It is by now common-place for economic historians to speak of a “Golden Age” in the history of American capitalism, an epoch of virtually uninterrupted growth that spanned from the end of World War II to the end of the Vietnam War. Although debates persist regarding the distribution of the benefits of that prosperous era, there is nonetheless general agreement about the sources of the remarkable expansion that made the American economy, by the end of the sixth decade of the twentieth century, one of the richest and most dynamic on record. Less well understood, and far more contentious in discussion among investigators, are the causes of the demise of this Golden Age, the increasingly unstable nature of economic performance in the U.S. case during the 1970s and 1980s, and the consequences of the erratic boom that ultimately closed out the millennium. It is thus a most welcome task to note that a historian at Auburn University, Wyatt Wells, has produced a succinct narrative that seeks to contribute to our understanding of the complex economic history of the last 50 years.

American Capitalism is a clearly written and concise text, one that offers a fairly traditional and briefly annotated survey of the main determinants of the pace and pattern of U.S. economic growth in the post-World War II years. Wells approaches his subject by means of what have by now become well-known and oft-repeated themes. He begins with a survey of the characteristics of the immediate postwar boom, focusing on reconversion and international reconstruction as core stimulants of expansion. This sets the stage for Wells's explanation of the “Go-Go Economy” of the sixties and seventies. Some reflection on the innate weaknesses and inherent contradictions of the “Go-Go” years then lead Wells to a close examination of the “Great Stagflation” that followed, the financial puzzles of the “twin deficits” that grew out of the public sector and changing international trade patterns, and the struggle to develop a new set of economic policies to confront such problematic economic circumstances. Wells then concludes the volume with a brief discussion of the “New Economy” of the turn-of-the-century and the challenges of globalization.

Although Wells's narrative is strikingly conventional, and although he often straddles contending points of view rather than comparing and contrasting them with the goal of formulating new arguments, he nevertheless does succeed at times in offering interesting revisions of extant wisdom. For example, contemplating the designs of the Marshall Plan in postwar Europe, Wells criticizes the claim that European bankruptcy in the late 1940s and early 1950s would have jeopardized U.S. economic growth, seeing the domestic sources of prosperity to be so powerful as to have more than compensated for the potentially negative impacts of that counterfactual case. He rightly emphasizes the important role of public sector investment in providing both the technological know-how and the appropriate infrastructure to realize the growth potential of the postwar years. Yet Wells interestingly argues that such spending was less the result of inertial tendencies born out of the New Deal response to the Great Depression and wartime mobilization than they were the direct product of “reformers' intellectual predilections [that] led them to … believe that the Soviet Union, which as a Communist state could mobilize huge resources for such activities, would outpace the United States unless Americans developed the same capability” (p. 55).

Finally, Wells situates a wave of conglomerate mergers in the 1960s at the center of the rapid economic growth and development of that decade—this, a most welcome and important intervention in an otherwise unsurprising narrative.

Wells is similarly effective and engaging in his discussion of the impacts of the fiscal debacle of the Vietnam era, the inflationary shocks of the 1970s, and the sectoral shift in key manufacturing sectors that these economic maladies accelerated. Indeed, his discussion of the ways in which these difficulties led to the “Reagan Revolution” and the increasing momentum among political leaders eager to “deregulate” the national economy is fair and accurate. Even so, his arguments avoid critical engagement with the core literature on these matters. Instead, it is in this portion of his book that Wells simply asserts that the shift from a focus on mass production to the development of what he calls an “information society” had profound destabilizing consequences. Noting unemployment and difficult investment bottlenecks created by the rise of service industries, particularly in telecommunications and information processing, Wells is nonetheless silent on the specific mechanisms by which these structural displacements in American capitalism emerged. He simply invokes a diminishing returns view of the decline of American manufacturing when he declares that “every technique has its limits, and by the 1970s the United States may well have extracted as much benefit from [mass production] as possible” (p. 121).

Similarly vague and unpersuasive discussions are offered regarding highly controversial subjects that continue to attract the attention of contemporary analysts. The impact of military spending on American economic performance is a case in point. Wells notes correctly that, if construed in narrow terms, military spending as a proportion of U.S. GDP was relatively small, even during the high tide of the Cold War itself. If examined in a broader format, in terms of its impact on the ability of the economy to react to foreign competition, Wells notes that the record regarding the “military-industrial complex” is more ambiguous. Did military spending make American industry lethargic, more and more dependent on the production of public goods rather than being flexibly poised to respond to changes in international trade flows? And did this enervation only intensify as a large proportion of the industrialized world re-emerged from the devastation and dislocations of both World War II and of global decolonization? On these significant and important questions Wells can only offer agnostic speculations along with the rather confusing suggestion that the “proper question” is not how military spending affected economic growth but rather “how much … the country need[ed] to spend on defense” given its security concerns (p. 35).

Wells also indulges in generalizations about fairly controversial subjects that are either inadequately justified or strangely limited in scope. He surveys the impact of deregulation in the economy with no assessment of its costs, ignoring the anticompetitive consequences of the renewed capital concentration (for example, in the case of the airlines) it sparked or the inefficiencies born of its dissolution of technological standards and systems access (for example, in the case of telecommunications). To be fair, he does note some of the distorting impacts of deregulation and privatization in the delivery of health care, but understands the collapse of reform efforts in the early 1990s to be the result of the fact that “Americans were reasonably happy with their health insurance as it was” (p. 169)—needless to say, a breathtaking claim. The anti-union focus of the Reagan Revolution is noted but explained in terms of an allegedly confrontational tradition in American labor relations—a strange assertion in a history of a nation that has never seen more than a third of its workers organized in collective bargaining units. The technologically driven boom of the 1990s is narrated well, but its collapse is briefly described with no systematic reference to the accounting fraud and criminally misleading investor communications that were so much an intrinsic part of the fragile “dot.com” expansion of the decade.

Wyatt Wells's American Capitalism is, in the final analysis, a fairly upbeat narration of some of the most significant, complicated, and transforming decades in the nation's history. Wells sees, in American traditions of entrepreneurship, public sector-private sector cooperation, and technological dynamism, the crucial ingredients of economic success in the final decades of the last century—and he favorably compares that success with “any nation on earth” (p. 195). What he ignores, in this optimistic rendition of the story, is a systematic appreciation of the historical mechanisms that made this success altogether unique, nor does he engage in a meaningful and thorough evaluation of its weaknesses, costs, and consequences. Equally absent in Wells's analysis is a frank and honest explanation of why the ingredients of another economic “Golden Age” cannot and will not come our way again.