’)Johnathan Chait nails it
Now here is the extremely strange thing about The Forgotten Man: it does not really argue that the New Deal failed. In fact, Shlaes does not make any actual argument at all, though she does venture some bold claims, which she both fails to substantiate and contradicts elsewhere. Reviewing her book in The New York Times, David Leonhardt noted that Shlaes makes her arguments ‘mostly by implication.’ This is putting it kindly. Shlaes introduces the book by asserting her thesis, but she barely even tries to demonstrate it. Instead she chooses to fill nearly four hundred pages with stories that mostly go nowhere. The experience of reading The Forgotten Man is more like talking to an old person who lived through the Depression than it is like reading an actual history of the Depression. Major events get cursory treatment while minor characters, such as an idiosyncratic black preacher or the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, receive lengthy portraits. Having been prepared for a revisionist argument against the New Deal, I kept wondering if I had picked up the wrong book.
My favorite wing-nut talking point (soon to come from Jay) is that WWII and not the New Deal ended the Great Depression.
Obviously, it was both things that worked to turn the economic tide but more to the point, what was WWII but one of the largest series of Federal expenditures of all time in America? Republicans have this strange habit of thinking wars don’t cost any money.
Further, the GI Bill, a Federal education subsidy was a great social “equalizer” for people like my grand-father and dad.
And it brought millions of women into the workplace for the first time.
In some ways WWII was basically an extension of the New Deal. Yet again, a Democratic president had to clean up a Republican (Coolidge, Harding, Hoover). He did so by making America the greatest country in the world.
That “The Forgotten Man” is a farce may have something to do with Ms. Shlaes being a weak-minded, barely informed, dilettante hack fraud.
My favorite wing-nut talking point (soon to come from Jay) is that WWII and not the New Deal ended the Great Depression.
Well, WWDeuce was a pretty big Public Works Project.
“WWDeuce was a pretty big Public Works Project”
Exactly. And people tend to just look at the “hard” military spending for guns and bullets and planes and salaries, not so much things like the GI Bill, technological innovations, and social barriers overcome (women in the workplace, blacks and Asians serving honorably).
Why does Johnathan Chait have to be such a wanker on foreign policy?
If you want a good idea of just how much of a hack Amity Shlaes is, just listen to Monday’s episode of To the Point. She is so obviously out of her depth, but the lies just keep on coming. I got so angry, I actually had to turn it off.
Good description. She’s even worse when she’s talking; heard her on To The Point the other night and she went from a naked claim that slight changes in marginal tax rates will affect the behavior of rich people to a twenty second, incomplete, decade-by-decade overview of economic history since the 1920s, punctuated by the weird grunting noises that inarticulate people (or comedians) use instead of words. She seemed to be trying to use the grunts as nuance. And then when she was criticized by one of the other panelists, her basic response was that people should stop being mean to each other over tax policy. Embarrassing.