Reviews for The Decline and Crash of the American Economy

The average rating for The Decline and Crash of the American Economy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-22 00:00:00 Frederic Dussault Years of in-depth research lead to the culmination of an interesting, long, and thoughtful book.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-01 00:00:00 Kelly Kaiser What did I learn? It's consume or die. Ruh-roh. Update - from my review on blogger.com: After the admission that I knew the author personally, I moved on to The Tome. I'm not through with the footnotes yet, but I did slog through the text. And I mean "slog" in the nicest way. This is the meaty prose of the dissertation, lightened hither and yon by Charlie's inimitable wryness. Example: subheading in chapter 7: "Slaughter on Madison Avenue" - great balls o' fire, he even worked in a musical reference! Further on, he remarks that "in the early 1930s the Buy-ological Urge [as expressed by Better Homes and Gardens:] seemed less frequent than cicadas." This topic is actually one of my pet bugbears. I am a fan of Consumer Reports, which I refer to before all major purchases (using the library copy - tee hee!) I was crushed when the kids' version, Zillions, went on-line where I couldn't read it. There was a time that I wandered around ranting that our economy was based solely on the exchange of cash for crap, yards of crap, endless steaming juggernauts of crap. And what was worse, there seemed to be no way away from it. I truly hoped that this book would tell me where this happened (which might lead to a way away from it). The book does not do this. Anyway, it's never one defining moment. This is a process beginning in the 1890s and on-going to our day and beyond. By "beyond," I mean more than in time, but also geographically. Consumerism seems to be the Ice Nine that will doom our civilization. If Charlie's book does anything, it confirms my fears (not really immediate fears, but deep ones) about business and advertising.