Lionel Shriver’s new novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, is set in Brooklyn, but not the borough we associate with hipsters, n+1, and “Girls.” This is, instead, a place overtaken by catastrophic economic events, punctuated by a “Great Renunciation,” in which the United States has repudiated its national debt and the dollar has become worthless. North America is now a fourth-world country, where scrounging for food, running out of toilet paper, and stealing shoes are everyday events. One of the characters—she’s the failed novelist whose books are burnt like firewood, to boil water—asks “Will there be an other side of this?” A page later, Shriver claims in her own voice that “natural forces” will always undermine the urban abstractions of money and affluence for all: “Most people liked the prospect of justice, and confused what was appealing with what was available.”

The moral of both stories is real simple: Get used to hard times, because, well, because that’s just the way the world works.

With An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy, former Economist editor Marc Levinson has written a non-fictional concordance to Shriver’s dystopian depiction of the near future. The moral of both stories is real simple: Get used to hard times, because, well, because that’s just the way the world works. Do not tamper with the laws of the market in the name of justice, or equilibrium, or full employment, for these laws are inviolable. To bend them to social purposes by political means is to risk even harder times, every time.

Or at least the world worked that way, Levinson says, until the unprecedented interruption of the postwar boom—a deviation from historical precedents, which lasted roughly from 1946 to 1973, when productivity soared, income inequality narrowed, and we began to expect growth and prosperity. No longer. Welcome to the new normal, which, by this accounting, began with the Great Stagflation of the 1970s, not with the 2008 crisis. In Levinson’s view, the Great Recession is, instead, a reminder that the postwar boom and its attendant prosperity were an anomaly that we are helpless to replicate.

By now, it’s a familiar genre. These aren’t the end times, Levinson explains, these aren’t even exceptional times—they’re just a “correction,” a reversion to the pre-industrial mean that once made economic growth seem a departure from the static norm. Get used to it, people! Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have perfected the tired vocal pitch required by this operatic form, but there are dozens of others, from Left to Right. Thomas Piketty, the favored tenor of our time, has only the most famous of these voices. His argument, in Capital in the 21st Century, is unassailable: Without political measures that will change the distribution of income, inequality will increase. Levinson goes all of them, even Shriver, one better, by claiming that any political measure is doomed to make things worse.

When the financial crisis was still unfolding in July 2009, however, Levinson’s fellow editors scolded economists for their inability to predict it, or merely address it. “Economists misread the economy on the way up, misread it on the way down, and now mistake the way out.” These editors called for “a change of mindset,” and they cited John Maynard Keynes, not Adam Smith—he of the invisible hand—as their exemplar. The citation is significant because Keynes argued in the 1930s and 40s that government spending to the point of deficits, and even central planning, were essential when economic crisis struck; the point was to restore the incomes and the confidence of consumers and investors alike. He argued that amending the laws of the market by political means was both possible and necessary.