Showing posts with label Joshua Green. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joshua Green. Show all posts

Saturday, September 25, 2010

As Democrats tank, Is Stephen J. Rose rebounding? Will Obama?

As the Democrats stare at disaster, is Stephen J. Rose finally getting some traction?

An economist former Clinton Administration official, Rose has been crying in the wilderness that Democrats overestimate middle class distress and pitch their programs and rhetoric too much at the disadvantaged, ignoring the broad, relatively prosperous middle of American society. Democrats do not cotton to his rebuttals to assertions that the middle class is  "disappearing" or"drowning in debt" or his critiques of work by Elizabeth Warren and Jacob Hacker propounding those ideas.

Rose's book Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis got a plug from David Brooks just prior to publication this past April, but my impression is that it's been largely ignored otherwise. My customer review on Amazon, posted on May 10 (here on xpostfactoid), remains the only one, and the book's Amazon sales rank is 305,456.  By contrast, Richard Florida's the The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, published two weeks after Rebound and listed by Amazon as a Rebound comparable, has 15 customer reviews and a sales rank of 10,950.

Perhaps it's coincidence, but Rose's theses popped up on my screen twice yesterday. The first is a shadow appearance. Joshua Green gave a platform to Chuck Schumer, who here expounds pure Rose: