Actually, it's pretty funny to me how he essentially says that the problem was that the Fed contracted the money supply in response to a crash. That's exactly what the Keynesian and Monetarist schools believe.

I also like how at 9:20 or so he says "the biggest gains happened when the National Recovery Act was overturned" well skippy, the National Recovery Act was trying to stop deflation by fixing prices. Not a good idea, definitely a drag on the economy, and not a part of the New Deal liberals want to repeat. He then says the "Agricultural Adjustment Act" (aka a farm subsidy bill) was struck down in 1936, and boom, growth immediately falls off (according to the chart), though his narrative blames that on the institution of the NLRA, which still exists today, and just protects the rights of workers to organize Unions.

What really cause the fall off was that Roosevelt was persuaded to believe that the depression was over, and it was time to cut spending, raise taxes, and balance the budget. Doing so immediately sent the economy crashing down again.

He also uses some voodoo to leave you thinking that because Obama thinks fiscal stimulus will help (and it did, even this video states that the economy recovered when the giant government stimulus of WWII began), he will somehow order the Fed to contract the money supply too. One, he can't, and two, we learned our lesson -- you need to expand the money supply in downturns, otherwise it chokes off the recovery. Bernanke is expanding the money supply.

He also defiantly ends with "it was not the free market and the gold standard that caused the problem", he's half right. With regard to the Great Depression, they were contracting money supply to get back onto the gold standard, and refusing to bail out the banks, which made a recession into a depression (not the free market). This economic problem was caused by the free market, and but Austrians cry out for a return to the gold standard, and that we let the banks fail.

We did it the classical/Austrian way in the 1930's, and it caused the Great Depression. Now you want us to do the same things you wanted (and got) Hoover to do, and got Roosevelt to do in 1937. Forget it.

I've noticed four sub groups, to the three camps in the poltical arena. We have the traditional three: Conservatives, Moderates, and Liberals. But the conservatives & liberals have two other groups: the comprimisers and the fanatics.

Comprimisers, tend to think on legistation, and talk with their counter-parts on the isle. Finding ways to agree to one thing, but come half way on another issue. In do this, they can they have the other side, come to their side on an issue. Its a give & take relationship. When that happens, alot of good works come out of congress, and help propell this country forward.

Fanatics, are the opposite. They take the route of 'my way or the highway' attitude towards discussions. They would not move an inch on their position, regardless if God, Himself, said so. These are also the ones who just flat-out reject the other side, regardless of the issue or arguement. Even if the issue stands to help their side of the arguement.

Today's politics, has these four groups, a compriser & fanatic to each side. The liberal side seems (for the moment), to have a heavy percentage of comprisers then fanatics. Were as conservatives, have a heavy amount of fanatics to comprisers. This creates a huge amount of tension on even simple issues (like education, and the President talking to American children), let alone a complication issue (like Health Care in the USA). We actually call these fanatics the 'neo-' group. Neo-lib, or neolib, and the neo-cons.

Moderates, however, tend to not be as full of passion on the subject matter. They are there, and discuss of things. They tend to have mixed views, liking the ideas of one side, and the other. Some try to bridge the gap of the arguement, to bring a consenus and move on to the next task at hand. And some, rather enjoy the chaos that is created, and just hangs on. Since, the issue will come up in the next election, and judging on how people in their home area feel, is how they market themselves. Which is why many of the issues we all say come up on the Democratic and Republican sides, are the same ones from 1930! Yes, some issues, are new-er, due to history conditions (i.e. events of Sept. 9, 2001, and following it), and some due to technology (i.e. stem cell research and the Internet). But most issues, are just blown over from issues that go back decades.

