Lessons unlearned

Barry Eichengreen is one of my favorite writers on economics. His latest sounds like a must-read for rightwingers, who are still in denial about how their policies wrecked the economy in 1929 and again in 2008.

I have little expectation, however, that any will do anything like reading a book that would challenge their faith.

I do quarrel with one statement in this brief New York Times notice (it isn't a review) of 'Hall of Mirrors." This one:

Public pressure on the Fed was, to a startling degree, one-sided. Many conservatives and financial market commentators assailed the central bank for its easy money stance, and there was little in the way of a crusade from the left to try to encourage greater activism by the Fed.

True perhaps in one sense, but that was the message of Paul Krugman, surely the most-read of liberal economists. So it's not as if the advice to repeat the New Deal was not out there (and in RtO, I'm pleased to be able to say).

It is symptomatic of the rightist mood of the nation that a party of rightwing economic delusions formed (the Tea Party) but the attempt to form a left economic movement (Occupy) failed. Possibly that was just a matter of superior organizational impetus on the right -- Occupy was not meant to create a party but might nevertheless, in a different time, have launched one anyway -- but I think it was largely due to the economic ignorance of the voters.