(Part 2) Top products from r/Economics

Out of all of those, which would you say are frequently underrepresented in MSM? It seems like the first one is pretty readily parroted by everyone as though it is some grand indictment of supply and demand (it's not) -- try googling the phrase "perfectly competitive markets don't exist". Freakonomics did a pretty good job of popularizing the idea of externalities. Books like Nudge and Predictably Irrational have done a pretty good job of popularizing the recent ideas of behavioural economics. And what to do about natural monopolies (or what even constitutes a natural monopoly, in the real world) is still very much a matter of debate; it's not like there's a definitive answer to that.

Chomsky is off by 10 years.

The real "tipping point" was 1971 when the dollar was completely removed from the Gold exchange standard (aka Bretton Woods) -- which triggered the massive inflation of the 1970's (worst at the end) -- and that in turn led to dramatic changes in the financial sector in the late 1970's and early 1980's (the end of usury laws, which enabled the VAST expansion of credit cards; the first of two decades worth of loosening of restrictions on banking; including the channeling of nearly all savings {including 401k's} up to Wall Street {creating a VERY massive "pool of cash" needing to be "invested"} whereas previously it had been lent locally, etc.) -- and of course the selection of Greenspan and the entrenchment of economic idiocy around "fiat" money (which, along with the modern spreadsheet, enabled the beginning of the corporate raiders and LBO operations that began the process of hollowing out of US based manufacturing -- all that "retirement" money was "dumb" in that it bought stocks via several layers, and only cared about "PPS" quarterly & year-over-year results.)

Add in the significant increase in environmental laws (which began in the 1960's & 1970's but actually hit it's "stride" and became far more pervasive in the 1980's) and the concurrent things like NAFTA & MFN status for China...

And you had the perfect recipe for a DE-industrialization of the US, an increased emphasis on short-term corporate results, and a shipping of any/all "dirty" jobs outside of the continental US.

For good measure, you can also toss in the reduction/elimination of general "savings" in the middle class (mainly because their FICA taxes were significantly increased -- to a level that basically equaled what people had previously "saved" themselves) -- which basically drove people into extended use of credit cards as a means of personal deficit-financing (and all other forms of debt including things like auto-leasing, virtually unheard of before the 1980's).


You can also look at Tyler Cowen's book "The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better" -- where he posits that the US had reached the "apogee" of a series of MAJOR innovations and was after that "coasting" on past achievements -- which I think has some merit as well.

There was no SINGLE factor, rather it is a result of many different factor pulling in various directions, with the overwhelming main direction one of a decreasing domestic industrial sector.

We see articles about the collapse of a higher education bubble quite frequently - I've never understood why people buy into it:

1. A bubble is a term with a specific meaning - people are buying an asset with the expectation that they will be able to sell it for more later. There is no mechanism for which this can work in the education market.
   
2. The last 30 years have been characterized by a huge increase in the college wage premium. In 1979, a college educated worker made 35% more than an HS graduate on average, by 1999, they would be making 80% more. The Race Between Education and Technology is a great overview of this. A college education is still a really good investment. This isn't because of selection effects - see The Caual Effect of Education on Earnings.
   
3. Virtually no one pays market price for a college education. The financial aid process allows universities to practice almost-perfect price discrimination. They can effectively charge a different price for every student, so that the market just follows the demand curve up until their maximum tuition level.
   
4. The is definitely is a sheepskin effect - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#A_basic_job-market_signalling_model - for college diplomas. But this is extremely well understood (Spence shared the economics Nobel with Akerlof for signalling theory). I think that separating bright, talented and hard working 18 year olds from bright, talented and lazy 18 year olds is a non-trivial process.
   
5. Tons of articles imply that you don't need higher education, because you can take classes online. If this was the case, why did the university lecture have survived the invention of the printing press? Books reduced the cost to the diffusion of knowledge far more than the internet did, without ending the university system. This implies that there is something else going on to me.

Check out Timothy Noah's Slate series about the causes of wealth inequity.


