Book review - The price of civilization: Reawakening American virtue and prosperity
Author Jeffrey D. Sachs Subject Economics Year 2011 Publisher New York: Random House ISBN 9781400068418 The first part of the book first pinpoints the economic predicament faced by America today. According to Sachs, the free-market ideology stemming from the 1980's has been so pervasive among both Democrats and Republicans that they overlooked the true roots of the American economic problem - its inability to cope with the new global economy. By adopting the free-market approaches, the government cut tax, refrained from spending on social welfare and kept interest rates abnormally low. Not only were these measures unable to tackle the crises, they created more uneven wealth distributions along with other unfavourable social consequences. In the second part the author suggests solutions to the problems. They include changing the tax structure, realigning the federal budget to curb the constant national account deficit, reinvesting in social welfare