A former libertarian on YouTube has made a brief video critiquing the libertarian narrative of the depression of 1920: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7yME2CUVmo Since he mostly lists facts and it’s hard to argue against facts when you can’t ascertain their veracity, I’d like to ask the more knowl…

Note that he also believes we should esablish government panels of psychologists to tell people how to act and feel…

Let’s disregard Spawk’s views on psychology for a moment and focus on that particular issue.

The libertarian narrative? I thought it was an Austrian narrative?

I don’t have a huge amount of data to compare what he’s saying to, so I have a hard time proving or disproving the facts which he is using. I feel like he at least has to be leaving some facts out, or else the normal libertarian assertion that the recession “was as bad” was truly the result of poo…

Going to respond to each major point individually (lengthy response). “GNP must fall 10% for it to even be classified as a depression.” False. A depression is not a severe recession. In fact, the term “depression” is void of any meaning in economics today. Periods of economic contraction, often as…

Took a gander at some of the recommended threads and the federal reserve calculates the money supply like this And I think to myself that this doesn’t fit with anyone’s explanation. The money supply continually increases at a very high rate as a recession breaks out and then it starts to decrea…

Good stuff Esuric. I’d also note that economists as a whole are not even close to coming up with a definition of “depression,” and so when they study the subject at all they tend to measure in terms of simple peaks and troughs in economic activity for the sake of avoiding disputes over semantics. As…

Esuric, I thought that the federal reserve has always had power over the three “textbook” ways in which it controls the money supply: Federal funds rate, the discount rate, and required reserves. The fed has no direct control over the federal funds, merely an indirect influence through open market…

Depression of 1920 Revisited

Economics Economics Questions

John_James February 2, 2012, 5:37pm 6

For more info on this,

see here

(in particular the links listed at the bottom.)

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Depression of 1920 Revisited

see here

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