I think there have been major social upheavals every 30 years or so in human society ever since the industrial revolution (1864 - Civil War, 1900 - Gilded Age, 1930 - Great Depression/WWII, 1960 - Civil Rights/Vietnam, 1980 - Ronald Reagan/Monetarist revolution, 2000's Iraq/Great Recession). I think we're seeing another upheaval now, I just hope it won't get quite so bad as some of the others in my list -- I hope we're going to end up comparing the 2010's more to the 1960's than the 1930's or 1860's. I suspect I'll live through one more major upheaval, assuming my lifespan ends up being somewhat average, and assuming the rate of social change isn't accelerating.

There's a part of me that thinks Kurzweil is right about a Singularity coming -- that the rate of technological advancement will speed up exponentially, and exceed our wildest expectations. I think there's a nonzero chance I'll live long enough to see the start of such a thing, but I think it could just as easily be a century or two away, and not decades.

I do think environmental issues are going to become a massive, unmistakable concern sooner rather than later. I don't think it will be the end of humanity or anything like that, but I suspect we're going to have to either rapidly retool our economy once people snap out of denial, or have a big economic crash coupled with major crop shortages and famine, and then rapidly retool our economy. I would even argue that environmental issues have played a nontrivial role in the current economic hardship, and that the time has come to really start enacting plans for moving away from fossil fuels, and start looking into more medium-to-long term issues like biodiversity and fresh water supply.

As for the freak globe-spanning natural disasters, there's no way to know about those. They could as easily happen tomorrow as they could a couple million years from now. Hopefully those will wait until post-Singularity when we'll be better equipped to deal with something like that...

Tags for this video have been changed from '69 love songs, 1930s, spectacle, dance, design' to 'stephin merritt, 69 love songs, 1930s, spectacle, dance, design' - edited by calvados

^ That's not the version of history I've read.

Most people say that we went from the Great Depression to 1973 without any real crashes or panics, and that that was a good thing. We then went from 1974 to now without any real crashes or panics (with a reasonable debate over whether 2001 counts as a real crash too, or if it's attached to 2009's crisis).

There's debate about the 1973 recession, but it seems reasonable to say that was a confluence of conditions that taught us something. Same with 1930. Probably the same will be true of 2009.

Before that, Great Depression-style crashes and panics were happening multiple times a decade (1907, 1901, 1896, 1893, 1893, 1890, etc.).

Most people consider centralized banking and banking regulation to have been at least part of the stabilization we saw in the 20th century, and that stabilization was a net benefit to the economy.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'mechanics, tutorial, 1930s, torque, rotation, wheels, car, gear' to 'mechanics, tutorial, 1930s, torque, rotation, wheels, car, gear, old timey' - edited by calvados

>> ^onionradish:
The catchphrase "Who's Yehoodi?" popular in the 1930s and 1940s was inspired by Menuhin's guest appearance on a radio show, where Jerry Colonna turned "Yehoodi" into a widely recognized slang term for a mysteriously absent person. It eventually lost all of its original connection with Menuhin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_Menuhin


Wow, and here I thought it was the precursor to Yahoo.

The catchphrase "Who's Yehoodi?" popular in the 1930s and 1940s was inspired by Menuhin's guest appearance on a radio show, where Jerry Colonna turned "Yehoodi" into a widely recognized slang term for a mysteriously absent person. It eventually lost all of its original connection with Menuhin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_Menuhin

There is no viable left wing in this country. Whatever existed was wiped out in the 1930s.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'left wing'. But can you honestly look Obama, Pelosi, Ried, Kennedy, ACORN, Daily Kos, and all the other myriad special interest groups that comprises the modern neo-lib movement and call them anything but 'left wing'? Only people who are thoroughly biased towards the left would see such groups and consider them 'centrist'.

News Updates...
Even the democrat run CBO says Obama's plan would result in no savings...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25415.html#ixzz0MQb9vTLi

5 Key freedoms you will LOSE under Obamacare...
http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/24/news/economy/health_care_reform_obama.fortune/index.htm

Top Democrat demands that Congress pass the bill WITHOUT READING IT...
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=51610&print=on

There is no viable left wing in this country. Whatever existed was wiped out in the 1930s.

