Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Coming up on the show today, you'll hear from Amity Schles, delivering a talk at the Manhattan Institute event

where she discusses her latest book called Great Society, A New History. It's published by Harper Books.

You can find a link to it in the description, or you can find it on Amazon or wherever else

books are sold.

Amity Schles is the chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and a scholar at

the King's College in New York.

She's also the chair of the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Book Prize, a yearly award that goes to the book whose ideas

best reflect Hayek's vision of economic and individual liberty. Amity is the author of a number

of best-selling books, perhaps most famously the Forgotten Man, a history of the 1930s and the Great Depression.

This time, this new book, Great Society,

focuses on the 1960s, a period of remarkable drama

with the civil rights movement in Vietnam War,

and also a massive shift in the role of government in society.

Amity's book provides a detailed account

of how our nation's political leaders sought to eliminate

poverty by expanding the federal safety net dramatically, which had the unintended consequence

of trapping millions in long-term government dependency. It's an important story for our time,

and I hope our listeners will enjoy it. Again, the book is called

Great Society. We'll have a link in the description, and you can find it wherever books

are sold. That's it for the intro after the music. The next voice you'll hear is Amity Schles.

Thank you. The first sentence of the book is a question.

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