More and more, economists are becoming aware of what historians have always known: that they can do a good job of explaining why the economy is the way it is and how it got to be that way, but that knowing exactly what to do to make it behave in any particular way in the future is another matter entirely. The American economy is complex and influenced by forces beyond the control of economists or politicians. In The Great Crash Galbraith spoke of “fissures” that “might open at…unexpected places,” and Chandler warned of some sort of “political deadlock” that might prevent the government from doing the things that would revive a faltering economy. And the higher the stock market soars, the greater the underlying fear.

Yet fears of another terrible collapse persist, even among the experts. Chandler of Atlanta University has called “the determinants that influence the behavior of employment, output, and prices.” We have learned what we should do to manipulate what Lester V. As dozens of economists and historians have shown, we now know, in theory, how to deal with violent cyclical downturns.

Since then there have been more recessions, some quite severe, but nothing like what happened in the thirties. Back in 1955 John Kenneth Galbraith called the Great Depression of the 1930s “the most momentous economic occurrence in the history of the United States,” and thirty-odd years later that judgment, recorded in Galbraith’s best seller, The Great Crash, still holds.

Galbraith the great crash