The right wing is quickly making themselves as liable; with very similar talks of revolution and violence they sound like anarchists.

In any other country in the world, NBC et al would be labeled right-leaning. For some reason, in the USA, "right of center"="rabid communist".

The wage conversation is a bit of a tangent, but from my point of view the right answer is to expand unemployment benefits and welfare, rather than reduce the minimum wage. I might be convinced that yes, people in certain situations should be able to work for less, but I'd rather the market just adjust to knowing that projects that rely on cheaper labor can't be done here.

As for your assertion that the entire housing asset bubble was caused by Fannie and Freddie and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act...I'm disappointed. I'd thought you were more well-read than to believe that story.

Here's the most basic, simplistic response -- if it was all Fannie and Freddie's fault (two formerly privately-owned and operated companies, BTW), why are other banks in trouble? Why is AIG in trouble?

I agree that the problem here was moral hazard, but I disagree that it was government that created that situation. It seems that the market's own mechanisms for accurately gauging risk failed utterly.

>> ^gtjwkq:
Money spent by govt is, in principle, rarely spent as wisely as money spent by people, because people work to earn and therefore value their money, they usually have to be productive to earn it (which isn't easy), while govt is just politicians and bureaucrats deciding over money they easily appropriate from productive people. I don't know how I can put this in simpler terms.

I hear this a lot from Austro-libertarians. If this were true, banks should never work right, either. The people making the investment choices, and choices about loans are not the people who own the banks. The most risk they have to bear is getting fired, and often they get lavish severance packages even when they are fired, and are almost immediately rehired by another bank.

I agree that having some skin in the game helps motivate people to be more wise with their money, but I don't think there are any people in government who're casually disinterested in how taxpayer money is spent -- on the contrary, I think they're highly interested in either spending it on altruistic things (like unemployment, healthcare, green technology incentives) or spending it on selfish things (tax cuts/subsidies for industries that donated to you, aid in skewing regulation to benefit donors). I like to vote for the former, and call for the latter to be jailed (though it seems they're all guilty of both in varying ratios).

I also think government spending is best directed at things that are unlikely to turn a direct profit, but are useful for humanitarian purposes, or a general positive impact on the economy (e.g. infrastructure).

I would like to see less military spending, but I think that will be politically difficult when there are two wars going on, and a recession. I like the way Obama/Gates have shuffled the military budget in terms of reallocating money between different military projects, but I'm annoyed that the budget did still get an increase for next year.

As for the bank bailouts, I feel like they were a necessary evil. I would rather they'd asked more in the way of concessions from the bank in return, but I do think letting them fail would have just made things worse.

When I give you money, the money is now yours, what you do with it is your own business. But when I'm the govt, and I give you money, I'm giving you money that IS NOT MINE and that I SHOULDN'T BE GIVING TO YOU (at least that's what I'm arguing, a keynesian might think differently). So there lies the root of the problem: govt is to blame for handing out free money, not what people did with it, because it's expected that people will be careless about money that is freely handed to them, as opposed to money that is earned.
People with guns don't inevitably commit murder. About the bus driver, it's expected that he'll drive poorly and crash when drunk (maybe not though if he's lucky), even though I said he was force-fed the alcohol, which is not accurate since I'm not sure investment banks were legally obligated to accept govt money, but it's easy to imagine how a bank might be strongly influenced to accept money if it has no strings attached and it's also offered to its competitors.

This, I think is a crucial part of our disagreement. Say you're a well-known investor who's made ridiculous profits through shrewdly investing in successful business. I walk up to you, give you a million dollars, no strings attached. Are you going to necessarily be reckless and wasteful with that money, simply because it was a gift? What if the money had come from some investment that simply performed better than your expectations? Does that make you unwise?

