Tag Archives: Economic History

From the New Yorker:

Perhaps nobody’s task was more important than Romer’s. She had drafted a crucial section of the memo which included an economic forecast and projections about the impact of a fiscal stimulus. Romer was well suited for the job; an economic historian, she was a close student of Washington policymaking during downturns. One of her key papers as an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she had spent the previous twenty years, showed that, contrary to popular belief, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s spending programs hadn’t pulled America out of the Depression. (She found that monetary policy was the key factor.) Conservatives had seized on the paper to disprove the efficacy of fiscal stimulus, but Romer’s point wasn’t that Roosevelt had spent too much to no purpose; it was that he hadn’t spent enough. When faced with a severe recession, she believed in overwhelming force.  Read more...