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Krugman: Obama can be the socialist FDR didn’t have the balls to be!

November 10th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

by Anton


Paul Krugman thinks that Obama should emulate F.D.R., except for the part where F.D.R. wasn’t socialist enough:

Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; F.D.R. is in. Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt era really offer for today’s world?

The answer is, a lot. But Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.

He also adds has a fun little passage that amounts to: “Evil conservatives want to dispute that the New Deal fixed the Great Depression, but the one study I choose to quote supports my point of view.”

Krugman was unbearable even before the Nobel. Now I don’t even know what the word is.

Filed under: economics, politics

One Response to “Krugman: Obama can be the socialist FDR didn’t have the balls to be!”

  1. Noah
    November 11th, 2008 - 3:44 pm

    I’m sure you loved this sentence, Anton:

    It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

    A lot of people have been writing about this lately. Here’s what (Libertarian and writer for The Atlantic) Megan McArdle has to say:

    You can argue whether FDR, on net, helped a lot, helped a little, or mildly hindered recovery. But you cannot argue that if FDR had gotten into office on January 20th, 1930, America would have avoided most of the pain of the next three years. The progression of the bank panics and industrial slowdown throughout the next two years is well described, but not well understood. But the problem was clearly not merely a lack of government activity, or fiscal stimulus. Hoover was, contra popular myth, fairly active. It’s just nothing he did worked. Neither did most of the things FDR tried.

    Clive Crook at FT says:

    The economy promptly tanked. In the end it was revived not by the New Deal but by the war FDR had promised to stay out of. He won two more presidential elections.

    The similarities between 1932 and 2008 make the temptation to draw parallels impossible to resist. One lesson that might give the president-elect comfort is that voters can overlook a lot of failure if they are sure that a president is on their side. Persuading them of this was FDR’s surpassing talent. Mr Obama may have the same knack.

    The history of the Great Depression is obscured by partisan mythology. One must steer a middle course between regarding FDR as a kind of saint who delivered the US from economic collapse and global conflict, and a malicious bungler who trashed the constitution and prolonged the Depression.

    He goes into a lot more detail there in what is a really good article.

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