Includes index.

"In this long-awaited work, award-winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman challenges us to take on George Bush and the radical right. Drawing from his New York Times columns, he chronicles how the boom economy unraveled: how exuberance gave way to pessimism, how the age of corporate heroes gave way to corporate scandals, and how fiscal responsibility collapsed. Krugman asks how it was possible for a country with so much going for it to head downhill so fast and finds the answer in the agenda of the Bush administration. Krugman began writing his New York Times column in 2000 and quickly demonstrated that he is one of the most well-informed and trenchant commentators in America. One would have to go all the way back to John Maynard Keynes to find an economist so willing to take on the issues of the day in accessible terms, and his political sallies recall the age of the great Muckrakers or Walter Lippmann and Louis Brandeis. From Krugman's account of the secret history of the California energy crisis to his devastating dissections of the Bush administration's dishonesty on everything from tax cuts to the war on terrorism, Krugman tells the uncomfortable truth about how the United States has lost its way amid economic disappointment, bad leadership, and deceit. This unprecedented work of social and political history sets the first years of the twenty-first century in a stark, new light."--Jacket.