Assessing the Not-So-Great New Deal

摘要

"FDR's New Deal Worked. We Need Another One." So said the headline of one of Noah Smith's recent Bloomberg columns. The subheadline adds that "Claims that the programs adopted in the 1930s lengthened the Great Depression don't hold up." For good measure Smith adds that such claims only are encountered "in certain right-wing circles and among a few contrarian economists." Far from being novel, Smith's rhapsodic view of the New Deal represents today's conventional wisdom, hundreds of instances of which might be gathered from the popular press and elsewhere. Here are a few: "Without [Pres. Franklin] Roosevelt's intervention, the economic recovery that lasted from 1933 to 1937 would have been weaker and shorter-not unlike our own recovery after the Great Recession" and "Any who doubt the New Deal's effectiveness need only look at the double-dip recession of 1937, after a conservative backlash in Congress scaled down relief spending." (David Weiman, "Imagining a World Without the New Deal," The Washington Post, Aug. 12,2011).