The Great Depression
The lessons from the history of economic thought teach us that one of the
main driving forces behind the evolution of new ideas is the march of events.
While theoretical ideas can help us understand historical events, it is also true
that ‘the outcome of historical events often challenges theorists and overturns
theories, leading to the evolution of new theories’ (Gordon, 2000a, p. 580).
The Great Depression gave birth to modern macroeconomics as surely as
accelerating inflation in the late 1960s and early 1970s facilitated the monetarist
counter-revolution (see Johnson, 1971). It is also important to note that
many of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, such as Milton
Friedman, James Tobin and Paul Samuelson, were inspired to study economics
in the first place as a direct result of their personal experiences during this
period (see Parker, 2002).
While Laidler (1991, 1999) has reminded us that there is an extensive
literature analysing the causes and consequences of economic fluctuations
and monetary instability prior to the 1930s, the story of modern macroeconomics
undoubtedly begins with the Great Depression. Before 1936,
macroeconomics consisted of an ‘intellectual witch’s brew: many ingredients,
some of them exotic, many insights, but also a great deal of confusion’
(Blanchard, 2000). For more than 70 years economists have attempted to
provide a coherent explanation of how the world economy suffered such a
catastrophe. Bernanke (1995) has even gone so far as to argue that ‘to understand
the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics’.
Although Keynes was a staunch defender of the capitalist system against
all known alternative forms of economic organization, he also believed that
it had some outstanding and potentially fatal weaknesses. Not only did it
give rise to an ‘arbitrary and inequitable distribution of income’; it also
undoubtedly failed ‘to provide for full employment’ (Keynes, 1936, p. 372).
During Keynes’s most productive era as an economist (1919–37) he was to
witness at first hand the capitalist system’s greatest crisis of the twentieth
century, the Great Depression. To Keynes, it was in the determination of the
total volume of employment and GDP that capitalism was failing, not in its
capacity to allocate resources efficiently. While Keynes did not believe that
the capitalist market system was violently unstable, he observed that it
‘seems capable of remaining in a chronic condition of sub-normal activity
for a considerable period without any marked tendency towards recovery or
towards complete collapse’ (Keynes, 1936, p. 249). This is what others
have interpreted as Keynes’s argument that involuntary unemployment can
persist as a equilibrium phenomenon. From this perspective, Keynes concluded
that capitalism needed to be purged of its defects and abuses if it
was to survive the ideological onslaught it was undergoing during the
10 Modern macroeconomics
interwar period from the totalitarian alternatives on offer in both fascist
Germany and communist Soviet Union.
Although a determination to oppose and overturn the terms of the Versailles
peace settlement was an important factor in the growing influence of
the Nazis throughout the 1920s, there seems little doubt that their final rise to
power in Germany was also very closely linked to economic conditions. Had
economic policy in the USA and Europe been different after 1929, ‘one can
well imagine that the horrors of Naziism and the Second World War might
have been avoided’ (Eichengreen and Temin, 2002). In Mundell’s (2000)
assessment, ‘had the major central banks pursued policies of price stability
instead of adhering to the gold standard, there would have been no great
Depression, no Nazi revolution, and no World War II’.
During the 1930s the world entered a ‘Dark Valley’ and Europe became the
world’s ‘Dark Continent’ (Mazower, 1998; Brendon, 2000). The interwar
period witnessed an era of intense political competition between the three
rival ideologies of liberal democracy, fascism and communism. Following
the Versailles Treaty (1919) democracy was established across Europe but
during the 1930s was almost everywhere in retreat. By 1940 it was ‘virtually
extinct’. The failures of economic management in the capitalist world during
the Great Depression allowed totalitarianism and extreme nationalism to
flourish and the world economy began to disintegrate. As Brendon (2000)
comments, ‘if the lights went out in 1914, if the blinds came down in 1939,
the lights were progressively dimmed after 1929’. The Great Depression was
‘the economic equivalent of Armageddon’ and the ‘worst peacetime crisis to
afflict humanity since the Black Death’. The crisis of capitalism discredited
democracy and the old liberal order, leading many to conclude that ‘if laissezfaire
caused chaos, authoritarianism would impose order’. The interwar
economic catastrophe helped to consolidate Mussolini’s hold on power in
Italy, gave Hitler the opportunity in January 1933 to gain political control in
Germany, and plunged Japan into years of ‘economic depression, political
turmoil and military strife’. By 1939, after three years of civil war in Spain,
Franco established yet another fascist dictatorship in Western Europe.
