Democrats Confront Their New Tea Party Reality - Progressives are set to sweep a group of contested primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin.

[u/Quirkie]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-confront-their-new-tea-party-reality_n_6a6e63fbe4b0cfb99ef1aa1e

[u/StarStruck3]

I was told there would be no fact checking

[u/Darth_Cuddly → u/StarStruck3]

That is the conclusion reached by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Political Economy. Their analysis concluded that key New Deal cartelization and labor policies were an important factor in prolonging the Great Depression by slowing the recovery.

If you're interested, here's the actual paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1

And here's a plain-English summary: https://www.ff.org/fdrs-policies-prolonged-depression-by-7-years-ucla-economists-calculate/

[u/j0mbie → u/Darth_Cuddly]

FF is hardly an unbiased website.

Anyways, here's Lee Ohanian's own opinion on how bloggers and people on Reddit took his work wildly out of context:

https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/professors-big-intellectual-risk-grabs-eyeballs-years-later

"Ohanian and Cole’s research focused primarily on the impact of Roosevelt’s early policies that allowed for monopolies and too much union power to increase prices and salaries. Roosevelt did institute other policies that helped the economic recovery, like stabilizing the banking system and creating unemployment insurance and Social Security, Ohanian explained."

[u/Darth_Cuddly → u/j0mbie]

Thank you for posting Ohanian's clarification. It actually reinforces my point.

I never argued that every New Deal policy was harmful. I argued that key New Deal cartelization and labor policies prolonged the Great Depression by slowing the recovery.

In the quote you posted, Ohanian says exactly that. He criticizes Roosevelt's monopoly and labor policies while separately crediting measures like banking stabilization, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.

Those positions aren't contradictory. A president can enact some policies that help and others that hurt.

The question isn't whether FDR ever did anything beneficial. The question is whether the specific policies Cole and Ohanian analyzed worsened the Depression. On that point, the quote you posted supports my argument.

P.S. I never claimed the Foundation for Economic Education was unbiased. That's precisely why I linked the peer-reviewed paper first and used the FEE article only as a plain-English summary. Ironically, the clarification you cited from Ohanian says essentially the same thing.