Ours Was the Shining Future

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The clear-eyed, definitive history of the modern American economy and the decline of the American Dream, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist behind The New York Times's “The Morning” newsletter. Two decades into the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in a cynical time. The phrase “American dream” is often used ironically or even with bitterness. Indeed, we hear more about the death of the dream than anyone achieving it. And the stagnation of living standards for most people has been the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and the Black-white wage gap is as large as it was when Harry Truman was president. How did this happen in the world’s most powerful country? Drawing on decades of writing about the economy for the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Leonhardt examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today’s Great Stagnation, in search of an answer.To explain both the rise and fall of the American dream, Leonhardt reveals three forces that have shaped our economy: political power through grass-roots movements, the prevailing culture in corporate America, and the government’s investment in making life better for future generations. Tracing the interplay of these three critical forces across the decades, Leonhardt offers an enlightening account of how the United States built the most prosperous mass economy in history after the Depression, and how that economy gradually unraveled. In engaging, vivid prose, Ours Was the Shining Future offers an essential history that explains our nation’s depleted economic condition, and features the trailblazing figures who helped shape the American dream: Frances Perkins, Paul Hoffman, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Robert Kennedy, A. Phillip Randolph, Grace Hopper and more. In illustrating the indelible impact these men and women have made—largely through grass-roots democratic movements, from across the political spectrum—Leonhardt also leaves space for hope: If Americans committed themselves to changing our economy again, they would likely succeed.A sweeping narrative full of human drama, Ours Was the Shining Future is the biography of the American dream.