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.
Eichengreen is my friend, teacher, and patron, and his book is to my mind the best explanation to date of why policymakers in Europe and the United States have reacted to the most dramatic economic collapse in almost four generations with half-hearted measures and half-finished interventions.
According to Eichengreen, the Great Depression and the Great Recession are related. The inadequate response to our current troubles can be traced to the triumph of the monetarist disciples of Milton Friedman over their Keynesian and Minskyite peers in describing the history of the Great Depression.
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.
Eichengreen is my friend, teacher, and patron, and his book is to my mind the best explanation to date of why policymakers in Europe and the United States have reacted to the most dramatic economic collapse in almost four generations with half-hearted measures and half-finished interventions.
According to Eichengreen, the Great Depression and the Great Recession are related. The inadequate response to our current troubles can be traced to the triumph of the monetarist disciples of Milton Friedman over their Keynesian and Minskyite peers in describing the history of the Great Depression.