So I'm writing a paper on the Great Depression and the New Deal for this history college course I'm taking. My professor (a historian) seems to have a very rudimentary knowledge of economics and has a hard-on for FDR and his policies.
What economic insights about the Great Depression and the New Deal could I talk about that would blow him away? Like I said, he's not an economist and has never heard anyone actually pronounce Keynesian correctly.
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You could talk about the Great Depression you have knowing your degree you're striving to get is worthless
It's a gen ed. My major is CS.
My major is counter strike also
balance sheet recession, liquidity trap, government borrowing to increase money supply, fiscal expansion/more gov spending to stimulate job growth in the market. the usual stuff
World War 2 lifted the US out of GD. All of our industrial competitors (England, Germany) industrial centers were dilapidated after the war and led to the golden age of 50s, 60s. Factories during the war were firing on all cylinders. Ship yards etc. It's pretty common knowledge FDR alleviated some pain, but didn't get us out of it.
New Deal didn't do enough in terms of government spending. Liquidity just went into debt, so only the creditors gained. Recovery didn't happen until WW2 when government spending went of the charts.
The problem with fixing the economy in a modern system is that the government has to spend a lot but can't do it unless some jackoffs can save a flag about it.
>A fucking computer science major
>Talking shit to his professor about not knowing about economics
>Some kiddy undergrad lolbertarian hating on FDR
Nigga, why don't you go ahead and do it. Try to call him out on all that shit you think you know about.
What kind of economic insights could you possibly have lol?
Yet it could be said that stuff like this only led to the government creating unneeded jobs to make a product that did not benefit in any way the average consumer and just wasted more resources and prolonged the Depression longer than it should have gone on. This is the same man who gave subsidies to farmers whilst paying them not to grow food in a starving nation and even killed farm animals and burned cops to kill supply. Also his meddling with gold by making it no longer a viable form of currency and alternative to the dollar only hurt many people and forced them to rely totally on the U.S. dollar, which was doing badly then. Many adore him because we are told he is a good president, but he did a lot of fucking meddling that no ones wants to talk of. Some people think other presidents acted like kings, well he acted as dictatorial emperor. Fuck the People, his wants and constituents come first.
>They didn't keelhaul into debt enough!
Why do you people keep repeating this meme?
Lol. The two points I wrote about involved producing goods for the war effort and manufacturing goods for the entire world in a post-war environment. The capital was allocated efficiently. I'm just happy my family was white, American, and able to take advantage of everything this family had to offer during that period.
>Getting off the gold standard was a bad thing
Yeah let's just let the gold hoarders keep the economy shrinking and deflation rising.
Fiat kick-started the economy by allowing government to print money that would be spent for actual goods instead of being hoarded by Jews who don't care that over a million people are fucking starving
OP let me ask you something.
How long has your professor been teaching?
How old is he?
How old are you?
How many other dozens or even hundreds or even thousands of arrogant 20 year old knowitall shitbricks before you have attempted to "punk" this professor?
What do you think you know, that he doesn't? What argument do you intend to produce, that he hasn't heard (and defeated) before?
Sure you could Google some bullshit redpill nonsense.
Or you could sit down, shut up, learn a thing or two, and move on with your life.
FDR put hobos back to work, and beat up Hitler. He was pretty rad
>Fiat kick-started the economy
Don't buy into the keynsian meme. There was plenty of economic growth during the gold standard.
> gold
> growing
start here: mises.org
Mine is WoW but markets change so I've had to make a career transition over the past few years
You don't want to blow him away, you want to pass the course
Regarding the effects of war time government spending on the economy, you should read Henry Hazlitt's economics in one lesson. He first introduces the broken window fallacy then applies it to war. The book is available for free on the mises website.
The great depression was filled with un and underemployed people and a lack of demand for all products. Getting into debt in the short-term (if markets offer low enough options, that is) will raise total demand and will re-circulate. Once the benefits are realized, pay the debt off, or more likely (every EOCD does this) the debt clears itself off overtime, as the most relevant measure of debt (to gdp) increases slowly when you're investing.
He loves FDR because he directly challenged some of the problems with the New Deal. Could have done more, could have failed less in some areas but overall something had to be done.
top top kek
Most of the policies that FDR employed increased the severity of the Great Depression.
Bubble in commodities like grain, cattle etc which grew during the roaring 20s based on speculation and probably market manipulation by the federal reserve.
