As a part-time commentator on things economic, I’m often asked a seemingly straightforward question: If the economy is so good, why are Americans so grumpy? By many measures — unemployment, inflation, the stock market — the economy is strong. Yet only 23 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, a […]
Originally published in The New York Times. The United Auto Workers has taken to the picket lines in a particularly acrimonious strike, targeting, for the first time, all three of the big Detroit automakers simultaneously. Popular opinion appears to lie firmly on the union side. And I’m all for the auto workers getting paid more […]
Originally published in the New York Times. The workers were furious. Believing that new mechanical looms threatened their jobs, they broke into factories, seized machinery, brought it into the street and set it afire, all with widespread public support, even tacitly from the authorities. That was in 1675. And those English textile workers were neither first […]
“[a] surprisingly modest account…Rattner has a journalistic talent for the telling detail, resulting in a memorable tale of life in the middle of the economic meltdown...Rattner deftly draws portraits of the inhabitants of "the Oval" and the West Wing...Rattner has proved himself a gifted chronicler.”
-Time Magazine