The famous Wall Street Crash of 1929 heralded one of the most dramatic
and catastrophic periods in the economic history of the industrialized capitalist
economies. In a single week from 23 to 29 October the Dow Jones
Industrial Average fell 29.5 per cent, with ‘vertical’ price drops on ‘Black
Thursday’ (24 October) and ‘Black Tuesday’ (29 October). Controversy exists
over the causes of the stock market crash and its connection with the
Great Depression in the economic activity which followed (see the interviews
with Bernanke and Romer in Snowdon, 2002a). It is important to remember
that during the 1920s the US economy, unlike many European economies,
was enjoying growing prosperity during the ‘roaring twenties’ boom. Rostow’s
Understanding modern macroeconomics 11
(1960) ‘age of high mass consumption’ seemed to be at hand. The optimism
visible in the stock market throughout the mid to late 1920s was reflected in a
speech by Herbert Hoover to a Stanford University audience in November
1928. In accepting the Republican Presidential nomination he uttered these
‘famous last words’:
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before
in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have
not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the
last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when
poverty will be banished from this nation. (See Heilbroner, 1989)
In the decade following Hoover’s speech the US economy (along with the
other major industrial market economies) was to experience the worst economic
crisis in its history, to such an extent that many began to wonder if
capitalism and democracy could survive. In the US economy the cyclical
peak of economic activity occurred in August 1929 and a decline in GDP had
already begun when the stock market crash ended the 1920s bull market.
Given that the crash came on top of an emerging recession, it was inevitable
that a severe contraction of output would take place in the 1929–30 period.
But this early part of the contraction was well within the range of previous
business cycle experience. It was in the second phase of the contraction,
generally agreed to be between early 1931 and March 1933, that the depression
became ‘Great’ (Dornbusch et al., 2004). Therefore, the question which
has captured the research interests of economists is: ‘How did the severe
recession of 1929–30 turn into the Great Depression of 1931–33?’ The vast
majority of economists now agree that the catastrophic collapse of output and
employment after 1930 was in large part due to a series of policy errors made
by the fiscal and monetary authorities in a number of industrial economies,
especially the USA, where the reduction in economic activity was greater
than elsewhere (see Bernanke, 2000, and Chapter 2).
The extent and magnitude of the depression can be appreciated by referring
to the data contained in Table 1.1, which records the timing and extent of
the collapse of industrial production for the major capitalist market economies
between 1929 and 1933.
The most severe downturn was in the USA, which experienced a 46.8 per
cent decline in industrial production and a 28 per cent decline in GDP.
Despite rapid growth after 1933 (with the exception of 1938), output remained
substantially below normal until about 1942. The behaviour of
unemployment in the USA during this period is consistent with the movement
of GDP. In the USA, unemployment, which was 3.2 per cent in 1929,
rose to a peak of 25.2 per cent in 1933, averaged 18 per cent in the 1930s and
never fell below 10 per cent until 1941 (Gordon, 2000a). The economy had
fallen so far below capacity (which continued to expand as the result of
technological improvements, investment in human capital and rapid labour
force growth) that, despite a 47 per cent increase in output between 1933 and
1937, unemployment failed to fall below 9 per cent and, following the impact
of the 1938 recession, was still almost 10 per cent when the USA entered the
Second World War in December 1941 (see Lee and Passell, 1979; C. Romer,
1992). Events in Europe were also disastrous and closely connected to US
developments. The most severe recessions outside the USA were in Canada,
Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland,
with the Scandinavian countries, the UK and Japan less severely affected.
Accompanying the decline in economic activity was an alarming rise in
unemployment and a collapse of commodity and wholesale prices (see
Aldcroft, 1993).
How can we explain such a massive and catastrophic decline in aggregate
economic activity? Before the 1930s the dominant view in what we now call
macroeconomics was the ‘old’ classical approach the origins of which go
back more than two centuries. In 1776, Adam Smith’s celebrated An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published, in which
he set forth the invisible-hand theorem. The main idea here is that the profitand
utility-maximizing behaviour of rational economic agents operating under
competitive conditions will, via the ‘invisible-hand’ mechanism, translate
the activities of millions of individuals into a social optimum. Following
Smith, political economy had an underlying bias towards laissez-faire, and
the classical vision of macroeconomics found its most famous expression in
the dictum ‘supply creates its own demand’. This view, popularly known as
Say’s Law, denies the possibility of general overproduction or underproduction.
With the notable exception of Malthus, Marx and a few other heretics,
this view dominated both classical and early neoclassical (post-1870) contributions
to macroeconomic theory. While Friedman argues that during the Great Depression expansionary
monetary policies were recommended by economists at Chicago,
economists looking to the prevailing conventional wisdom contained in the
work of the classical economists could not find a coherent plausible answer
to the causes of such a deep and prolonged decline in economic activity
The lessons from the history of economic thought teach us that one of the
main driving forces behind the evolution of new ideas is the march of events.
