The title above isn't meant to be 100 percent literal. And, I haven't jumped on any conservative bandwagon.
It IS, though, to signify I largely agree with Paul Stiglitz's new essay, that anti-Keynesian monetary contraction may well not have been the primary cause, or even primary exacerbator of, the Depression.
Rather, as in today's economy, it was ultimately an employment issue.
Just as Henry Blodgett noted a week ago that consumers create jobs more than anybody else, Stiglitz notes taht if we can't consume, to put it crudely, job creation is in trouble.
Read the whole thing. He says the same issues apply to the Great Recession, too.
As does, to the degree it worked more than deficit spending in particular or monetarism in general, Stiglitz' solution. It's the other half of the New Deal: A direct federal jobs program, or more than one.
Unfortunately, Obama the neolib ain't a bold experimenter, unlike FDR, so we ain't getting any such thing. Instead, it's "college for all" even as we already face a "higher education bubble."
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