Murphy on the Case
The economist Robert Murphy’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal is out. It’s an attempt to overturn the received wisdom about the Depression (i.e. Hoover espoused laissez-faire policies, World War II was responsible for the recovery, etc.) through an Austrian treatment.
This looks pretty good. Murray Rothbard wrote a classic work on the Depression, but I was frustrated by the fact that it ended its analysis with the end of Hoover’s term, when a Rothbardian take on the Roosevelt terms and the effect of World War II would have been so valuable. It also is pretty dense and dry in parts — not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s a scholarly treatise, after all. But Murphy’s book looks to be a less difficult treatment of the subject while still being analytically rigorous. It’s also gotten effusive reviews from Jeff Tucker and Robert Wenzel.
In case you missed it, I wrote an article at Doublethink touching on the same issues, which I had considered to be the last word on the subject, but apparently this Murphy guy thinks he has something more to add.
P.S. Who would have thought three years ago that a new book about the Great Depression would be so topical? How far we’ve fallen…
April 20th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I’m sure it’s just a summary of what you wrote, Mark. That, and it probably has more entertaining illustrations. And maybe a chart. I don’t know how you thought you could get away with writing about economics without including at least one chart.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I think you’re right, Karl. I’ll try to draw a couple of caricatures of Roosevelt to include next time, or at least put in some Word clip art. And maybe try to graph GDP against number of pigs slaughtered by the government or something.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I think that’ll take you over the top. Probably get a big book deal out of it.
April 20th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I am sure that there are Rothbard essays somewhere on 1933-1945.
A good book on Roosevelt is John T. Flynn’s _The Roosevelt Myth_, which is great for picking up where Rothbard left off, only it doesn’t good too much into economics. Even though they’re on different topics, Taubes reminded me a lot of Flynn’s book.
April 20th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I guess that makes sense considering Rothbard wrote about everything. I wish I had thought of that when I was researching the piece, I would have been less panicked upon realizing AGD didn’t cover the Roosevelt years..