Would it make any difference how I got the money I gave you? Even if I conned it out of a bunch of nice old ladies, wouldn't you still invest it correctly? That's why I think the Austrian theory doesn't make sense, especially on this topic.

It would make sense if the government, before the economy went haywire, said "do whatever ya like, we'll absorb all your losses" -- but it didn't do that, implicitly or explicitly.

All that said, I disagree with your characterization of there being a qualitative difference between money given to companies being theirs, but that money given to government to pay taxes still somehow remains yours. It's this whole idea that government is operating as a giant racketeering organization (which seems utterly incorrect). It's like the managing corporation of a condominium. By living here, you agree to a contract with the government, and you have to abide by the obligations in the contract, like obeying the laws, and paying taxes.

Regardless of how you think government got the money to give away, I don't see why money government gives to banks somehow will automatically be frittered away, especially if they say "this is yours, no strings attached".

Even though I think Ben Bernanke is an idiot, he's smart enough to be the current chairman of the Fed and even he thinks the Fed helped cause the Great Depression. The conclusions one can take about what happened in the 20's and 30's are not as clear cut as you'd think. What is important to understand are the motivations behind those that acted and those who interpret what happened.

I think you should perhaps read that speech of his more carefully -- I find what Bernanke says about the Great Depression persuasive. He's mostly talking about how much he loves Milton Friedman, but the key paragraph is:

Friedman's emphasis on avoiding monetary disruptions arose, like many of his other ideas, from his study of U.S. monetary history. He had observed that, in many episodes, the actions of the monetary authorities, despite possibly good intentions, actively destabilized the economy. The leading case, of course, was the Great Depression, or as Friedman and Schwartz called it, the Great Contraction, in which the Fed's tightening in the late 1920s and (most importantly) its failure to prevent the bank failures of the early 1930s were a major cause of the massive decline in money, prices, and output. It is likely that Friedman's study of the Depression led him to look for means, such as his proposal for constant money growth, to ensure that the monetary machine did not get out of order. I hope, though of course I cannot be certain, that two decades of relative monetary stability have not led contemporary central bankers to forget the basic Hippocratic principle.

He doesn't go into why the Fed thought what it was doing was the right idea here, but it should sound refreshingly Austrian -- they were worried about deviating from the gold standard too much, and weren't concerned about bank failures because they figured, as you do now, that banks failing is a blessing in disguise: ownership just moves from incompetent managers to competent ones, no muss, no fuss (liquidationism, it's called these days).

What Bernanke believes is that the Fed should have known better and reacted by massively expanding the money supply to stave off deflation, and rescuing the failing banks. What it actually did was contract the monetary supply and let them fail, and that was pouring gasoline on the fire (or as one economist said of Austrian advice at the time, it was "to cry, 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's flood.")

I don't contest that the Fed has a lot of power, and that if wielded incorrectly it can cause a lot of damage. But I think the period of time between the Great Depression and now is a testament to the stability a central bank can create. There were recessions, but no Depressions, or Panics. There's already a debate about whether Greenspan could have prevented this one, but so far that debate is leaning towards the relaxation of banking regulation being at fault, rather than a FRB monetary policy error.

I don't really think debate on the history of the Great Depression is over; Keynesians and Monetarists are still fighting about aspects of it. But Austrian economics fell out of the mainstream in the aftermath of the Great Depression, largely because their policy prescriptions were carried out, to disastrous results. Present-day Austrians don't even deny that a contractionary monetary policy in the late 20's was a bad idea, they just deny it was their idea, even though it's what people like Hayek and Schumpeter were calling for at the time, and what they're calling for now.

That's why I can be perhaps a bit over the top when trying to quash Austrians as quacks; in my opinion their policies caused both Depressions.

Excellent gorillaman.

The first post on this page is outrageous, i can barely stomach the whole thing. Comparing ideals which exclude people on the basis of their skin to the suffragette movement?

