Reviews

"Using deep research in business, labor, and government archives, Samuel Milner explains how and why American policymakers struggled for decades to solve the problem of inflation. This is a valuable new contribution to our understanding of 20th-century U.S. history."

— Mark R. Wilson, author of Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II

"This excellent book takes a fascinating new approach to analyze wage price adjustments in U.S. big business in the twentieth century. It shows how oligopoly market power was ultimately limited by the constraints of macroeconomic fundamentals."

— Michael Bordo, author of The Historical Performance of the Federal Reserve: The Importance of Rules

"In a deeply researched, probing analysis, Milner takes us on an insightful journey through presidential administrations from Roosevelt to Reagan to reveal how each balanced the often conflicting demands of heavy industry’s corporate managers, labor unions, consumers, investors, and government officials. With all these stakeholders claiming to speak for the public interest, their battles over pricing, wages, and productivity portray a very different—and much more contentious--picture of the postwar era we often mythologize as the 'Golden Era of American Capitalism.' An important contribution to the new literature on American capitalism."

— Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

“It is easy to forget how much the U.S. economy was dominated by a corporatist triangle of big business, organized labor and the federal government from the 1940s until the 1980s. Meticulously using the archives of all three, Samuel Milner has resurrected a lost world of oligopolistic managers, union bosses and interventionist politicians and traced the structural origins of the 1970s wage-price spiral that brought the corporatist era into disrepute and dissolution.”

— Niall Ferguson, Hoover Institution, Stanford University