‘False Dawn’ Review: The Mirage of Recovery

Wall Street Journal ^ | June 15, 2025 | Judge Glock

[karpov]

For those who lived through the Great Depression, the strangeness of it was hard to convey. The nation had suffered no great natural disaster. The farmers were still farming, and the factories were still standing. Yet there lay rotting food that people couldn’t afford to buy and empty factories next to shanty towns filled with the unemployed.

In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the promise to restore prosperity. But he and his advisers had no clear explanation for the collapse and his subsequent New Deal would amount to a series of experiments. FDR admitted to the nation that some of his proposals took the nation down “a new and untrod path.” If they failed to “produce the hoped-for results, I shall be the first to acknowledge it.”

George Selgin’s “False Dawn” asks if the New Deal’s varied experiments produced the promised recovery. In dispassionate, careful and finally devastating detail, “False Dawn” shows that, with a few exceptions, FDR’s experiments did not work. And he did not acknowledge it.

Based simply on raw numbers, the case for the New Deal is not strong. Although the economy did recover from its nadir when FDR took office in 1933, by 1939 the unemployment rate was still 17%. After six years of supposed recovery, the economy was in worse shape than in any other recession of that century or the following one. The American public is right to link the Great Depression with the ’30s, during most of which FDR was president.

The modern economic consensus, at least since the work of Milton Friedman, holds that the Great Depression before FDR was caused by a collapse of the banks and contraction in the economy’s money supply. Soon after he assumed the presidency, FDR did one thing modern economists agree was successful.

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TOPICS: Books/Literature; Business/Economy; History
KEYWORDS: 1930s; bookreview; fdr; greatdepression; judgeglock; newdeal; pages; wallstreetjournal; wallstreeturinal

[karpov]

Full article.

The book site is https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo244061292.html

[Fungi]

How does archive make the article available despite the paywall?

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

Already read it. Problems, but no solutions, just like now.

[Valpal1]

Just confirms that FDR belongs in the pantheon of terrible presidents.

[cuz1961]

They call it the great depression cuz our country has had several.

All caused by unscrupulous banksters.

Banks can be good, but most were not cuz of grifters running them.

The fedres claimed it was needed to prevent booms and bust depressions, then immediately created the largest boom, and bust, our nation USA ever endured.

Revoke it's privately owned anonymously owned charter to counterfeit our currency and return to gold and silver backed US Treasury note currency and our nation would prosper beyond the wildest dreams. . That's what JFK was begging to do and someone murdered him over it.

[Rockingham]

The bankers were not at fault. Astonishingly bad economic and public policy were to blame.