that pricing allows us to make decisions which make sense, not always, but mostly. When you substitute macro evaluations for micro a lot can go wrong.

I am a big fan of Moynihan - he was a very smart guy. At one point when he was a Senator, I had the opportunity, with a group of about six academics, to have dinner with him and talk tax policy. Each of the academics, when the Senator began to talk, instinctively began to take notes. He was a charming and smart guy who influenced federal policy for a generation and a good deal of his work was important for clarifying how things should work.

Shlaes does her usual job of researching a period and then coming up with interesting conclusions. This is not like the book on the Depression (where she came up with a unique interpretation of the causes and end of the depression - "The Forgotten Man") Early in the book she argues that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were basically one president all convinced that putting the right kind of experts on any societal problem would solve them. Shlaes does an amazing job of describing the policy debates in and outside of the three administrations that formed key things which influenced a generation from the stumbling into the Vietnam War, to trying to eliminate poverty, to all sorts of other programs an initiatives.

Many of the major programs were developed not with high minded policy research, if indeed there really is such a thing, but with base political intrigues. For me the most fascinating descriptions came from the discussions of Johnson's attention to the Vietnam war with his reliance on "numbers" guys like McNamara. Johnson's ego thought he could manipulate events both domestically and internationally. The blot on his record is that in both Vietnam and the War on Poverty he overestimated his brilliance. But he was not alone in that problem. The other discussion was the August 1971 convening of Nixon's economics team which eventually proposed a series of disastrous economic policies including wage and price controls, tariffs and floating gold changes which ultimately defined the rest of the decade as pretty horrible. In both cases experts were baffled by the knowledge of time and place.

I am admittedly a skeptic of much of what passes for policy analysis. But there is certainly a place for careful research. But this book should bring caution to all who believe that we can solve our problems in the way that Moynihan espoused. ...more

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Dec 15, 2019 Russel Henderson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A worthy follow-up to The Forgotten Man, Shlaes reminds us that The New Deal was not the only attempt to remake America's economy or society from above, and that many of the ideas considered novel are echoes of past failures. One would not have to reach particularly far to find echoes of John Connally or LBJ in Trump's economic programme or in the speeches of the Democratic primary field. The Great Society's failures are an interesting melange of populism and technocracy, of blustering vulgarian ...more

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Jan 01, 2020 Michael Bailey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this book. The book follows the presidencies of JFK, LBJ, and Nixon. She focuses specifically on the construction of the modern welfare state, which started with FDR's New Deal but then saw a renaissance with the Democratic presidents of the 60s. Many of our modern welfare state institutions were created in this era, as people in power became focused on "solving" poverty and other social ills. The book also speaks to other related phenomenons at the time like the growth of union ...more

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Mar 12, 2020 Daddy-O rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The Fatal Conceit, as illustrated by American history. Of course, like the rest of us, Shlaes enjoys the fascinating characters of the central planning circus far more than the gritty details of the central planning. Decades ago, Charles Murray's Losing Ground already covered the statistical facts of our social policy fiasco; Shlaes now gives us a review of the colorful egos who were behind them. ...more

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Jan 30, 2020 Artie rated it really liked it

A challenging book. It should be about 3 times as long to adequately cover the subject. Several important aspects of the War on Poverty are just barely mentioned, such as the 1966 mid-term elections. The role of the Vietnam War is minimized. Parts of it are quite thought-provoking, others not so much.

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Jun 20, 2020 Ted Hunt rated it liked it

