As surveys of the American economic experience go, Michael Lind's Land of Promise is distinctly eccentric. For example, the typical survey of American economic history devotes dozens of pages to western expansion, and the Westward Movement is considered one of the defining characteristics of America's story. Westward expansion gets no explicit treatment by Lind, and from reading his book one only vaguely senses the importance of westward migration in the nation's development. Although the railroads do get a good deal of attention, there is no mention of the assessments by major scholars of their importance to U.S. economic growth, no mention, for example, of Robert Fogel, Albert Fishlow, or Jeffrey Williamson (though Williamson gets name-checked in a footnote). A book that invokes John Kenneth Galbraith on eight pages but Nobel prize-winning economic historians like Bob Fogel and Douglass North not at all is decidedly behind the times. Lind is a journalist and novelist, the policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, of which he is co-founder. His book is long on anecdotes, marginally relevant quotations, and leftish ideological arguments and short on the integration of scholarly research, probably because much of the research is inconsistent with the author's view of the driving force in economic change.