So you think excluding people based on their race/colour/creed is comparable to NOT EXCLUDING PEOPLE BASED ON THEIR RACE/COLOUR/CREED (gender) !?!?!??!?!?!?

The BNP have specifically preyed on people in areas who are subject to racial differences and problems. They have thinly veiled their racist and neo-nazi policies behind a virtually transparent curtain of patriotism.

It's sick and disgusting that great britain - a country we once were proud to say that our empire, for a time, stood ALONE against a rising tide of opression which threatened the world - has become a country in which neo-nazi high-rankers (literally, one quit his neo nazi group to take a position at the BNP) can get into a position of vocal power.

Welcome to germany in the 1930's. A rising popularity grows for a party which claims that <x> are the source of your problems, we can do better without <x>. This time, we have history to look back on and realise - QUICKLY - the road we're going down.

The people who voted for the BNP are unreservedly stupid. a) for not realising these thinly veiled racist policies, and b) for not realising that their vote is going to a party of people AS STUPID AS THEY ARE.

The BNP recently made a poster saying "BRITISH PEOPLE FOR BRITISH JOBS!" - featuring a picture of 3 white AMERICANS stood in front of a union jack patting each other on the back. There's a reason not to vote for them. At least our more popular parties would have been crafty and devious enough to not do something so stupid!

Pprt - in one very small sentence, you hit on the truth - that our lazy, careless, empire building MPs in the popular parties do not realise that the backhanded, underhanded, sneaky and elusive tactics they use for governing are hurting us and them in the long run. Or worse, they probably know it and DON'T CARE. They're in it for themselves, not us. But that is NO excuse for letting racists into our government.

i just downvoted my first qm comment.
(i think, i maybe proven wrong, but i dont REMEMBER voting another one down)

No, there have to be others. I'm pretty sure you hated me when you first started commenting.

taking care of eachother as a national ideal is not the same thing as "celebrating" being downtrodden. i suppose you celebrate the kind of greed which creates this human refuse. with compassion, we all grow stronger.

im confused as to your idea of morality.

Since you have firsthand experience in these matters, I have to wonder why you think "greed" is the cause of homelessness. What about mental illness, drug addiction, abusive homes, etc?

Treating homelessness is a logistical nightmare. Half of the money set aside for food stamps goes UNspent, and even if you could round up the homeless to feed them, the ACLU would sue any organization that "violated the rights" of the homeless by putting the mentally ill in an institution.

As in all things, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.



I was orig. addressing the other side of enoch's quote:

"A measure of a society can be made on how it treats its elderly, children and weakest members"

Years ago I read a similar sentiment painted on a wall in Berkeley, CA...

The area of Berkeley I visited had a university campus, with tuition costs of 50K per annum, surrounded by blocks of expensive businesses whose walkways were crowded with young, healthy, able-bodied bums; what they lacked in money they made up for in self-righteousness.

They demanded money because, hey, you were working weren't you? You could afford it!

When hobos were roaming the country in the 1930s, they always offered to work for food or other items. Now there's an entitlement mentality, part of which includes blaming society for self-inflicted wounds.

What about the government/society that celebrates victimhood, creates dependency and makes people weaker?

To answer my own question, last year Florida taxpayers spent 100 million in "free" medical care for illegal aliens, Texas taxpayers spent 250 million, and California? One Billion dollars.

Do you think that one billion spent on illegal invaders might have helped these homeless people instead?

Limited government.
Politicians and their schemes answerable to the Constitution.
Private property rights.
Low taxation.
Strong, defended borders.
Strong military.
Citizenship.

This what the modern leftist defines as "ultra-conservatism". Yet it's also what the Founding Fathers created and what worked from 1776 to the 1930s.

A "moderate" Republican is a Democrat, which is funny because an all-the-way Democrat is now a statist.

Now that the terms have been properly defined, Olbyloon once again makes little sense.

you didn't vote it up!!

In reply to this comment by LordByron:
a vote up for me being Speechless with political correctness