In 2005 the right-wing magazine Human Events listed Keynes’s General Theory among the ten most harmful books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, right up there with Mein Kampf and Das Kapital.
What actually happened, of course, was that in 2008–09 the Fed did everything Friedman said it should have done in the 1930s—and even so the economy seems trapped in a syndrome that, while not nearly as bad as the Great Depression, bears a clear family resemblance. Moreover, many economists, far from being ready to help craft and defend additional steps, raised extra barriers to action instead. What was striking and disheartening about these barriers to action was—there’s no other way to say it—the sheer ignorance they displayed.
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What actually happened, of course, was that in 2008–09 the Fed did everything Friedman said it should have done in the 1930s—and even so the economy seems trapped in a syndrome that, while not nearly as bad as the Great Depression, bears a clear family resemblance. Moreover, many economists, far from being ready to help craft and defend additional steps, raised extra barriers to action instead. What was striking and disheartening about these barriers to action was—there’s no other way to say it—the sheer ignorance they displayed.
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