Citation:

Abstract:

For presentation at a Conference on Politics in the New Hard Times in honor of Peter Gourevitch, University of California, San Diego, April 24, 2010. This is a highly preliminary draft. Please do not cite or believe it without permission from the author. Comments welcome. What are the adjustment problems facing the political economies of the developed world in the wake of global recession, and what adjustment paths can they be expected to take? These are economic questions, about the sources of demand and supply in a chastened world, and political questions, about how the will to adjust will be generated. Such issues can be approached in various ways, but my premise is that, in the political economy as in the forest, if we want to know where we are going, it is useful to know where we are coming from. Therefore, this paper places the dilemmas of the present in the context of the recent past by analyzing how the OECD economies addressed parallel challenges in the decades after the Second World War.