Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is Mark Levinson. Mr. Levinson is an economist, historian, and journalist specializing in economic and business issues.

He's a former finance and economics editor for The Economist and has written for publications

including the Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal.

He's the author of six books, the most recent of which is An Extraordinary Time,

the End of the Post-War Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy.

Mark Levinson, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you for having me.

You know, your most recent book covers a lot of ground, the global economy over basically

the last 70-plus years, and I'm sure it must have been a major undertaking to write. And so I'm

wondering, what prompted you to take up such an enormous topic?

I've read a lot of the history of the last 70 years, and there's a disconnect. Many people have

written about the cultural changes of this period, the cultural ferment of the 1960s, of the cultural

conservatism of later periods. Many people have written about the politics of this

period, Thatcher Reagan and so forth. And of course, there have been many, many books about diplomacy

and the international developments of the period,

the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain and other very significant international events.

I felt that many of these books have missed what is really essential background to this

period, which is the underlying economic situation around the world.

We went through a period roughly from 1948 to 1973 when the world economy prospered

in a way it has never prospered before or since. And then we've been through a period since

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