I knew before I began reading this book that it would take a conservative approach to the Great Society programs, which I did not deem a problem, as many were clearly problematic. I was also interested to read the author's argument for putting Nixon into the collection of Great Society presidents, along with Kennedy and Johnson. The book was well-written and it certainly provided a nice inside look at much of the Nixon economic record, most notably the Family Assistance Program designed by Danie I knew before I began reading this book that it would take a conservative approach to the Great Society programs, which I did not deem a problem, as many were clearly problematic. I was also interested to read the author's argument for putting Nixon into the collection of Great Society presidents, along with Kennedy and Johnson. The book was well-written and it certainly provided a nice inside look at much of the Nixon economic record, most notably the Family Assistance Program designed by Daniel Moynihan and the manipulation of the currency that took place under Fed Chair Arthur Burns. But there were many, many things that disappointed me about this book. For one, its scholarship was shoddy. There were many claims that simply had no supporting evidence: high taxes stifle initiative (we weren't innovating in the 1950's? hmmm...); the anti-poverty programs of the 1960's were the big cause of the '65 Watts riot (not racism? hmmm....). In addition, there were so many factual errors about the Vietnam War that I stopped counting: there were TWO attacks, not one, in the Tonkin Gulf in the summer of '64; the Marines first came ashore in March, not August, 1965; Khe Sanh was a combat base with one air strip, not an "air base;" Nixon announced in late April, 1970 an INVASION of Cambodia (he called it an "incursion") not simply a bombing campaign. If she has made so many errors in this part of the book, how can the reader trust the other contentions that they might not have the time to fact-check. I did not like her "guilt by association" approach to criticizing government programs. Tom Hayden worked on the War on Poverty and he visited the USSR; ergo- the War on Poverty must have been communist? That is the type of approach employed by Fox News to attack their targets. (Perhaps not surprising, as the author has appeared a number of times on that network.) I'm sure that she would not want the Republican Party to be judged based on the fact that former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke is now a Republican. And why did she even bring in Charles Reich's book "The Greening of America," whose naiveté caused it to be disregarded very quickly, or the Robert Redford movie "The Candidate"? What did the crimes of the Manson family have to do with her central thesis? Shlaes is clearly anti-union, a sentiment shared by her two political heroes, Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. But she didn't seem to have a problem with Reagan's time as the head of the Screen Actor's Guild. While there are many things for which unions could be criticized, I wonder what the reaction would be if she publicly expressed her sentiments about unions while in some of West Virginia's coal mining towns, where the dignity and safety of work was bolstered again and again by the United Mine Workers. In 2010, the Upper Big Branch mining disaster killed 29 of 31 miners in that mine, which was, notably, a non-union mine. Coincidence? The book is convincing in its argument that the Great Society's Office of Economic Opportunity and its housing programs were disasters, but these points have been made before (in Allen Matusow's "Unraveling of America," for instance). But does the failure of some government programs somehow prove that all government programs are bad? Even in the book, the author discusses how the high tech industry could afford to take chances and innovate in the 1950's and 1960's because of the confidence they had that the Defense Department would be there at the end with government contracts. She begins each chapter with a breakdown of the government spending in a particular year on "guns" (defense) and "butter" (domestic). By the late 1960's, the government was clearly spending too much money, and the resulting stagflation impacted the economy for decades. But all of her focus is on the domestic programs; couldn't the argument be made that we were spending too much on "guns?" And why did she say nothing about the most expansive and perhaps ineffective government programs of the last two generations: the nation's prison systems? In the end, her argument sounds less like a scholar and more like a series of Republican talking points. Every public program should be scrutinized and evaluated. But this extreme libertarianism has created a level of government nihilism that left our nation unequipped to handle one of the greatest health crises of its history. And perhaps the resulting challenges to our health care system, where one's ability to receive decent care is tied to employment, is convincing more and more Americans that perhaps universal health care isn't such a bad idea. The author might be sensing a sea change taking place in the nation, as the millennial generation clearly does not share her revulsion to the ideas of socialism. But I'm not sure if this book makes for a convincing counterargument. ...more

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Apr 20, 2020 Eric rated it really liked it

A pretty decent summary of the last 40-50 years of (mostly) liberal politics in the US. I thought the most telling feature of the narration was the concluding chapter wherein the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis was dynamited over a few years in an attempt to “solve” problems that likely sprang from non-ownership. So much of LBJ’s “Great Society” (which had sprung from “New Deal” thinking and was seamlessly endorsed up through Nixon) turned out to be not quite so great. A fair rejoinder t ...more

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Feb 25, 2021 Nikki rated it really liked it

Shelves: political, 2021, beat-the-backlist-2021

This is a great read for those who understand that history repeats itself. While heavy, it perfectly describes how our country is essentially repeating the 60s...and not in a good way. Additions of certain programs by government intervention does not, in fact, generally help those they target, but rather make them at a disadvantage, further hurting the economy and providing no incentive for people to better their lives. I would recommend this to anyone who strives to understand actual facts and ...more

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Jul 02, 2020 Vincent Lombardo rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned-never-finished

I have no problem with Shlaes' thesis, but the book is discursive and dwells on minutiae. It was not worth my time. I felt the same way about "The Forgotten Man". ...more

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Feb 25, 2020 Steven rated it really liked it