Another awful aspect of wealth inequity is that for the past few decades, as business profits have increased greatly, average wages have stagnated. That is against the traditional American view of economic fairness, if that means anything to anyone. Workers' wages are supposed to reflect productivity gains, are they not?

That, and it decreases the entire society's quality of life: link

Also, here's another great source for wealth inequity, if this topic interests you. It gives a breakdown of US wealth distribution, net wealth distribution, wealth across racial lines, and more.

Vindicates it to a certain level yes. http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS is a great book mostly talking about America's economic decline but also speaks a little to China as well. China has seen impressive growth by the numbers and in some real world cases but that doesn't mean the system is incredibly corrupt and inefficient. A state managed system can work wonders when all you have to do is do the simple things all the other developed countries have done already (build infrastructure, factories with cheap labor, open up borders). This is especially true seeing what China was coming from in the 1970s, there wasn't much room to go but up. Now in the coming decades we will see how well this development approach will work into the future.

I think that more so has to do with the origin of the criticism--UMass is a heterodox school, Harvard is one of the premier economics schools in the world by prestige (if you can trust rankings, #2, but that's bubba meisa).

Additionally, the finding in the R&R paper was extremely politically convenient at a time when some, including well respected thinkers like Stiglitz, Krugman, Akerloff, Schiller, Summers, were calling for a return to a more a fiscal-based anti-crisis policy.

Had their paper not come out, some other talking head would have been found to justify the austerity claim (not that the R&R paper even really does justify austerity--the issue is long term average debt, balanced over the business cycle, not its static measurement at any given moment), which occurs regularly.

Also, the more intense your prestige, the less likely you are to publicly fess up. You see this in other disciplines. Chomsky, who, by any metric, is an incredibly intelligent man, who changes the conclusions of his theories regularly, will, nonetheless, never own up to their being issues in generativism generally & the minimalist program, specifically.



It really may be a Harvard & MIT disease. Steven Pinker was savaged by Taleb's statistical analysis, not to mention substantial rebuttals from anthropology, sociology, poli sci & economics which disputed his claims (notably everyone from Douglas P Fry to James Scott to Jared Diamond to John Gray disputes it, despite their lack of agreement on anything else)--but he only ever doubles down. Ditto for Pinker & other talking heads on the issues of adaptationism in evolution and genocentrism & other issues in biology generally. Larry Summers (who, academically within econ actually has some integrity) famously gave a talk about differences between men & women's career outcomes--he cited someone for his claim who was literally in the audience at the talk and during the Q&A said he mis-interpreted the data. He recast himself as a martyr for free speech later, even as this was impertinent to the subject at hand.

I'm going to go against the grain and say there is no student loan bubble - it doesn't even make sense. A bubble is when "asset prices that exceed an asset's fundamental value because current owners believe they can resell the asset at an even higher price" (source). This is impossible in this context - you can't resell your education and the debt is non-dischargeable (for good or ill).

Instead, it may be accurate to say college is overpriced, since bubble is makes no sense. I don't think this is accurate. Over the last 40ish years the college wage premium has increased. In 1974, an average college grad made 32% more than a high school grad, in 1999, the difference had risen to 80%. You can read more about it in this book. A college degree is still a really good investment. Maybe not as good as 10 years ago, but not negative.

Also, you can't evaluate returns to investment in college by looking at sticker price. Financial aid process lets schools do very precise price discrimination - they can basically just walk up the demand curve. Saying nominal tuition increased by X isn't very meaningful. College is pricey, dropping out is very pricey, but it is still worthwhile. The college premium is not just a selection effect.

I'll grant there is some signaling going on through the college process. But economists have shown pretty clearly that although a portion of college is signaling, not nearly all of it is signalling. And signaling isn't necessarily entirely wasteful, separating smart hard working people from smart lazy ones isn't easily achieved other ways.

This article suggests that online classes can replace college in some respects. Perhaps in some part, but not entirely. Lectures survived books and other recorded media, and learning with both was better than either alone. Plus, working with and around similar peers has real knock-on effects. And so far, the majority of for-profit universities have failed to produce the same graduation rates, quality of education, or lower costs than public and private universities - that could change, but we're not there yet.

