Is Our Adults Learning?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/opinion/brooks-is-our-adults-learning.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 8:54 AM
Subject: re: Is Our Adults Learning?
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

     Mathematical models of economies--or of anything else--are only as valuable as the data they're built on. If we mean to learn, we must never lose sight of the experiments we have performed.  Between the stock market crash of 1929 and FDR's inauguration in 1933, president Hoover had over three years to fix the U.S. economy. He hewed to austerity, and we fell into the Great Depression.  FDR also dabbled in austerity as the election of 1936 approached.  The recovery he had achieved evaporated and the Depression deepened. By 1952, former president Hoover was still railing against the evils of deficits. But by then the U.S. had moved from the Great Depression to the Post-War Prosperity through deficit spending for raking leaves and deficit spending for infrastructure and deficit spending for our part in WWII and deficit spending for the Marshall Plan. No one can prove what part each of those contributed, but the prosperity was real.  At that time, Hoover was the only one who had failed to learn from our own experience.  No one who has been paying attention believes that Hoover was right in 1930; no one should expect his austerity policies to work for us in 2012.

Barry Haskell Levine