(Although my contributions to this series have so far been more-or-less in their proper order, this one isn't: it occurred to me only relatively recently that it would be worthwhile to take stock of the overall progress of the recovery up to the outbreak of the Roosevelt…
(Previous installments of "The Keynesian Myth" are here and here.) Balancing Act As Richard Adelstein (1991, p. 177) observes, far from taking Keynes's advice that he ratchet-up the federal government's deficit spending, "Roosevelt held fast to the ideal of a balanced budget and remained the chief opponent…
(The first installment of "The Keynesian Myth" is here.) All-American Money Makers Although conventional wisdom has it that Keynes considered government spending far more capable of ending the depression than monetary expansion, that certainly wasn't his view in 1931: during lectures he gave then at the University…
(The first of an essay in 3 installments.) In The Money Makers, his 2015 book on the New Deal and its aftermath, Eric Rauchway says that FDR "conducted an active monetary and fiscal program of recovery…working along lines suggested by Keynes." His book's subtitle in turn declares…
(This post completes my three-part discussion of the "regime uncertainty" hypothesis, according to which the New Deal hampered recovery by causing businessmen to fear policy changes that might render their investments unprofitable. Links to the previous posts about regime uncertainty, and to the other posts of my…