One would be free to ignoring a judgement of a private court, but the consequences would be severe. One might be social ostracism, the vast majority of people would be unwilling to do business with a man who had ignored the judgement of a well respected private court, for both reasons of ethics and more importantly reasons of liability. Another possibility is a writ of outlawry, that is the man in question's legal rights and protections will have been considered forfeited leaving him vulnerable to theft, mob justice, and other undesirable outcomes. There are many intricacies in a system of polycentric law, and I do not pretend to be familiar with all of them. Books like The Machinery of Freedom and For a New Liberty as well as The Ludwig von Mises Institute provide some good information on the topic. If you're curious about historical precedents early Iceland provides a fascinating albeit imperfect example.

Yes Definitely! Like: America's Great Depression

and The Great Contraction, 1929-1933

and Great Myths of the Great Depression

The problem is there is no way of knowing what is high enough or too high when it comes to the inflation of the money supply (thru the FED interest rate).

The only interest rate which is always right in a meaningful sense and is self-correcting is the natural interest rate, that which the market determines by individuals exchanging IOUs for future money in exchange for current money (ie. borrowing and lending).

Different people have different time preferences, some are more thrifty and "savers", whereas some would rather borrow to achieve their plans. The mix of savers and borrowers keeps changing, and the result of this supply and demand is the natural rate.

The problem is that with central banks controlling the money supply and the interest rate they provide to other banks, there is no way to know the actual natural interest rate anymore. In a way, the FED by its very existence makes its own task impossible.

The only solution is to end the FED ...

Something doesn't add up here.

Here is the syllabus for Cornell's Econ 302 macro course

It says they use Greg Mankiw's book (which is pretty standard) and it covers all of the topics I mentioned in the GP in great depth (table of contents here). But no one covers that whole book in a semester though because it is like 600 pages. Krugman/Well's macro book is also good about covering fiscal and monetary policy in detail in chapters 12 and 13. For example, figure 12-10 in this book shows the debt/GDP ratios of various countries. As I said, these are basic concepts.

Also, I should point out that much of what I learned about macro I learned by reading the textbooks almost in full (I'm a nerd like that) and then non-textbook books (and blogs for the modern guys) from various people like Keynes, Samuelson, Friedman, Mankiw, Krugman, Stiglitz, Simon Johnson, De Long, Akerlof, etc. There is only so much time in class (and I was not an econ major, so I didn't get the upper level stuff).

But, back to the point, nothing I've said in this thread deviates from standard macro. The current US public debt/GDP ratio isn't that high historically and relative to other modern first-world economies (Japan, France, Germany, UK, Canada, Italy, etc.).

How comfortable are you with reading a textbook for the fun of it?

While people will argue about his policy proposals and career history, Greg Mankiw writes one mean introductory text on economics. It's well-written, thorough and pretty easy to read, as far as textbooks go. It's a Macro book though so I would suggest making sure you know your Micro fundamentals, but you would probably be fine without it.

EDIT: If anyone is interested, he's also got a semi-decent blog, if a bit sparse in his postings.

Excellent question. I get it. So do these people. And these. And these. And these. And this guy. And this guy. And him. And a bunch of others.

I had the benefit of working on Wall St. for a few years and saw the kind of people running the financial system. The computer scientists were for the most part typical idealistic and/or pragmatic computer scientists. But many of the finance guys were reckless greedy assholes looking to make money by tricking other people out of it, rather than by making or contributing anything of value. For anyone curious, Satyajit Das's book Traders, Guns, and Money provides a good description of who we're bailing out, and why. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

> If nothing else, would you agree that "taxing the rich" is not at all anywhere close to a viable solution to the depth of America's financial predicament?

"Would you agree that 1 thing out of the 23489178 outlandish things the commentator said is true?" Well, maybe, but his credibility is shot already at that point. I won't trust any of his stats after that.

> By the way, those accounting trick's your talking about help by allowing the company to make more profit off the same capital ratios.

