http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/magneto-muddles:
Keynes argued that the Great Depression could be thought of as a failure in the car’s electrical system; so let’s think of it as a situation where your car won’t run because it has a dead battery — that is, you could get it running again with a fairly trivial and easy intervention: just buy a new battery, which costs only a tiny fraction of the expense of a new car.
In saying this I am not denying that there may be other problems with the car, perhaps even big ones. Maybe it needs new brakes, or a new transmission, and these had better be dealt with soon.
Still, what sense can it possibly make to say that therefore you shouldn’t start by replacing that dead battery?
I really don’t get it.
