This is a good, general overview of U.S. political economy, and it should be approachable enough for any student who has previously taken high school-level U.S. Government and Macroeconomics. Johnson is surprisingly balanced here, although there is a lot of attention given to Congress and the President, at the expense of lower level bureaucratic offices.

I picked up this book to fill in the gaps I had about the relation between politics and economics in the U.S., and I was hoping for something similar to A Political Economy of the Middle East. It doesn’t quite reach the same level of detail or comprehensiveness, nor does it try to. While the latter book is a bird’s-eye view of the relationship between politics, economics, and society in the Middle East, Johnson’s book is more about the ways that political decisions impact the economy, for better or worse.

The book is structured in a reasonable way: the first few chapters are thematic, followed by chapters that trace the development of the U.S.’s political economy since the Great Depression, although the bulk of the text is on the period since the 1960s.

I wish the book is somehow more, but it is brief and it doesn’t claim to do more than it actually does. As a result, the book is deserving of four stars. The only major flaw is its emphasis on elected leaders in the highest positions at the expense of career civil servants and other less understood aspects of the American economy.