http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/08/290349/the-depression-and-our-recession/The Depression And Our Recession
By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 8, 2011 at 11:30 am
Here’s a chart of real GDP during the Great Depression:
As you can see, the upshot is that output re-obtained 1929 levels in 1936, seven years after the Depression began or in the fourth year of the Roosevelt administration.
Now here’s our current Great Recession. We haven’t yet re-obtained 2008 levels of output. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that we’ll do so in less time than seven years from the start of the recession and before the fourth year of the Obama administration.
In terms of Obama’s re-election prospects, the two situations aren’t even slightly equivalent. FDR took the helm of a country in an incredibly deep ditch and presided over rapid growth. Obama took the helm of a country whose economy was declining at a terrifying pace and turned that around into slow growth. The evidence suggests that you’d much rather be in an FDR-style situation than an Obama-style situation if you want to be popular and win elections. And if you want to undertake a broad legislative reform agenda, it’s very helpful to be popular and win elections.
But none of that should obscure the fact that there’s precious little evidence that FDR’s recovery policies were any more effective than Obama’s were. “Things were getting worse at a terrifying rapid pace and would have gotten much worse had I not intervened” is a lame campaign message, but it’s a pretty impressive achievement. I wish more had been done, but the reality is that there are no historical examples I can think of that feature a large economy in a comparable hole doing better.
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