The Monetarist Mistake
The inadequate response to the Great Recession reflects policymakers' acceptance of Milton Friedman's analysis of the Great Depression. And yet the dominance of Friedman's monetarism has less to do with the evidence supporting it than with the fact that economics is all too often tainted by politics.
BERKELEY – Ideas matter. That is the lesson of Hall of Mirrors, the American economist Barry Eichengreen’s chronicle of the two biggest economic crises of the past 100 years: the twentieth century’s Great Depression and the ongoing Great Recession, from which we are still struggling ineffectually to recover.