Daniel T. Rodgers: Economics in an Age of Fracture
[Daniel T. Rodgers is a professor of history at Princeton University. His new book, Age of Fracture, has just been published by Harvard University Press.]
If crises change the way we see the world, the Great Recession of 2008-10 has to be reckoned, so far, as an anomaly. It has upended lives, set loose a storm of fears and anxieties, fueled a conservative insurrection in American politics, and shaken economic institutions on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. But in comparison with earlier economic crackups, this crisis has packed an emotional wallop but only an intellectual whimper.
By contrast, Depression-era America was awash in ideas and visions of social change. Many of the concepts that came to the fore in those years went on to shape social thought for decades: Keynes's macroeconomic theories, new conceptions of mass society and social character, and a bold sense of the state's obligation to maintain general welfare. Social visions expanded as the economic collapse swept millions of personal fates into one. Even before the New Deal took shape, Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the "watchword of this age" was our collective "interdependence" on one another.
The economic crisis of the 1930s lasted longer, ran deeper, and left far more extensive economic damage in its wake than the current recession. In its bank failures, its liquidation of middle-class savings, and its armies of the jobless, the Great Depression was a striking lesson in interdependence: the dependence of farmers on urban purchasers, the reliance of businesses on the consumer spending of workers, the need for new forms of labor solidarity.
The institutional failures of 2008-10 did bring the economy closer to the brink of structural breakdown than any of the post-World War II downturns that preceded it. In its cascading economic effects and institutional failures, the Great Recession, too, has offered a harrowing lesson in interdependence. Yet the movement in ideas has been barely discernible....
Read entire article at CHE
If crises change the way we see the world, the Great Recession of 2008-10 has to be reckoned, so far, as an anomaly. It has upended lives, set loose a storm of fears and anxieties, fueled a conservative insurrection in American politics, and shaken economic institutions on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. But in comparison with earlier economic crackups, this crisis has packed an emotional wallop but only an intellectual whimper.
By contrast, Depression-era America was awash in ideas and visions of social change. Many of the concepts that came to the fore in those years went on to shape social thought for decades: Keynes's macroeconomic theories, new conceptions of mass society and social character, and a bold sense of the state's obligation to maintain general welfare. Social visions expanded as the economic collapse swept millions of personal fates into one. Even before the New Deal took shape, Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the "watchword of this age" was our collective "interdependence" on one another.
The economic crisis of the 1930s lasted longer, ran deeper, and left far more extensive economic damage in its wake than the current recession. In its bank failures, its liquidation of middle-class savings, and its armies of the jobless, the Great Depression was a striking lesson in interdependence: the dependence of farmers on urban purchasers, the reliance of businesses on the consumer spending of workers, the need for new forms of labor solidarity.
The institutional failures of 2008-10 did bring the economy closer to the brink of structural breakdown than any of the post-World War II downturns that preceded it. In its cascading economic effects and institutional failures, the Great Recession, too, has offered a harrowing lesson in interdependence. Yet the movement in ideas has been barely discernible....