While theoretical ideas can help us understand historical events, it is also true
that ‘the outcome of historical events often challenges theorists and overturns
theories, leading to the evolution of new theories’ (Gordon, 2000a, p. 580).
The Great Depression gave birth to modern macroeconomics as surely as
accelerating inflation in the late 1960s and early 1970s facilitated the monetarist
counter-revolution (see Johnson, 1971). It is also important to note that
many of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, such as Milton
Friedman, James Tobin and Paul Samuelson, were inspired to study economics
in the first place as a direct result of their personal experiences during this
period (see Parker, 2002).
While Laidler (1991, 1999) has reminded us that there is an extensive
literature analysing the causes and consequences of economic fluctuations
and monetary instability prior to the 1930s, the story of modern macroeconomics
undoubtedly begins with the Great Depression. Before 1936,
macroeconomics consisted of an ‘intellectual witch’s brew: many ingredients,
some of them exotic, many insights, but also a great deal of confusion’
(Blanchard, 2000). For more than 70 years economists have attempted to
provide a coherent explanation of how the world economy suffered such a
catastrophe. Bernanke (1995) has even gone so far as to argue that ‘to understand
the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics’.
Although Keynes was a staunch defender of the capitalist system against
all known alternative forms of economic organization, he also believed that
it had some outstanding and potentially fatal weaknesses. Not only did it
give rise to an ‘arbitrary and inequitable distribution of income’; it also
undoubtedly failed ‘to provide for full employment’ (Keynes, 1936, p. 372).
During Keynes’s most productive era as an economist (1919–37) he was to
witness at first hand the capitalist system’s greatest crisis of the twentieth
century, the Great Depression. To Keynes, it was in the determination of the
total volume of employment and GDP that capitalism was failing, not in its
capacity to allocate resources efficiently. While Keynes did not believe that
the capitalist market system was violently unstable, he observed that it
‘seems capable of remaining in a chronic condition of sub-normal activity
for a considerable period without any marked tendency towards recovery or
towards complete collapse’ (Keynes, 1936, p. 249). This is what others
have interpreted as Keynes’s argument that involuntary unemployment can
persist as a equilibrium phenomenon. From this perspective, Keynes concluded
that capitalism needed to be purged of its defects and abuses if it
was to survive the ideological onslaught it was undergoing during the
10 Modern macroeconomics
interwar period from the totalitarian alternatives on offer in both fascist
Germany and communist Soviet Union.
Although a determination to oppose and overturn the terms of the Versailles
peace settlement was an important factor in the growing influence of
the Nazis throughout the 1920s, there seems little doubt that their final rise to
power in Germany was also very closely linked to economic conditions. Had
economic policy in the USA and Europe been different after 1929, ‘one can
well imagine that the horrors of Naziism and the Second World War might
have been avoided’ (Eichengreen and Temin, 2002). In Mundell’s (2000)
assessment, ‘had the major central banks pursued policies of price stability
instead of adhering to the gold standard, there would have been no great
Depression, no Nazi revolution, and no World War II’.
During the 1930s the world entered a ‘Dark Valley’ and Europe became the
world’s ‘Dark Continent’ (Mazower, 1998; Brendon, 2000). The interwar
period witnessed an era of intense political competition between the three
rival ideologies of liberal democracy, fascism and communism. Following
the Versailles Treaty (1919) democracy was established across Europe but
during the 1930s was almost everywhere in retreat. By 1940 it was ‘virtually
extinct’. The failures of economic management in the capitalist world during
the Great Depression allowed totalitarianism and extreme nationalism to
flourish and the world economy began to disintegrate. As Brendon (2000)
comments, ‘if the lights went out in 1914, if the blinds came down in 1939,
the lights were progressively dimmed after 1929’. The Great Depression was
‘the economic equivalent of Armageddon’ and the ‘worst peacetime crisis to
afflict humanity since the Black Death’. The crisis of capitalism discredited
democracy and the old liberal order, leading many to conclude that ‘if laissezfaire
caused chaos, authoritarianism would impose order’. The interwar
economic catastrophe helped to consolidate Mussolini’s hold on power in
Italy, gave Hitler the opportunity in January 1933 to gain political control in
Germany, and plunged Japan into years of ‘economic depression, political
turmoil and military strife’. By 1939, after three years of civil war in Spain,
Franco established yet another fascist dictatorship in Western Europe.
