I studied history and economics as a young skull full of mush undergrad in the 70s. The historians ignored the economic evidence of the Depression’s causes (which had just been published by Milton Friedman) because they LOVED big government. Hell, big gov employed lots of academics, that’s one reason they loved it. The economists on the other hand had the evidence in front of them and couldn’t be so ignorant. It was a bit of a challenge not to confront the historians with the plain economics of the New Deal. Raise the price of labor with taxes (such as social security) and guess what, less labor will be demanded! Raising the price of labor in the middle of a depression is suicidal. Ditto for increasing the cost of government regulations. I’m glad that a critical relook of the New Deal is finally being addressed on a public scale. The professional economists knew it all along - just couldn’t speak up given the climate of political correctness in the ivory towers of academia. Reality check - the New Deal was a Bad Deal for much of America.
I took several economics classes as an undergrad in the late ‘70s. Two things I remember:
- Being taught emphatically that stagflation was the new, inevitable and irreversible state of the modern economy; and
- As each professor recounted with pride, that the entire economics department was Marxist.