… is from page 115 of Robert Higgs’s excellent October 2006 paper “What Got Us Into and Out of the Great Depression?” as this paper is reprinted in Higgs’s 2007 book, Neither Liberty Nor Safety (original emphasis):
For the eleven-year period from 1930 through 1940, net private investment totaled minus $3.1 billion, and only in 1941 did annual net investment finally exceed the 1929 amount. No economy can prosper when it goes more than ten years without adding to its capital stock, and economists of various schools agree that the failure of private investment to recover accounts in great part for the Great Duration.
DBx: Forty years ago, in July 1984, Mario Cuomo told the delegates and other worthies who assembled in San Francisco’s Moscone Center for that year’s Democratic National Convention that “Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees.” Of course the Democrats believed this account, for most Americans believe it. The myth that the New Deal helped the American economy – that FDR’s interventions (some of which were begun by Hoover) made that decade’s calamitous economic downturn a bit less ‘great’ as a depression – persists. But the reality is that the New Deal prolonged the Depression.