The famous Wall Street Crash of 1929 heralded one of the most dramatic
and catastrophic periods in the economic history of the industrialized capitalist
economies. In a single week from 23 to 29 October the Dow Jones
Industrial Average fell 29.5 per cent, with ‘vertical’ price drops on ‘Black
Thursday’ (24 October) and ‘Black Tuesday’ (29 October). Controversy exists
over the causes of the stock market crash and its connection with the
Great Depression in the economic activity which followed (see the interviews
with Bernanke and Romer in Snowdon, 2002a). It is important to remember
that during the 1920s the US economy, unlike many European economies,
was enjoying growing prosperity during the ‘roaring twenties’ boom. Rostow’s
Understanding modern macroeconomics 11
(1960) ‘age of high mass consumption’ seemed to be at hand. The optimism
visible in the stock market throughout the mid to late 1920s was reflected in a
speech by Herbert Hoover to a Stanford University audience in November
1928. In accepting the Republican Presidential nomination he uttered these
‘famous last words’:
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before
in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have
not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the
last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when
poverty will be banished from this nation. (See Heilbroner, 1989)
In the decade following Hoover’s speech the US economy (along with the
other major industrial market economies) was to experience the worst economic
crisis in its history, to such an extent that many began to wonder if
capitalism and democracy could survive. In the US economy the cyclical
peak of economic activity occurred in August 1929 and a decline in GDP had
already begun when the stock market crash ended the 1920s bull market.
Given that the crash came on top of an emerging recession, it was inevitable
that a severe contraction of output would take place in the 1929–30 period.
But this early part of the contraction was well within the range of previous
business cycle experience. It was in the second phase of the contraction,
generally agreed to be between early 1931 and March 1933, that the depression
became ‘Great’ (Dornbusch et al., 2004). Therefore, the question which
has captured the research interests of economists is: ‘How did the severe
recession of 1929–30 turn into the Great Depression of 1931–33?’ The vast
majority of economists now agree that the catastrophic collapse of output and
employment after 1930 was in large part due to a series of policy errors made
by the fiscal and monetary authorities in a number of industrial economies,
especially the USA, where the reduction in economic activity was greater
than elsewhere (see Bernanke, 2000, and Chapter 2).
The extent and magnitude of the depression can be appreciated by referring
to the data contained in Table 1.1, which records the timing and extent of
the collapse of industrial production for the major capitalist market economies
between 1929 and 1933.
The most severe downturn was in the USA, which experienced a 46.8 per
cent decline in industrial production and a 28 per cent decline in GDP.
Despite rapid growth after 1933 (with the exception of 1938), output remained
substantially below normal until about 1942. The behaviour of
unemployment in the USA during this period is consistent with the movement
of GDP. In the USA, unemployment, which was 3.2 per cent in 1929,
rose to a peak of 25.2 per cent in 1933, averaged 18 per cent in the 1930s and
never fell below 10 per cent until 1941 (Gordon, 2000a). The economy had
fallen so far below capacity (which continued to expand as the result of
technological improvements, investment in human capital and rapid labour
force growth) that, despite a 47 per cent increase in output between 1933 and
1937, unemployment failed to fall below 9 per cent and, following the impact
of the 1938 recession, was still almost 10 per cent when the USA entered the
Second World War in December 1941 (see Lee and Passell, 1979; C. Romer,
1992). Events in Europe were also disastrous and closely connected to US
developments. The most severe recessions outside the USA were in Canada,
Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland,
with the Scandinavian countries, the UK and Japan less severely affected.
Accompanying the decline in economic activity was an alarming rise in
unemployment and a collapse of commodity and wholesale prices (see
Aldcroft, 1993).
How can we explain such a massive and catastrophic decline in aggregate
economic activity? Before the 1930s the dominant view in what we now call
macroeconomics was the ‘old’ classical approach the origins of which go
back more than two centuries. In 1776, Adam Smith’s celebrated An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published, in which
he set forth the invisible-hand theorem. The main idea here is that the profitand
utility-maximizing behaviour of rational economic agents operating under
competitive conditions will, via the ‘invisible-hand’ mechanism, translate
the activities of millions of individuals into a social optimum. Following
Smith, political economy had an underlying bias towards laissez-faire, and
the classical vision of macroeconomics found its most famous expression in
the dictum ‘supply creates its own demand’. This view, popularly known as
Say’s Law, denies the possibility of general overproduction or underproduction.
With the notable exception of Malthus, Marx and a few other heretics,
this view dominated both classical and early neoclassical (post-1870) contributions
to macroeconomic theory. While Friedman argues that during the Great Depression expansionary
monetary policies were recommended by economists at Chicago,
economists looking to the prevailing conventional wisdom contained in the
work of the classical economists could not find a coherent plausible answer
to the causes of such a deep and prolonged decline in economic activity
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