On 2003-10-23, Bryan Caplan uttered: >Check out almost any textbook: Thomas Bailey's is one obvious example. >Schlesinger *Age of Roosevelt* and Hofstader's *American Political >Tradition* are others.
It's easy to agree that this is the prevailing view of things: spending cured the Depression. I wonder about explanatory power, though. Where's the work that follows a coherent economic theory and goes through all the relevant statistics, interpreting them according to the theory (whatever it might be; probably old-Keynesian, but whatever), so that the analysis arrives at purported causality instead of mere coincidence? I've seen more than one Keynesian treatment of the Great Depression, yet not one of them go as far as to actually test the hypotheses underlying the vulgar-Keynesian thesis. They do not ambush their own presuppositions with all the neo-classical, neo-Keynesian, supply-side, and even Austrian, challenges that are out there. That makes most of them pretty boring, really... -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
