The go-go '00s: can an updated Clintonism fix the economy? Maybe.

• Author: Mallaby, Sebastian
• Position: On Political Books - The Pro-Growth Progressive - Book Review

The Pro-Growth Progressive By Gene Sperling Simon & Schuster, $26.95

Gene Sperling is one of Washington's good guys. If you admire brains and compassion, and if you are at all stirred by the idea that government is about helping people, it's impossible not to like him. So I begin this review with an honest disclosure: I do like him, a lot. This doesn't mean that I always agree with him.

Sperling's book states the case for Clintonomics, the bundle of policies he helped to create during his eight years in the White House where he served as Deputy National Economic Adviser during the Clinton's first presidential term and National Economic Adviser during the second one.

Clintonomics was about two things--market-driven growth on the one hand, progressive social goals on the other--and this explains Sperling's rifle: The Pro-Growth Progressive. Faint-hearted readers should be warned: This is a book by a policy wonk, for policy wonks, and you have to be interested in refundable tax credits to make it from cover to cover. But if you want to get your mind around what the centrist wing of the Democratic Party is thinking, Sperling provides a sophisticated argument.

One of the best parts of the book comes fight at the outset. In a "Memo to Progressives," Sperling lays out why free-market competition and economic growth can be good--not just for corporate profits but for ordinary people. Competition brings prices for consumers down; it can create more jobs than it demolishes. Anybody inclined to think that economic churn is bad should regard 1999 (number of American jobs destroyed: 32.9 million) as a worse year than 2003 (number of jobs destroyed: 30.2 million). But 1999 was, in fact, the better year for American workers because turbocharged job creation outpaced job destruction by 2.6 million positions, whereas 2003 witnessed a net loss in the number of jobs available.

The globalization wrought by the collapse of communism and technological advance is often viewed with suspicion by many on the left. But Sperling reminds us that these shifts coincided with tremendous gains for poor Americans (not to mention the fastest progress the world has made against destitution in developing countries in history). From 1992 to 2000, every quintile of the income distribution in the United States saw incomes increase. Those in the bottom fifth saw a gain of 22 percent, and the income growth of the average African-American family outpaced that of the average white...