Here’s a letter to National Review.
Editor:
In both style and substance, Amity Shlaes’s review of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 shines (“Sorkin Rounds Up the Usual Suspects,” November 27). Anyone tempted to buy the potted history that Ross peddles should consult Ms. Shlaes’s excellent review.
There are, though, two works that further bolster Ms. Shlaes’s criticisms of Ross’s book but that (doubtless because of space constraints) she doesn’t mention. These are Robert Higgs’s 2006 book, Depression, War, and Cold War, and George Selgin’s 2025 False Dawn.
Higgs argues that the Great Depression lasted as long as it did because FDR’s policies unleased what Higgs calls “regime uncertainty,” which is the severe insecurity regarding their property rights that investors suffered as a result of New Deal measures and rhetoric. This insecurity was so great that investors remained on the sidelines throughout the 1930s, thus preventing economic recovery. Higgs tested his regime-uncertainty thesis using polling data and evidence from financial markets; each test supports the claim that FDR and his New Dealers prolonged, rather than helped to end, the Great Depression.
In a complementary work – one in which he bends over backwards to be fair to Roosevelt – Selgin painstakingly investigates the consequences of each of several different New Deal programs that were meant to promote economic recovery. He concludes that, while FDR’s imposition of a bank holiday and then suspension of the gold standard in 1933 were beneficial, no one can legitimately say, “without contradicting a wealth of evidence, that most subsequent New Deal policies and rhetoric promoted recovery more than they hampered it.”
Readers genuinely interested in learning about the Great Depression and the New Deal would do well to leave Sorkin’s book on the shelf and consult instead the volumes by Higgs and by Selgin – and also, indeed, Ms. Shlaes’s own brilliant 2007 book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
