A Solution to Every Problem

The making of “the economy” as the most pressing political issue of our time

Everyone knows the economy matters. It sets the course of nations, decides the fate of presidents, and determines the size of your bank account. Aside from the occasional war or global pandemic, there’s only one answer to the question of what’s most important in politics: it’s the economy, stupid. But it wasn’t always this way. In A Solution to Every Problem, Timothy Shenk explores the astonishing rise of a concept that not even economists talked about before the twentieth century—“the economy.”

Today, of course, the economy is inescapable: managed by institutions like the Federal Reserve (founded in 1913), studied by macroeconomists (a word that didn’t exist before the 1940s), and measured by statistics like GDP (another twentieth century invention). The economy can be healthy or ailing, heating up or cooling down, but it can’t be ignored.

Shenk illustrates this remarkable transformation, tracing the rise of an idea that emerged in the not-so-distant past to become the central issue in democratic politics. He also tells the story of the people who theorized the economy while trying (and usually failing) to govern it—a cast of characters that includes such celebrated and controversial figures as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman as well those, like Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, who implemented economic policy in crisis conditions.

The economy shapes how we understand the world. It is somehow one of the fuzziest terms in our political vocabulary and one of the most precise. Shenk’s account explains how we got here—and asks whether the age of the economy might be coming to an end.