Wealth of a Nation

EconoclastsThe Rebels Who Sparked the Supply-Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity

by Brian Domitrovic
ISI, 368 pp., $27.95

The only history of supply-side economics written by a professional historian to date, this entertaining account should be required reading not only for staffers on Capitol Hill and the economic do-gooders in the White House, but also for anyone interested in “the most significant development in American—arguably world—economic history” in recent times. Brian Domitrovic tells the story of how a few renegades patched together the supply-side revolution.

The scene is Michael 1, a restaurant just footfalls away from the American Stock Exchange in New York. Michael 1
was the stomping ground for B-team Wall Street financiers, but beginning in 1974, a new group joined what Domitrovic calls the junior varsity of Wall Street: economists Robert Mundell, Arthur Laffer, and Charles Parker, the political operative Jeffrey Bell, and journalists Robert Bartley and Jude Wanniski. All were frustrated iconoclasts, hostile to the economic establishment, and intent on reversing the economic decline of the 1970s. 

A first-rate storyteller as well as historian, Domitrovic skillfully unfolds the events that ignited the supply-side revolution and breathes life into the colorful characters behind the scenes. We learn, for example, that the 42-year-old Mundell, founding father of the revolution, wore his hair below his shoulders in 1974 and spoke “in a low slur, glided over syllables, sprinkled in wry remarks, and had a Canadian accent to boot”—forcing his dining interlocutors to lean in to their table to hear what he had to say. Then in 1999, with his hair cut, a triumphant Mundell shed his mumbling speech when he started bellowing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” during his address accepting the Nobel Prize for economics.