From Mark J. Perry at Carpe Diem:
From University of Virginia economics professor Lee Coppock's blog Long Run Equilibrium.
We still have a long way to go before the jobless rate equals the levels of the early 1980s. So before we make comparisons to the 1930s and declare that we are in Great Depression II, how about making first making comparisons to the 1980s?
Comment: All the media that we are exposed to tend to draw the most pessimistic portrait of our current economic situation without really putting it into the right perspective. I'm not saying that things aren't bad or alarming, I'm just saying that we need a bit of a reality check and to understand that the talking heads are going to stoke the bad news for all its worth.
2 comments:
Good point. However, we should also remember that, while economically we are far from the 1930s (and in several measures other than unemployment), philosophically there are striking parallels.
We have an incoming progressive President who is explicitly studying FDR and using his policies as a guide. We have a compliant Congress, eager to enact those policies, also.
Worse still, we have a largely compliant SCOTUS where FDR had a resistant one (at least for a few years.) We also have an enormously popular and successful environmental movement (granted most people disagree with the explicit, extreme views). And, we have Americans who are now two generations degraded from traditional respect for the Constitution and Western values in general.
It doesn't help that we have an ongoing war against jihadists that, except for Iraq, we're making little progress against while the West is surrendering to them by force of political correctness with the aid of an anti-West media around the world and here.
Far from hopeless, but not a pretty sight. Economics is actually the least of our problems.
On the upside, we have better communications and information gathering facilities and much better informed and prepared pro-American, pro-capitalist intellectuals than we had 80 years ago, along with the historical perspective provided by the passage of those same decades. We also have the highly instructive failed systems of the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, South America and Cuba, etc.
It's going to be an interesting drama, at minimum, to see which side wins.
Jeff,
You are spot on as usual. I do worry that we may be repeating the Hoover--FDR period with great haste.
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