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The Way It Worked and Why It Won't: Structural Change and the Slowdown of U.S. Economic Growth. By Gordon C. Bjork. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Pp. xviii, 299. $69.50, cloth; $27.95, paper.

At a time when serious questions in economic history are often delivered by publishers into the hands of either misinformed polemicists (such as Dinesh D'Souza in his remarkably misleading The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno–Affluence) or facile pundits (such as Jeffrey Madrick in his thoughtful yet under-researched The End of Affluence), it is a special pleasure to encounter Gordon Bjork's The Way It Worked and Why It Won't. Here is a work, skillfully rendered by the Lovelace Professor of Economics of Claremont McKenna College and the Drucker School of Management (Claremont Graduate School), that carefully assays the recent economic history of the United States with a view toward understanding the productivity slowdown that has obtained since the 1970s.