In the opening chapter of The Land of Too Much, Monica Prasad maps out an imaginary “farmers' tour” of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European political economy, along the lines of the well-traveled sociological exchanges that drew American intellectuals abroad throughout the Progressive Era. The farmers' itinerary skips what would have been standard visits to settlement houses and old-age pension ministries to instead feature the issues—antitrust, monetary policy, taxation, business regulation—most central to populist reform. It's an effective device, meant to offset what Prasad sees as the “urban and labor bias” (p. 10) introduced into comparative social welfare scholarship during that first era of transatlantic reform, and, perhaps, to signal unorthodoxies ahead. It also gets quickly to one of her central arguments: judging from the accomplishments of Progressivism's populist wing, the American state was anything but a paragon of laissez-faire liberalism; nor can it be characterized as historically weak. At its key, formative moment, the distinctively American tradition of state intervention was at once more extensively regulatory, more progressively redistributive, and more adversarial in its approach to business than any of its European counterparts.

Prasad is not the first to take aim at the mythology of American laissez faire, as she notes in one of the numerous, impressively wide-ranging literature reviews that thread throughout the book. Nor is she alone in emphasizing the distinctive and stage-setting role of what Elizabeth Sanders calls the “agrarian statist agenda” in early twentieth-century American state-building and reform. Prasad expands on select themes from these and related lines of inquiry—in history, American political development, and comparative political economy—to make a far more sweeping claim about what is truly exceptional about the American experience and what explains the exceptionally high rates of poverty and inequality that prevail in the world's richest economy today. American policymakers faced a unique set of challenges in the late nineteenth through the early decades of the twentieth century, she argues, stemming from the historically unprecedented growth of the U.S. economy and of its agricultural sector in particular—the problem, as Huey Long put it, of “too much” (p. xii). The distinctive response they crafted, heavily influenced by progressive agrarian reformers, set off a sequence of subsequent policy developments that undermined the prospect of a strong and stable public welfare state and laid the groundwork for 2008's financial collapse.

Prasad develops her argument in three parts. Part one moves from a detailed critique of competing theories of exceptionalism to a “demand-side” explanation that stems from the United States' unique position in the world economy. As net exporters, American farmers were hit hard by the extended bouts of deflation set off by their own extraordinary productivity and turned for solutions to the politics of money, monopoly, and consumption-driven growth. This was especially the case with the disproportionately influential agrarian bloc in Congress, whose populist constituents blamed bankers and corporate trusts for their problems and who stood to suffer from the kinds of protectionist, production-oriented measures being adopted by their European counterparts. Instead, they threw their weight behind policy measures designed to rein capitalism in, two of which—progressive taxation and heavy banking regulation—proved fateful to the future course of the American welfare state.

In parts two and three, Prasad plays out the consequences of these measures in greater detail. These sections take the form of extended policy critique, with each following an admittedly circuitous series of links to show how the historical outcome of progressive intervention turned out to be more poverty and financial instability, not less. “Soak the rich” income taxation set the United States on a course of precarious public finance: by preventing the adoption of the more regressive but historically stable sales and consumption taxes found in more generous welfare states; creating a built-in bias toward privatized welfare provision via corporate tax exemptions for health and pension benefits; and, ironically, setting the stage for the populist politics of tax revolt and welfare backlash in the 1970s. Progressive banking regulation left the industry weak and decentralized, leading to financial collapse during the Great Depression, the rise of Federal Housing Administration-subsidized “mortgage Keynesianism” as a centerpiece of postwar prosperity, and ultimately to the grassroots- and industry-shared deregulatory fervor behind the financial crisis of 2007/08. The broader outcome of progressive intervention was a political economy steeped in private, credit-financed consumption and weak social provision. Prasad concludes with proposals (including some version of a value-added tax) aimed at lessening the need for credit by strengthening the public welfare state.

Prasad takes on a number of important, deeply contested, issues in this book, and makes her arguments with more nuance and vigor than a brief summary can convey. Her insights from cross national comparison provide a sharpened, empirically based perspective on what makes the United States stand out among advanced capitalisms, as does her insistence on bringing the regulation of taxation, finance, and consumer demand more fully into the much-studied development of the welfare state. By honing in on the problem of American plenty, she brings a new angle of vision to our understanding of the nature and extent of state interventionism, albeit one that focuses too exclusively on the farmers' lobby as its source.

This exclusivity of focus becomes more of a problem in the book's overarching narrative of progressive statecraft gone awry, where it leads to a somewhat blinkered analysis and inflated causal claims. Her account of postwar demand-side management, for example, relegates full, high-wage employment, unionization, and fair labor standards to mere background factors rather than treating them as politically negotiated policy goals (with progressive and New Deal roots), leaving us with a decidedly one-sided view of Keynesianism that essentially leaves labor—and the ongoing campaign against it—out. Other key, potentially complicating factors are similarly omitted or dismissed, including the politics of regressive payroll taxation, which figured centrally in welfare backlash and in the bipartisan embrace of the huge and expanding subsidy to low-wage employers known as the Earned Income Tax Credit. Capital and its political representatives are curiously missing as well. Thus, Prasad treats efforts to end gender and racial discrimination in credit as the driving force behind financial deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s—a highly debatable proposition, considering that demands for equal access involved more oversight and regulation rather than less, but one that comports with the book's general tendency to absolve business, and free market activists, of responsibility for welfare's demise. This in turn might help to explain the assumption, uncorroborated by experience, that improving the state's capacity to raise revenue would necessarily translate into a welfare state committed to reducing poverty.

What's unfortunate about Prasad's narrative is that it distracts from the important insights embedded in this book: about the role of credit as a form of redistribution in the United States, for example, and of meeting needs that in other countries are considered matters of public welfare, or citizenship rights; about the existence of a robust tradition of state intervention in American political development; and, of course, about the enduring centrality of what Henry George—and Huey Long after him—called the “great enigma” of poverty amidst plenty to the evolution of that tradition over time. Scholars interested in these vital questions may find much to dispute in this book, but they will also find a good deal to learn.