It reads like a series of essays. They are strong, and Shlaes writes well, but it wasn't as cohesive as The Forgotten Man ...more

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Dec 24, 2019 Eric Chevlen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, politics-sociology

"Great Society: A New History" takes on the daunting task of retelling the lofty ambitions and the failures of the Great Society. The book is well balanced, giving appropriate attention to economics, politics, and biography. In retrospect we can recognize the hubris of thinking that poverty could be solved by transfer of wealth. The failure of huge public housing projects is told in the sad tale of the Pruitt-Igoe project. The author does not dissect the failure of the Head Start program; decade ...more

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Jun 12, 2020 Clyde Macalister rated it it was ok · review of another edition

As someone who admires the author in general, this book was very disappointing. Ungodly amounts of scholarship are channeled into discussing matters that are not relevant to the Great Society at all, in particular the amount of effort Shlaes devotes to the Vietnam War and to Nixon's ending of the dollar's ties to gold. Too bad. ...more

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Feb 04, 2020 Thomas Ernst rated it it was amazing

very interesting read on the 1960's and early 1970's anti poverty efforts out of Washington DC.
no one comes off as very good in this decades long fiasco that ended up costing billions of dollars and accomplishing little meaningful change

It is shocking how Johnson simply let McNamara run the Vietnam War like he ran an automobile company ... from a board room !

Shlaes write a very readable book and does not take sides in the debate which is a refreshing change ...more

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Dec 13, 2019 Joe Oaster rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

well researched by Mrs. Shlaes. Really showed the "inside baseball" of the Great Society program. ...more

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Nov 28, 2020 Amy Hansen rated it it was amazing

At the beginning, this was a 3.7-4 star book. It felt like the author was telling a different story every chapter. By halfway through, however, she started tying all the threads together and it came off very nicely.

Lots of good info in this book if you are curious about the origins of the war on poverty and other government programs. I thought the author did a great job of explaining the issues of the time and individual government actor’s motivations. In many cases, you can see why they though ...more

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Jan 11, 2020 Jack rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This was an exceptional accounting of how seemingly good ideas combined with politics always fail to achieve their objectives. Neither Democrats nor Republicans could get past the reality that socialism and government initiative to change people’s behavior always seem to fail. Smart people living in intellectual bubbles with little or no experience or expertise at building things or getting things done (other than political goals) always seem to come up with harebrained ideas that don’t work in ...more

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Mar 10, 2020 mark propp rated it it was ok · review of another edition

it's probably not fair for me to rate this, because i've decided not to finish it. but opting not to finish a book when you've read about 320 out of 420 pages is something of a statement in itself.

i just found this to be leaden & dreary to read. i am certainly interested in the history of government expansion in this period, but i found it all was presented in a very uninteresting way - this union organizer met this person, this activist met with those folks, the president thought this.

the parag ...more

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Feb 09, 2020 Rob Schmults rated it liked it · review of another edition

Had high expectations - not met. Book is just too much of a jumble. Could do with a solid editorial job to rework it into something more readable and that held its threads more coherently

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Feb 18, 2020 George Brzezinski rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Pretty dry

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Sep 13, 2020 cool breeze rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This is a companion book to Shlaes’ excellent The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, but it isn’t nearly as good. It recounts a dismal and depressing history, as the big-government socialists of LBJ’s era work to complete the destruction that FDR’s socialists began 30 years earlier.

Shlaes isn’t as critical of the Great Society programs as she was of those of the New Deal. I expected more full-throated criticism, but instead it is a passive-voiced "mistakes were made". She adop This is a companion book to Shlaes’ excellent The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, but it isn’t nearly as good. It recounts a dismal and depressing history, as the big-government socialists of LBJ’s era work to complete the destruction that FDR’s socialists began 30 years earlier.

Shlaes isn’t as critical of the Great Society programs as she was of those of the New Deal. I expected more full-throated criticism, but instead it is a passive-voiced "mistakes were made". She adopts a relatively neutral tone and pulls her punches, which are weak slaps at best. She does note some of the problems, but she typically mentions them in a sentence or two and moves on. The few exceptions, like the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, are so universally recognized as unmitigated disasters that they are safe for her to criticize at length, and they get more space than they warrant. She is unwilling to touch more controversial topics, like the fact that the Head Start program has never shown any lasting benefits, yet still gets over $10 billion annually after 55 years of failure. She treats SDS radical Tom Hayden kindly, even humorously (riots, bombs and treason, how amusing). She treats UAW president Walter Reuther like a hero, despite his central role in the destruction of the US auto industry and cities like Detroit and Flint. She is unduly obsessed with the gold standard, without actually shedding much light on the issue. Her lengthy coverage of the history of Intel Corporation doesn't belong in the book at all.

