Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: New Republic Crashed-and-Burned Watch (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?): "A quick check of Google Scholar is enough to confirm that Judis is wrong. "Mainstream" economists agree with Romer: Monetary forces were a root cause of the Great Depression, and monetary expansion was likely a root cause of the recovery from the Depression. What Judis calls the "standard account" (giving primary credit to fiscal policy) is only standard among history professors and journalists. Want to see for yourself? Just go to Google Scholar and type in the phrase "fiscal great depression" and compare the results to "monetary great depression." Under the former, you get one heavily cited Krugman article in a popular magazine, and a number of papers that mostly show that monetary forces mattered more than fiscal forces. Under the latter, you get links to Bernanke's work on the banking-related causes of the Depression (which your may or may not consider "monetary," as a theological matter), and you'll see many papers that are basically commentaries on Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's classic work, The Monetary History of the United States (which will be on my syllabus next semester). Friedman and Schwartz's book, which blamed the Fed for the Depression and gave FDR credit for expanding the money supply, is cited well over a thousand times. Spend some time looking at those citations and decide for yourself whether mainstream economists on the whole agree with Judis or with Romer.... Maybe the economists are wrong about the recovery from the Depression, but their "standard account" doesn't seem to be the same as Judis's......"
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