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For a quarter of a century the industrial Western world has been living in the euphoria of continuous improvements in welfare, based on economic programming, increasing integration and terms of trade which favor indus trial countries and discriminate against agricultural regions. It is true that recessions have periodically recurred during these years : time and again, however, government intervention succeeded in reducing them to mere "in ventory cycles". In contrast with the twenties and thirties, when economic policy in the West focused on fighting unemployment and stimulating investment, the postwar period has been characterized by a permanent concern to curb inflationary pressure, which was partly due to full-employ ment. The present welfare economy has given rise to a growth of the pro pensity to consume such that public policy has often been constrained to limit consumption and stimulate saving. In this new framework it has perhaps been forgotten that today's welfare owes much to the lessons from the past. The bitter world crisis experience of the thirties in particular has exerted a fruitful and decisive influence upon the search for means to prevent, eliminate or soften the cyclical fluctuations which the process of economic growth involves. Forty years after the out break of the greatest economic crisis ever, it seems useful to draw up the balancesheet of the lessons learned from it. There exists a large literature about the depression of the thirties.
This classic book offers a broad sweep of economic history from prehistoric times to the present, and explores the disparity of wealth among nations. Now in its fourth edition, A Concise Economic History of the World includes expanded coverage of recent developments in the European Union, transition economies, and East Asia.
The fateful days of the great stock market crash entered modem history almost 50 years ago to this day. The cyclic turning point of the U. S. economy oc curred, however, around June 1929, and economic activity receded substantial ly over the subsequent months. The onset of an economic downswing thus became clearly visible before the famous crash. But the October event stays in the public's mind as the symbol of the Great Depression. For nearly four years, until the spring of 1933, the U. S. economy plunged into a deep reces sion. Activity declined, prices fell, and there emerged a massive unemploy ment problem. The economy ultimately overcame this shock in 1933. Prices rose rapidly in spite of substantial margins of unusual resources. Activity ex panded, but occasionally at a somewhat hesitant rate. The expansion, however, was interrupted by another recession of major proportions during 1937-38. The tragic sequence of events shaped public consciousness and influenced new approaches and views in economic policymaking. The activist approach to "stabilization policy" and a wide range of regulatory policies were essentially justified in terms of this experience. These policies were crucially influenced by our understanding and interpretation of the Great Depression. The view of a radically unstable economic process perennially on the edge of serious collapse gained wide popularity and became a central element of the Keynesian tradi- 2 INTRODUCTION tion. It encouraged, with supplementary interpretations, an interventionist and expanding role of the government in our economic affairs.
For a quarter of a century the industrial Western world has been living in the euphoria of continuous improvements in welfare, based on economic programming, increasing integration and terms of trade which favor indus trial countries and discriminate against agricultural regions. It is true that recessions have periodically recurred during these years : time and again, however, government intervention succeeded in reducing them to mere "in ventory cycles". In contrast with the twenties and thirties, when economic policy in the West focused on fighting unemployment and stimulating investment, the postwar period has been characterized by a permanent concern to curb inflationary pressure, which was partly due to full-employ ment. The present welfare economy has given rise to a growth of the pro pensity to consume such that public policy has often been constrained to limit consumption and stimulate saving. In this new framework it has perhaps been forgotten that today's welfare owes much to the lessons from the past. The bitter world crisis experience of the thirties in particular has exerted a fruitful and decisive influence upon the search for means to prevent, eliminate or soften the cyclical fluctuations which the process of economic growth involves. Forty years after the out break of the greatest economic crisis ever, it seems useful to draw up the balancesheet of the lessons learned from it. There exists a large literature about the depression of the thirties.
Few periods in history compare to the Great Depression. Stock market crashes, bread lines, bank runs, and wild currency speculation were worldwide phenomena--all occurring with war looming in the background. This period has provided economists with a marvelous laboratory for studying the links between economic policies and institutions and economic performance. Here, Ben Bernanke has gathered together his essays on why the Great Depression was so devastating. This broad view shows us that while the Great Depression was an unparalleled disaster, some economies pulled up faster than others, and some made an opportunity out of it. By comparing and contrasting the economic strategies and statistics of the world's nations as they struggled to survive economically, the fundamental lessons of macroeconomics stand out in bold relief against a background of immense human suffering. The essays in this volume present a uniquely coherent view of the economic causes and worldwide propagation of the depression.
This is an enjoyable and immensely readable book which combines in interview format, reflections by prominent economists on contemporary and subsequent explanations of the Great Depression with what Bernanke in his foreword refers to as highbrow gossip concerning the lives and experiences of those selected economists who lived through the era. W.R. Garside, Australian Economic History Review The tone of the book is broad, and it moves fluidly between discussion of grand intellectual debates about what mattered, personal thoughts of the interviewer and his subjects, formative experiences, events and gossip. Christopher M. Meissner, The International History Review This volume is built around transcripts of interviews conducted in 1997 and 1998 with 11 noteworthy economists who had been graduate students in the 1930s. They were invited to reflect on how the Great Depression affected them, both personally and professionally. As Ben S. Bernanke remarks in the foreword, this is first-rate highbrow gossip . The result is both instructive and entertaining. William J. Barber, Journal of Economic History The interviews with famous senior economists contained in this enjoyable book achieve two important, and quite distinct, goals. First, they provide invaluable insights into the history of theorizing about the Depression. In these conversations we see the struggles of the brightest young economists of their generation to reconcile old paradigms of the efficiency and optimality of free markets with the hard facts of mass unemployment and economic collapse they saw around them in the 1930s. In their attempts to find new answers we see the roots of current ideas and debates in economics. These interviews do an excellent job of recapturing the sense of uncertainty, the feeling of grappling with an intractable puzzle, that almost every one of these economists experienced. The second achievement of these interviews is to provide, well, first-rate highbrow gossip. The interviewees are outstanding economists but they are also an exceptional group of people. They hail from around the world, from a variety of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Each, in one way or the other, found his or her way to professional prominence, often in the face of substantial adversity. From the foreword by Ben S. Bernanke, Princeton University, US It is an accepted truism that the Great Depression did more for the development of modern economics than any other single event. Some of the greatest economists of the twentieth century were inspired to go into the field as a direct result of their experiences during this period. This book explores the most prominent economic explanations of the Great Depression and how it affected the lives, experiences, and subsequent thinking of economists who lived through that era. Presented in interview format, this collection of conversations with Moses Abramovitz, Morris Adelman, Milton Friedman, Albert Hart, Charles Kindleberger, Wassily Leontief, Paul Samuelson, Anna Schwartz, James Tobin, Herbert Stein and Victor Zarnowitz provides a record of their reflections on the economics of the Great Depression and on the major events which occurred during those critical years. This volume is also another chapter in the legacy of the interwar generation of economists and is intended as a token of gratitude for the contributions they have made to the economics profession. Randall Parker has given us a window into the lives of these gifted scholars and an important glimpse into the world that shaped them. Any student or scholar of economics will find this homage to and record of the brightest voices to come out of this critical time to be indispensable.