All Posts Tagged With: "Great Depression"
Regime Uncertainty, Then and Now
In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]
4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | ContinuedUnemployment: What’s To Be Done?
In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]
30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | ContinuedLet Sleeping Failures Lie: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation
The most fallacious argument for an RFC is that it can provide capital when there is a shortage. Obviously, the government has no capital of its own.
21Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedDepression, War, and Recovery
Keynesians find comfort in rising macroeconomic aggregates while ignoring how flesh-and-blood people actually live.
9Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 25 comments | ContinuedWhat Do We Mean by “Big Government”?
The scale of government matters, but we cannot get so tangled up in debates about the size of federal government expenditures that we overlook the effects of changes in the scope of government power.
25Aug2011 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedWhich Strategy Really Ended the Great Depression?
“World War II got us out of the Great Depression.” Many people said that during the war, and some still do today. The quality of American life, however, was precarious during the war. Food was rationed, luxuries removed, taxes high, and work dangerous. A recovery that does not make—as Robert Higgs points out in Depression, [...]
24Aug2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 6 comments | ContinuedFDR’s Advisers Knew What Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman Don’t
Hoover can be blamed for turning what would have likely been a severe but short market correction into a deep and long Great Depression. The reason, however, is not that Hoover did nothing.
18Aug2011 | Steven Horwitz | 46 comments | ContinuedThe Infrastructure Delusion
Goods, people, and information will not flow freely across a nation, regardless of the quality and extent of its infrastructure, if taxes and regulations block their flow.
15Aug2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 41 comments | ContinuedThe Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights
The raging controversy in Wisconsin over eliminating collective bargaining “rights” for government employees cast a bright and harsh light on public-sector unions. Some commentators have distinguished public-sector unions from private-sector unions, but the vested interests of the two are much the same. Both are expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came [...]
22Jun2011 | Wendy McElroy | 4 comments | ContinuedHow the Economy Works
This book is slim. It’s also well written, which is always a surprise when the author is an academic economist. But don’t let the concision and breezy style fool you. UCLA economics professor Roger Farmer offers a big idea that he’s convinced will reduce both the frequency and size of economic booms and busts. Unfortunately [...]
22Jun2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 2 comments | ContinuedPrivate Investment and Public “Investment”
Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]
22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedAnd the Slump Goes On
Official economic statistics and the underlying economic reality sometimes differ starkly. Such discrepancies may be almost inevitable when a small group of macroeconomic experts sets the official dates for peaks and troughs of aggregate economic activity. The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) recently “determined that a trough in [...]
24Feb2011 | Angel Martín Oro | 13 comments | ContinuedWar Would End the Recession?
In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause and effect. The result [...]
22Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedThe Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal
The Great Depression ranks as one of the most misunderstood periods of history. For that, we can thank biased historians who for generations have favored activist government, along with Keynesian economists who never understood how the economy works. Since the last few months of 2008, the Great Depression has been thrust back into the national debate [...]
22Dec2010 | Raymond J. Keating | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Broken-Window Fallacy Writ Large and Dangerous
Veteran Washington Post political columnist David Broder yesterday: What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy. Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II. Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With [...]
1Nov2010 | Sheldon Richman | 9 comments | ContinuedAmerica’s Depression within a Depression, 1937–39
The Great Depression in the United States is generally dated as beginning in 1929 and ending in 1941, give or take a year. This has led many commentators to disregard or to pass quickly over the serious depression that began in 1937 and ended—if returning to the 1937 level can be considered a depression’s end—in [...]
22Oct2010 | Robert Higgs | 8 comments | ContinuedThe Rise and Fall of Glass-Steagall
The ongoing financial crisis has pundits, bloggers, academics, and politicians scrambling for explanations. Deregulation gets a major share of their attention, specifically the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Just what was Glass-Steagall and how did it come about? Bank failures were among the most dramatic and devastating aspects of the Great Depression. [...]
22Sep2010 | and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 6 comments | Continued-
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