“Back in 2012 I published a book about the Obama administration’s efforts to heal the economy. The book was largely a narrative, reconstructing events and internal debates as they unfolded. But it delivered a judgment on Obama’s economic team, and the judgment wasn’t favorable. Right there in the book’s subtitle it says that “Obama’s team fumbled the recovery.” This probably sounds right to anyone who’s unemployed, particularly anyone who’s been among the painfully large number of long-term unemployed …
[But] my verdict on the administration was overly harsh. Job growth has been very steady the last three years. GDP growth has exceeded two percent in each of the last two years, and will almost certainly do so again in 2014 … And the same goes for historical comparisons. As Paul Krugman recently observed in Rolling Stone, the United States did a better job limiting the fallout from its financial crisis than the typical advanced economy has over the years. We also crawled our way out of the hole a little faster,” – Noam Scheiber. (Awards glossary here.)
