Robbing Peter to Pay Paul approaches a familiar topic from a new and important angle. Author Samuel Milner looks at the struggle between managers and workers in heavily unionized industries over how the fruits of post–World War II prosperity ought to be divided. Earlier scholarship on that topic by labor and political historians tended to focus on the roles played by unions and the government in that process. Milner considers those factors but devotes more attention to the perspectives of management and academic economists, something that helps round out a complex story. Among the many strengths of Milner's account is that it rests upon a great deal of primary and secondary research and covers an unusually long period. Rather than end in the early 1970s when what some call the “golden age” of modern capitalism ended, Milner carries the story through the 1980s, which clarifies the longer-term consequences of the process he writes about. The book is also well organized and well written and is often very insightful about how American political economy changed in the half century or so after World War II.

Among Milner's most important findings about what Charles Maier has called “the politics of productivity” is how poorly that key concept was defined and measured during the heyday of collective bargaining in core industries. The lack of widely agreed upon criteria for defining what constituted increased worker productivity led, Milner explains, to self-serving formulations by the various parties involved in collective bargaining disputes. That situation led, in turn, to a decades-long pattern of management granting wage and benefits increases that it viewed as too costly, for which it tended to try to compensate by repeatedly raising prices. Milner is especially focused on what caused ever higher prices and how business leaders thought about that issue, and it is here that his book is most original and important. Management negotiators such as Lemuel Boulware of General Electric and Conrad Cooper of U.S. Steel, he argues persuasively, understood better and sooner than union leaders or government mediators that keeping plants modern, and thus internationally competitive, would require higher profits than many workers and politicians believed to be fair. Robbing Peter to Pay Paul's focus on inflationary trends during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s also makes Milner's decision to continue the story through the 1970s and 1980s very logical because that is when inflation crested and finally began to decline.

What is lacking at times in Milner's book is the kind of broader context that would lead the reader to see the work of Boulware, Cooper, and others like them in a somewhat less flattering light. The sense in union and government circles that management was demanding more than its fair share stemmed in part from just how high business profits for the core industrial firms were in the United States when compared with other major market systems. Milner's account is so U.S. centered that one does not get a sense of why labor leaders in particular, who belonged to international associations of trade unionists, tended to draw that kind of comparison when evaluating management claims about proper profits. Also missing is any real discussion of the kind of excessive managerial compensation for which Bethlehem Steel, to give only one example, became notorious—a problem that also encouraged labor leaders to demand more than management wanted to give. Milner's analysis of Boulware and Cooper in particular also seems undercontextualized, because he does not make clear that their heavy-handed, confrontational approach in the late 1950s and early 1960s to winning needed changes in union contracts ultimately proved counterproductive.

There are some other odd gaps in Milner's account, such as his lack of attention to management's crusade to revise the National Labor Relations Act in the later 1950s so as to weaken unions’ ability to organize and bargain collectively. That crusade eventually contributed to passage of the polarizing Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, but it is not mentioned at all in Milner's book. The problem here seems to stem from Milner's broader argument that business leaders from the later 1950s onward were not fighting against the New Deal system but only wanted to bring about their “preferred balance between corporate stakeholders,” which sometimes leads him to miss things that do not seem to fit within that thesis (p. 161).

While Robbing Peter to Pay Paul falls short of providing a persuasive overall synthesis of the complex questions Milner examines, the book nonetheless makes a valuable contribution to the history of American political economy from the 1940s through the 1980s. Its focus on how and why business made the pricing decisions they did then provides the reader with a new and valuable perspective on why social contracts of the post–World War II variety proved to be not nearly as durable as the optimists had once predicted they would be.