David Leonhardt discusses Ours Was the Shining Future with Michael Barbaro

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the stagnation of living standards has become the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and, after some progress, the Black-white wage gap is once again as large as it was in the 1950s. How did this happen in the world’s most powerful country? And what happened to the “American dream”—the promise of a happier, healthier, more prosperous future—which was once such an inextricable part of our national identity?

Drawing on decades of writing about the economy for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer David Leonhardt examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today’s Great Stagnation, in search of an answer.

To make sense of the rise and subsequent fall of the American dream, Leonhardt tells the story of the modern American economy as an ongoing battle between two competing forms of capitalism: one that envisions prosperity for most, and one that serves the individual and favors the wealthy. In vivid prose, Ours Was the Shining Future traces how democratic capitalism flourished to make the American dream possible, until the latter decades of the twentieth century when, bit by bit, the dream was corrupted to serve only the privileged few.

Ours Was the Shining Future is a sweeping narrative full of innovation and grit, human drama and hope. Featuring the trailblazing figures who helped shape the American dream—Frances Perkins, Paul Hoffman, Cesar Chavez, Robert Kennedy, A. Philip Randolph, Grace Hopper, and more—this engaging history reveals the power of grassroots democratic movements from across the political spectrum. And though the American dream feels lost to us now, Leonhardt shows how Americans—if they commit themselves to transforming the economy, as they did in the past—have the power to revive the dream once more.

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Participants

David Leonhardt is a senior writer at The New York Times, where he writes "The Morning." He has also been the Times’ Washington bureau chief, an Op-Ed columnist, a staff writer for the Times Magazine, and the founding editor of The Upshot. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary as well as the Gerald Loeb Award. This is his first book. Photo credit Doug Mills

Michael Barbaro is the host of “The Daily,” a five-day-a-week Peabody award-nominated audio show from The New York Times with millions of listeners a month. Before hosting “The Daily,” Barbaro was a national political correspondent for The Times and host of “The Run-up,” a political podcast that chronicled the 2016 election. Previously, he covered New York’s City Hall and the U.S. retail industry. Photo credit Jake Chessum