I didn't mean to imply that derivatives are always bad, but there are many types that simply exist to evade taxes and trick lenders into thinking you're a less risky investment than you are. Forgotten subprime mortgages and credit swaps already? If you're unfamiliar with the blatant theft that goes on (like 'fixed income' contracts where all the terms cancel out to make 0 -- I'm not kidding) I'd suggest reading Trader's Guns and Money, written by well known derivatives expert Satyajit Das: http://www.amazon.com/Traders-Guns-Money-unknowns-derivatives/dp/0273704745

Edit, one important and relevant point from the book: It doesn't help make them make more profit. It helps them take what someone tells them is a lower amount of risk according to a complex model that is usually wrong and really results in greater risk.

>But the point of redistribution is not to grow the pie, it is to ensure everyone gets a big enough piece - KNOWING that this reduces the size of the pie.

You are assuming a model of benevolent, disinterested redistributors sitting at the top, pondering how to best distribute desert according to just deserts, even if this reduced the total amount of desert served. (Plato's Guardians become Plato's Redistributors).

But a far more accurate model is: everyone throughout the system, at all points up and down, left and right, using it to grab as much of the pie as they can for themselves, and NOT CARING if this reduces what everybody else gets or the size of the total pie.

The reason why capitalism/democracy has created such a huge increase in wealth in the last 200 years is that it breaks up the monopolies that groups always used in the past to extract wealth for themselves at the cost of everyone else, throughout all pre-modern-capitalist-democratic history.

See, for instance, Nobelist Douglas North's Violence and Social Orders or Acemoglu & Robinson's Why Nations Fail.

The model used in this analysis is very important. Apply the false one, you get failure-to-disaster.

>Why does the government do this? From a utilitarian point of view: declining marginal utility of income (whereby each additional dollar leads to a smaller increase in happiness - giving a millionaire a dollar does not create as much happiness as giving a beggar a dollar).

Bah! I guarantee you, no politician ever thought in those terms. They all think in terms of "(1) What's best for me. (2) What's best for the allies I need", when pondering how much to take from who to give to whom (i.e. "redistribute").

>From a political realist point of view: your redistributed tax dollars purchase social stability (so that rioters don't send you to the guillotine).

Ah, but just remember that the voters who threaten to send politicians to the guillotine are those with political power, not those with "high marginal utility of income" need. The correlation between the two is near zilch.

The members are AARP as a group on average have far more wealth and disposable income than all the people below age 40 -- that's all you Redditors reading this -- whom they will force to pay much higher taxes to pay off the deca-trillions of dollars of unfunded entitlement benefits they expect come to them, which they didn't pay for themselves.

But if those AARPers get the idea that those benefits will be cut -- even by mere means-testing to assure the benefits only actually do go to those among them with "high marginal utility of income" -- well, we've already seen what happens. It's "Attack! Off with the heads" of those damn politicians! very much threatening social stability to keep their gettings...

"Dan Rostenkowski's being attacked by his own constituents after telling them that they would have to pay for their own catastrophic health care coverage isn't just a long-forgotten event from a bygone era.

"To this day, it's something that members of Congress cite chapter and verse when discussing the budget. Like a story passed down from generation to generation, this includes current representatives and senators, the vast majority of who weren't in office when the event occurred.

"I can't tell you the number of times the Rostenkowski incident has been mentioned by members of Congress at meetings I've attended. Usually it's mentioned as a throw away line ("I don't want my constituents chasing me down the street")...

"It seems to be a story that elected officials feel most personally. Staff invariably do not raise it first.

"Historically, my guess is that it will assume a place right up there with the Whiskey Rebellion that occurred in Pennsylvania in the late 1770s. The picture below shows the incident where a federal tax collector was tarred and feathered, the Revolutionary War equivalent of attacking the limo of the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. "

So do not make the naive mistake of thinking redistribution schemes are designed by well-meaning, disinterested leaders for the benefit of the "high marginal utility of income" needy, ever.

They are in fact always designed and enacted by entirely self-interested politicians in response to political power -- the marginal utility of the income of the recipients be damned.

