Download or read book The Unsustainable American State written by Lawrence Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown rapidly in recent decades, but as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. Covering the early nineteenth century to the present, The Unsustainable American State offers an unsettling account of the dysfunctionalities that accelerated the erosion of American state capacity in the post-1970s era: persistent racial division, growing economic inequality, democratic decline, and imperial overreach.