Tuesday, April 9, 2013

DKuehn on FDR, in 2013


From Hoover on Keynes, in 1936:

The New Deal is kind of an amorphous blob of a lot of different ideas and programs. There were some very good public investments. But there was also a lot of bad tinkering and price fixing. Much of that got struck down. Overall it wasn't particularly impressive as fiscal policy. The general sense of economists is that fiscal policy didn't really get much of a chance until WWII. Monetary policy made a difference earlier in the thirties. On the margin some spending helped people. There is an interesting literature on the impact that Roosevelt had on expectations. But little was done in the way of proper macroeconomic policy.

A lot of words, there. Let me show you in one picture what FDR did:

FDR was President from 1933 to 1945

Not so amorphous after all, is it.

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