I think he wholeheartedly believes it was the contraction of the money supply that caused the Great Depression. I have The Great Contraction 1929-1933 by Friedman and Schwartz, and in the foreword, he praises the work done by Friedman and acknowledges that he wouldn't let something like that happen again.

Why would we return to a gold standard? Why not a standard based on a basket of precious metals? Gold, silver, platinum, etc..

Read this book and you'll get a good answer to your question.

To put student indebtedness in perspective, some information:

>About 60% of students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011-12 from the public and private nonprofit institutions at which they began their studies graduated with debt. They borrowed an average of $26,500.

Image

>In 2012, 40% of borrowers with education debt owed less than $10,000 and another 30% owed between $10,000 and $25,000

Image

Compared to the substantial benefits associated with going to college, it's just not that much debt. For example, in 1974, an average college grad made 32% more than a high school grad; in 1999, the difference had risen to 80%. You can read more about it in this book. A college degree is still a really good investment. (and before the inevitable "correlation is not causation" response, there are literally hundreds of papers studying the returns to education -- it's a very well developed field).

Are there some outliers who incurred large amounts of debt while earning a degree with low labor market payoffs? Sure. But let's not pretend they are representative of the population of students who rely on loans to pay for college. Access to loans opens the door to a college education for millions of students.

Turning to the article:

>And [they] found that while students with ... and without college debt start off at similar levels of income, by the time they're 40 they have less income if they have student debt

Note that this is taken from a blog post that makes a billion assumptions (see methodology) and as far as I can tell doesn't actually use individual-level data to estimate anything.

>If we know that people aren't accumulating assets and that the wealth gap is growing, partially because of student loans

Huge [citation needed] on that one.

>Why should one person go to college, take on all kinds of amounts of debt, and through their work and effort, be one of the better people in their field — and still not be able to earn as much as other people earn because of all this debt?

Did I miss the part where wages shown to be linked to debt?

I highly recommend The Great Stagnation to you. It sheds some optimistic light on the role of the internet while simultaneously stressing that we need gear up America again for the new century.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by Shiller and Akerloff

Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely

One Economics, Many Recipes By Dani Rodrik

Each book encourages readers to think differently about economics than the standard policy models dictate. The first two focus on the role of human psychology in economic decision making, while Rodrik's work is one of the preeminent works on second-best development economics, which looks to find policy solutions that are specific to the social, political and economic context in which they will be implemented.

For those really interested, get his book "The Spirit Level" on this topic.

It wasn't gov't-imposed, it was Germany-imposed austerity, which benefits the Germans, as Mark Blyth wrote in Austerity: the History of a Dangerous Idea. Austerity is fine when your economy is contingent on exports, as Germany's is. So the ECB, which the old Bundesbank has the most influence, acts in Germany's interest. More specifically, it acts in Germany's exporters' interest. Viewed in this way, the Euro-crisis is not a crisis, but, merely a means to keep the large German exporters, selling their products around the world.

The comment does exist, and hasn't been moderated. Reddit's servers may be having an issue.

Here's the reply again:

"This is really somewhat hilarious. You're dismissing the plurality view of the academic field because I "haven't posted evidence of it" (even though the research we're discussing actually supports that conclusion, if you read the paper), and it hurts your feelings.

Fine, here are some citations. Since you don't even know what "literature" means, I'll leave out things behind paywalls:

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth? by William Easterly

The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Easterly

Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

Coffee and Power by Jeffrey M. Paige

The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson

Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth by William Easterly, Jozef Ritzen, and Michael Woolcock

African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis by Nicolas Van de Walle

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen

Doing Bad by Doing Good by Christopher Coyne

From Subsistence to Exchange by Peter Bauer"

As a note, several of these are ones that one of the mods posts when asked about good books on development.

This is a short animated excerpt from his book The Machinery of Freedom, which goes into much more detail.

Also, did the video at least make you think? Do you accept that it's at least theoretically possible for an alternative system such as this?

Thanks for the TL;DR.

https://www.amazon.com/Monetary-History-United-States-1867-1960/dp/0691003548

He's referencing, I believe, a Michael Lewis book, my guess being The Big Short. It's a narrative-style journalistic piece. Personally, I'd recommend looking to more sources than this if you want to really get into a Glass-Steagall (or other financial reform) debate, this one is very much told as a story.

