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FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate (2004)

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Re: FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate (2004)

#6

Post by opam2 »

This is a revisionist history.

"How can one make this claim? Unemployment reached 25 percent in the Great Depression, and fell steadily until World War II (although there were some bumps up along the way). Ah, but the revisionist position is that unemployment did not fall as much as it should have. And this argument is based on an interesting interpretation of the available data. As Amity Shlaes, currently the premier anti-New Deal historical revisionist writing for a popular audience, explained proudly in her own Wall Street Journal opinion piece in November, “The Krugman Recipe for Depression,” a necessary step is to not count as employed those people in “temporary jobs in emergency programs.”

That means, everyone who got a job during the Great Depression via the Works Progress Administration (WPA) or Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), or any other of Roosevelt’s popular New Deal workfare programs, doesn’t get counted as employed in the statistics used by Cole, Ohanian and Shlaes.

In other words, millions of men and women earned a living wage and self-respect and contributed mightily to the national infrastructure. But, according to the statistics as interpreted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they were unemployed."

http://www.salon.com/2009/02/02/the_new_deal_worked/

Re: FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate (2004)

#7

Post by nl »

(Perhaps the [2004] date might be appropriate in the title?)

The key problem with this reasoning is they use a fairly unique measure of unemployment: specifically they don't count those workers who were employed in "New Deal" programs as employed (!).

Here's a good reponse: http://www.salon.com/2009/02/02/the_new_deal_worked/

At a basic level I think I'd agree the New Deal included some bad ideas. But overall the general consensus is that it worked reasonably well in migrating the worst impact of The Depression.

Re: FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate (2004)

#8

Post by fleitz »

opam2 wrote: post #6

This is a revisionist history. "How can one make this claim? Unemployment reached 25 percent in the Great Depression, and fell steadily until World War II (although there were some bumps up along the way). Ah, but the revisionist position is that unemployment did not fall as much as it should have. And this argument is based on an interesting interpretation of the available data. As Amity Shlaes, currently the premie…

The entire point of history is to revise it as new information and opinions become available.

History isn't about facts but opinions, a recorded history of every person to cross the rubicon probably isn't important. How caesar crossing the rubicon influenced modern times is, and since modern times change history should too. 100 years ago it might have been a really good thing, in 100 years with China as the dominant player maybe one could say Caesar led to a hubris in the west, or something like that, etc, etc, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism

With out historical revisionism Stalin would be seen as an equal to FDR in pulling his country out of depression through the grand ideas of collective farming and 5 year plans, perhaps why CCR remarked '5 year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains'

Re: FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate (2004)

#9

Post by ekianjo »

nl wrote: post #7

(Perhaps the [2004] date might be appropriate in the title?) The key problem with this reasoning is they use a fairly unique measure of unemployment: specifically they don't count those workers who were employed in "New Deal" programs as employed (!). Here's a good reponse: http://www.salon.com/2009/02/02/the_new_deal_worked/ At a basic level I think I'd agree the New Deal included some bad ideas. But overall the gen…

> The key problem with this reasoning is they use a fairly unique measure of unemployment: specifically they don't count those workers who were employed in "New Deal" programs as employed (!).

Well if you create artificial jobs, not deemed necessary by market needs, just for the purpose of stimulating the economy, that assumption can be seen as correct. It depends on your point of view. You could employ people cutting tulips around the city hall, and technically they are employed, yes, but do not produce any value towards economical growth, so it's a net loss compared to them working in a productive job in the industry.

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