On Political Economy of the United States

This is a good general overview of U.S. political economy, approachable enough for any student who’s taken high-school U.S. Government and Macroeconomics. Johnson is surprisingly balanced, though he gives a lot of attention to Congress and the President at the expense of the lower-level bureaucratic offices. I picked it up to fill in the gaps in how I understood the relationship between politics and economics in the U.S., hoping for something like A Political Economy of the Middle East. It doesn’t reach the same detail or comprehensiveness, nor does it try to — where that book is a bird’s-eye view of politics, economics, and society in the Middle East, Johnson’s is more about how political decisions shape the economy, for better or worse. It’s sensibly structured: a few thematic chapters first, then chapters tracing the development of U.S. political economy since the Great Depression, with the bulk on the period since the 1960s. I wish it were somehow more, but it’s brief and doesn’t claim to do more than it does, so I can’t hold that against it too hard. Its one real flaw is the emphasis on elected leaders in the highest offices at the expense of career civil servants and the less-understood corners of the American economy.