t's good to have a cheerful economic history of the United States. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 until his retirement in 2006, and Adrian Wooldridge, the political editor of the Economist, set out to tell the “exhilarating story” of America's economic triumph, with a few headwinds towards the end. We know the story, or at least some comic or tragic version of it picked up from high school, college, the movies, or politics. Even the headwinds, such as the rise of entitlements and the inflexibility of the financial system, are seen as cheerfully overcome-able.
The cheer occasionally grates. Thomas Jefferson is praised, as he should be, for articulating the great idea of liberal equality. But he is not blamed, as he should be, and in the next sentence, for his unusually tight grip on his slaves, some of them perhaps his children. He is praised, as he should be, for intoning that “[t]he mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred to ready to ride them.” But he is not blamed, as he should be, and in the next sentence, for lifting imperfectly the formulation without attribution from Richard Rumbold, the English Leveller, in his speech from the scaffold in 1685.
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