A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark. It's about economic growth throughout human history. I don't want to portray it as some seminal work in the field of economic history, because evidently it's debated intensely. It is however one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in recent memory.

There were four different econ history courses at mine! One of them is on iTunes U, if you're so inclined. And/or you can buy the professor's (very reasonably priced) book. It's a light read.

^(Please ignore the normative policy implications of the title. The author just wanted to be clever. Source: I took his class.)

These are not finance books, but popular books on behavioral economics by leading academics

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast And Slow (a classic, I think)
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein - Nudge
http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/014311526X

Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational
http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Edition/dp/0061353248

>I think connecting usury to Judaism is incorrect, and offensive.

It's still the historical foundation of modern banking systems. One which gave Europe a decisive economic advantage leading to the Western dominated world we live in.

All Abrahamic faiths (Jews, Christians and Muslims) have prohibitions against usury. In Judaism's case, it only banned charging fellow Jews interest. A fact exploited by various Gentile city states looking to finance their mercenary driven proxy wars. This loophole provided an incentive to lessen Christian oppression while integrating/exploiting Jews into the Catholic dominated society.

Check out Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money if you're interested in going further forward or back.

Unrelated to this thread but to the OP, don't forget that the Bible craps on currency exchange too.

Big would be the amount of debt used to fuel it relative to income. The sub prime mortgage crisis was around 120% by my recollection (could be off by 10%) and Australia is currently at 130% (again could be off). So the shocks around the globe likely wont be comparable, since the Australian market is much smaller, but for those of us in the market a pop wouldn't be so good.

Most of these ideas of mine are paraphrased or inspired by the book This Time is Different: https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

There is that book, too, but the one person was thinking of is more recent and is literally called “This Time Is Different .”

Calling Naomi Klein....

*peers

also, http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/0812690699

Exactly. However I think they may be complementary, in which case i'd add
Why nations fail and The mystery of Capital - Enough there to give you a more informed understanding of why things are as they are.

I first read about him in Niall Ferguson's book The Ascent of Money, which was also a TV series. I think you can watch the episode on John Law online.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Short-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827

His story has been corroborated.

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

Decades of research psychology. Most fameously Taversky and Kahneman.

Also, if we were roughly rational we wouldn't need behavioral economics. And advertising wouldn't be effective.

I have two end the fed tshirts.

There is a reason we have lost 95% of our purchasing power since 1913. Guess what was created that year? Guess who caused and admitted to the Great Depression?

The inflation has hurt the purchasing power of every American who has ever saved money.


You do your homework.

I suggest you pre-order his book "End the Fed"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446549193?ie=UTF8&tag=ronpaufor05-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0446549193

austerity is a horrible idea, yes.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report

or alternatively for a more readable book (if more focused on the mortgage meltdown) The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Sometimes i'm confused as to reddits official position on naomi klein.

http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism/dp/0805079831

Do you know why people get angry when they talk to people who enjoy economics?

Those people seem to ignore all other aspects of the world, except economics. You are only looking at how the income gap affects our economy, and nothing else.

http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies-Stronger/dp/1608190366/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3GJX0JYWH410L&colid=1KNYNPSWMYVDW

The FRED data does not go back far enough.
You can preview parts of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, but I did not find the info yet.


I am looking at the same data you referenced. You have insinuated that the growth that broke the Great Depression into 2 cycles was due to moderate Keynesian policies. So the only thing making the event 2 cycles in your theory is the help from these policies. It is really 1 cycle with some counter cyclical blips. I am just claiming that from our analysis and standard definition, the length of the Great Depression is from 1929 to around WWII so at around 150 months. This would make the average for 1919-1945 be 40 months not 18. So things were worse during that time. No other event in the NBER data comes close to 150 months of the Great Depression, yet shouldn't we expect some event to be worse. Especially since the Great Depression was shortened by WWII.

Hah, you have to read Shock Doctrine to hear about some of the nasty shit Chicago-school economists have done to the world.