The New Deal and Recovery, Part 8 (Supplement): The Brookings Report

George SelginIn assessing the New Deal's contribution to economic recovery, I've naturally tended to draw on fairly recent research. That keeps me from being accused of being out of date. But it makes me vulnerable to the charge of overlooking the testimony of experts who studied the New Deal's consequences at first hand.To that charge, I plead an emphatic Not Guilty! Those who know me will back me up when I say that I'm actually an antiquarian at heart, who'd much rather read a musty old report than any recent journal article. So I've read plenty of contemporary writings on the course of the depression and recovery, and the New Deal's contribution to them, including those of several of FDR's own advisors. These works often support the critical assessment of subsequent economic historians. If anyone is guilty of exaggerating the New Deal's contribution to the recovery, it's those popular historians who gloss over its failures while declaring that anyone who points to them must be a Hoover Republican!*Of those failures, none was more glaring than that of the National Recovery Administration, the subject ofmy previous post in this series. And that failure was no less evident to those who witnessed its consequences as it has been to most economic historians since. I might cite numerous contemporary works to make the point —no other product of New Deal legislation met with more caustic or widespread criticism. But none makes it more assiduously than the 1935 Brookings Instituti...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs