Learning from history

Says Kevin Drum, about the lessons we’ve learned from the Great Depression:

If we had taken the same policy actions that Hoover and Mellon took in the 30s, does anyone doubt that the results would have been another Great Depression? I don’t. We may still be doing a lot of dumb things, but we’re an awful lot smarter than we were 80 years ago.

Some interesting corrective thoughts in the comments, including the fact that these are non-farm figures, and far more people worked on farms in the 1930s than do now. Also that unemployment figures have been massaged downwards pretty much in every major industrialised country - you need to add the people who have given up looking for a job, or who are working two jobs when they’d rather be working one (a particularly US-centric phenomenon, I think).

Sometimes we don’t learn, though (via drjon:

The Australian accents just make it funnier.