Title: Self-inflicted wounds
First published: 1994
Description: In the early 1960s the United States had an economy that was strong and vibrant; since then the economy has steadily weakened. What happened, and who made it happen?

Self-Inflicted Wounds illuminates how the events of the past thirty years and the efforts of individuals to manage the economy have put us where we are today. Hobart Rowen, the prizewinning economics columnist for The Washington Post, is a reporter of analytic brilliance whose personal access to the people who made things happen - Lyndon B. Johnson, Paul A. Volcker, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Alan Greenspan, Arthur F.

Burns, among others - render his book an intimate look at how economic decision making really works.

When Hobart Rowen began in journalism more than fifty years ago, the United States was struggling to survive the hardships of the Great Depression and soon would face the privations of the Second World War. Both experiences would ironically leave the nation more prosperous than ever before. Today, in the mid-1990s, America can no longer boast that it is number one.

We are the world's largest debtor nation, and many critics insist that we have become a second-class power unable to lead the world by virtue of either our economic prowess or our political sagacity.

America's decline in self-esteem puzzles our allies and rivals alike. It bewilders our people most of all. Many search for a scapegoat to blame for our manifold ills. But the bitter truth is that we have no one to blame for our condition but ourselves. For it is the argument of this important book that the wounds to our economic health and to our national pride have been largely self-inflicted.

Hobart Rowen gives us a remarkable story. He traces the trajectory of our slow but steady self-strangulation. It is a story of blunder, mismanagement, stupidity, and irresponsibility by officials whose chief obligation to govern the nation was betrayed by their embrace of policies misconceived and ineptly applied. It is a story that begins with President Lyndon B. Johnson's inheritance of a level of prosperity that had never been achieved in the nation's entire prior history.

But Johnson's embrace of a forlorn and unwinnable war in Vietnam, his insistence that the country could have, in the phrase of the time, both "guns and butter," left a bitter legacy.

We have since been humbled by the duplicity of Richard Nixon, the bumbling of Gerald Ford, the notorious malaise of Jimmy Carter, and the "voodoo economics" pursued by Ronald Reagan and George Bush. At no time was any of the six presidents willing to combat the menace of the oil cartel, the swindlers on Wall Street, or the industrial assault on the environment.

An American society brought up, over the last two decades, to treasure greed, has consumed more than it produced, and borrowed the savings of the rest of the world to pay for its profligate tastes. Hobart Rowen's indispensable book gives us a compelling portrait of the twists and turns of particular policies, and of the character and ability of those who were elected to govern the nation wisely and stand guard over its physical and moral resources.
Subjects: Economic policy, International economic relations, New York Times reviewed
Places: United States
Time periods: 1971-1981, 1981-1993, 1961-1971
LC classification: HC106.6 .R69 1994