Most amazingly, Shlaes forgets the "forgotten men" that she so brilliantly illustrated in her earlier book – those who had to pay the intended and unintended consequences of the mistakes of the Great Society. The book is heavy on good intentions and light on how they paved the road to hell. For instance, the destruction of the black family is mentioned only in passing and rates no documentation. She fails to mention that the Great Society policies resulted in 10% unemployment, 14% inflation and 19% interest rates over the next decade; readers who weren’t adults in the 1970s (60+ now) might understandably be unaware of this. Blithering idiots like Paul Ehrlich appear in the book without receiving nearly as much scorn as they richly deserve for how laughably wrong their dire predictions were.

Perhaps this is because Shlaes identifies with the good intentions. She really should know better by now. Perhaps it is because the book grew out of a college course on the Great Society that she taught in New York City; her woke students probably don’t brook much criticism of liberal icons these days. Perhaps she increasingly craves the approval of her Manhattan milieu, or at least fears their ostracism; her invitations to cocktail and dinner parties may have been dwindling. Perhaps, like a lot of cosplay conservatives, she has decided to show her true liberal-lite colors and join the Kristol/Brooks/Rubin/Goldberg cruise ship set.

Whatever the cause, the book is a disappointment and a missed opportunity. ...more

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Apr 22, 2020 Nathan rated it really liked it

This book reads like a story, but is full of economic facts and evidence, which Shlaes is wont to do in her previous histories. This is a timely book for those who want to learn how the attraction towards socialism and economic redistribution in the 1960s Great Society programs and largesse may bring similar results today.
A few notable points:
- Henry Ford sold the production equipment for the Model T to the Soviet Union in 1931, and Americans went there to teach the Soviets how to run an assembl This book reads like a story, but is full of economic facts and evidence, which Shlaes is wont to do in her previous histories. This is a timely book for those who want to learn how the attraction towards socialism and economic redistribution in the 1960s Great Society programs and largesse may bring similar results today.
A few notable points:
- Henry Ford sold the production equipment for the Model T to the Soviet Union in 1931, and Americans went there to teach the Soviets how to run an assembly line. (Pt. 1, Ch. 2)
- While in office, FDR was able to shove America towards socialism while at the same time sustaining democracy. (Pt. 1, Ch. 2)
- New communities did not come to life in the new government projects; rather, the new housing created new slums which isolated black families especially in ghettos. (Pt. 1, Ch. 2)
- In the Great Society effort to plan miles of new roads, Sec. of Labor Daniel Moynihan noticed the irony that whether the recipients of Great Society planning were black or white poor, the planners were always white. (Pt. 2, Ch. 3)
- Under the various housing-related acts and housing "czars," over 600,000 were displaced by government takings, and federal funds for "urban renewal" projects flowed so freely that the authority that received the funds to disburse became powers unto themselves. In communities, mayors found the amounts of funds so great that they could not refuse them, and this was much easier than raising local taxes and incurring the ire of local citizens. (Pt. 2, Ch. 7)
- It was found over and over that property owners were less likely to riot, and first-time home buyers repeated the phrase, "I'm living for something now!" (Pt. 2, Ch. 7)
- Perhaps the socialist emphasis on the abusive landlord was misplaced. After all, landlords only operated in economic reality and were not all demons. (Pt. 2, Ch. 7)
- It turned out that "to be housed" was not what people wanted. Rather, they wanted to "house themselves." (Pt. 2, Ch. 7)
- The Toyota achievements of the 1960s was a damning indictment on America's "big-business, big-labor" arrangement. It showed that the worker could participate in innovation, even in a traditional industry such as autos. (Pt. 2, Ch. 9)
- By Nixon's presidency, he realized that "the government could do a lot for the worker, but it couldn't provide him dignity." (Pt. 2, Ch. 9) ...more

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About Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes

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Amity Shlaes graduated from Yale University magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1982.

Shlaes writes a column for Forbes, and served as a nationally syndicated columnist for over a decade, first at the Financial Times, then at Bloomberg. Earlier, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she was a member of the editorial board. She is the author of "Coolidge," "The Forgotten M ...more

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