When the bubble burst in 1929 FDR vowed to fix the market, and so when he came into power he instituted a series of price fixing policies (aka creating artificial shortages) in order to "help the farmers and investors" as there was now an over abundance of stock causing prices to plummet dramatically.
(now if you weren't an inbred studying history, and instead studied something useful, you would realise the insanity of these policies)
Farmers were forced to kill their cattle, and burn their crops as it cost too much to keep on hand, and thanks to price fixing, they could only sell a fraction of their stock. So while people starved in the streets, farmers were destroying their food. This lead to the infamous "dustbowl" in the united states.
READ ABOUT BROKEN WINDOW THEORY and then realise the insanity of keynesianism.
There have been bigger crashes than the crash of 1929, but the severity was due to the Governments reaction to the crash.
FDR also temporarily banned and confiscated gold (aka literal theft of people's wealth), and abandoned the gold standard causing the usd to inflate relative to gold from 20(or so) usd to 35 usd, destroying saver's purchasing power.
FDR took over many private production industries, which meant that businesses couldn't develop products which people wanted. The government more or less paid people to dig ditches and then fill them in again, leaving no positive productive externality to society (like when you produce a car for some one, there is a transfer of value, and that car then decreases the value of all other cars and second hand cars on the market (less demand), allowing for poorer people to buy and consume).
On my phone cbf rereading for mistakes etc
press.princeton.edu
According to Milton Friedman the great depression was caused by tight policy from the fed. There was an NBER paper from Christina Romer that indicated that the recovery was from monetary expansion ( but not due to the fed).
>What is fiscal stimulus?
It's not as effective as the left say but it can work.
OP this pretty much sums up the GD If you want to get more of an understanding of the GD you should begin here with this video youtube.com
Look a little back. The massive European bloodshed of WW1 caused a great need in europe, allowing massive exports of american goods.
the romantic jingoism of the 19teens was dying out after the bloodshed.
Shipping was becoming safer and faster. america was expanding.
eventually europe stabilized and the exports shrank creating a bubble. Rather than let the farmers go out of business and redeploy their resources. he chose to keep farmers in business.
We were reaching an inflection point in the efficiency of farming. wherein significantly less portions of the population needed to farm to feed the whole.
Rather than redirect these resources and increase their training and transition into the modern economy, by investing in human capital FDR with his insane policies invested in wasteful redirection of resources into an old way of life. today the rapid rate of development is well understood with things like moores law of computing. There was no equivalent for manufacturing. and it was falsely assumed to be linear.
People lost their freedom and were robbed of their mobility. So instead of creating massive labor intensive factories and burning through the food supply we prolonged inefficiencies by keeping bad and unlucky farmers in business.
We could have had ridiculously cheap cars decades sooner, and completely reworked the american road system and employed all these people much sooner.
The great depression instituted a mania of distrust and ignorance in the banking and systems of government whose effects are felt by individuals to this day.
His policies sank the world at least 20 years behind in progress.
Imagine the PC hitting homes in the 70's. how far ahead would we be.
You think it worked after 2008??
We are in the biggest all round bubble that i can think of in the last 100 years. Housing bubbles in most OECD countries rival pre 2008 usa (australia, canada, even some states in the usa etc), student loan bubble, new stock market bubble (very little real growth since 2008, most growth has been fueled by debt, stimulus and interest rates) yet thanks to qe1 2 and 3 coupled with 0% interest rates for record times we have soared to new heights in the stock market. We just kicked tha can down the road, didn't let the market correct itself, now the problem we are facing is far worse than 2008
Did you know that for every 1% hike in interest rates in the USA, the government has to pay an extra 200 billion in interest? And the longer interest rates stay close to 0% the bigger the bubbles will get (more people get hurt in the long run). Literally no way out without some form of default... hmm sure looked like obama's stimulus spending sure did help (if the fed + obama decide to print 20 trillion instead of defaulting, many countries would dump their us treasuries, effectively hyperinflating the usd) also defaulting would heavily damage their credit rating.
Printing money for stimulus is also an indirect tax on people. You can't add purchasing power to an economy (without producing products that people want) just by adding more money. That purchasing power comes from someone (you are robbing your grandpas savings gg).
On a phone again, grammar isn't perfect, could have gone more indepth but cbf right now.