Flawed Capitalism ― The Anglo-american Condition and Its Resolution

In Flawed Capitalism, David Coates draws on his vast experience of economy and society in both the U.S. and the UK to examine the economic and social problems currently besetting each. Building an argument around the rise and fall of important social settlements, Flawed Capitalism traces the history of the two economies through first their New Deal and then their Reaganite periods—ones labeled differently in the UK, but similarly marked by the development first of a Keynesian welfare state and then a Thatcherite neoliberal one.

It is with the weaknesses and downsides of the Reagan/Thatcher years that Flawed Capitalism is primarily concerned, showing how the underlying fragility of a settlement based on the weakening of organized labor and the extensive deregulation of business culminated in the financial crisis of 2008. The legacies of that crisis haunt us still—a squeezed middle class, further embedded poverty, deepened racial divisions, an adverse work-life balance for two-income families, and a growing crisis of housing and employment for the young. Flawed Capitalism deals with each in turn, and makes the case for the transatlantic creation of a new social settlement—a less flawed capitalism—one based on greater degrees of income equality and social justice.

David Coates holds the Worrell Chair in Anglo-American Studies in the Department of Political Science at Wake Forest University.