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The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. Reviewing two recent books on the Great Depression and FDR's response to it, Benjamin Friedman in the New York Review of Books ($) adduces some numbers that call into question the right-wing revisionist historians' contention that FDR did nothing (or less than nothing) to end the nation's greatest economic catastrophe, and that only WWII saved us. From 1929 to March 1933, total economic production dropped steeply and repeatedly.
"March 1933 marked the bottom. Total production rose 11 percent in 1934, 9 percent in 1935, and then 13 percent in 1936 -- just enough to regain the level reached in 1929. But by then businesses in many industries had learned to make do with less labor, even if they now produced just as much." The one-year decline in 1937-38 was smaller and quickly ended.
World War II didn't start until 1939.
These numbers seem to be incompatible with the assertions that FDR's policies perpetuated the Depression and discouraged business innovation. Is there some good economic reason why they're wrong or irrelevant?
and otherwise. Recently updated blogs are in bold text.
/A web site without all the gassy bloviating of Rush Limbaugh or Bill ORLY, I mean.
While I certainly press that FDR made things worse, you don't quote enough information to disagree with you.
Which part of his authoritarian mischief are you pumping here? Statistics? Blah...12 years of misery should be enough.
JBP
This is the problem with you wing-nuts. You say stuff but you never back it up with any facts.
I highly recommend reading up on this not particularly well known chapter of American history, it has most certainly has had a massive impact on everyone.
The simple truth is that the Depression went on a long time. Roosevelt (and Hoover) did a lot of silly things like regulating the number of buttons on mens suits, and eliminating cost competition in chicken wholesaling, which aggravated the situation.
JBP
Here's some
GDP 1920-1940.
http://www.answers.com/topic/gdp20-40-jpg
Look where it changes!
Here's another one!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thum...
Total Employment 1920-1940
http://www.answers.com/topic/us-jobs2040-jpg
Look where it changes!
JBP
The total-employment graph, given that it deliberately excludes the WPA, is probably the best single example of the stupidity of that anti-FDR myth.
If anyone thinks a 15% unemployment rate is a success after 8 years in office, I wonder why the current unemployment rate of 4.7% is considered such a failure after 8 years of Bush (see Nobel Winner Stiglitz article from earlier post)
JBP
The failure is taking a good-to-great economy and blowing it. And almost doubling the debt to do produce such a lame economy.
Again, the question is: would you rather be living in the Bush economy or the Clinton economy?
I start in 1930 as the meddling policies of Hoover were pretty much the same as the meddling policies of Roosevelt, though FDR gave more attention to lunatic meanderings like reducing the supply of chickens, by mass slaughter. None of this worked very well.
Shlaes book is pretty well thought out, if anecdotal. She is a good writer. Jim Powell's FDR's Folly is better for the statistical minded. They don't take that long to read.
JBP
JBP
Haven't bothered with Shlaes since that book appears to be entirely anecdotal and hence not likely to be illuminating.
Shlaes persuasively shows that Hoover and Roosevelt followed pretty much the same intreventionist path, with FDR making the good move of increasing the money supply.
She also shows, quite well, the despotic nature of FDR's policies, and the mind numbing details that fouled up business planning, the stock market, labor markets etc.
My rather simple read of Shlaes book is that the Depression went on a long time, and that regulating the number of buttons on mens suits did not help to end the Depression.
JBP
short answer: yes i have ...
The review is not available on line, nor at our library for that matter.
JBP