Economics Professor Answers Great Depression Questions

WIRED

Economics professor Christopher Clarke joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about The Great Depression. What caused The Great Depression? How bad as The Great Depression? What did people eat? How was the military affected during the Great Depression? What would happen if there were another run on banks like in 1929? What affect did Herbert Hoover's policies have? Who made it through the Great Depression easiest? Answers to these questions and many more await on Great Depression support.  Director: Justin Wolfson  Director of Photography: Charlie Jordan Editor: Richard Trammell Expert: Christopher Clarke Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen Associate Producer: Brandon White  Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Supervising Casting Producer: Thomas Giglio Camera Operator: Yuki Soga Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen  Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo Assistant Editor: Billy Ward

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Chris Clark. I'm an economics professor at Washington State University,

00:03and I'm here to answer your questions from the internet. This is Great Depression Support.

00:12This Caterpillar330 asks, was the Great Depression really as bad as it's commonly portrayed to be?

00:18Yes. It was awful. The unemployment rate is 25%. In the Great Recession of 2009,

00:24we maxed out at 10%. Other places across the planet where we see this say,

00:28Greece in 2012 also hit 25%. Not a good time. The economy collapsed. Industrial production fell by

00:38half. This is a huge amount of idle resources. Folks went hungry. It spurred us to create the

00:45first federal welfare systems. This is where we got social security, unemployment insurance,

00:50federal minimum wage, housing subsidies, all throughout the 30s trying to address the

00:56suffering that we saw then. Bright Sherbet asks, explain it like I'm five. What caused the Great

01:01Depression between 1929 and 1933? In the late 1920s, the United States financial markets were experiencing

01:07a speculative boom. Now, the real economy was growing, and there were real profits to be shared

01:13on Wall Street. But they started investing heavily on margins. Now, what this means is that they would

01:20take out huge loans and then buy stocks with those loans. And then they would set up a different

01:25company to buy stocks in that company again on huge loans. So that meant an initial investment of,

01:31say, $100 could turn into $1,000 worth of stocks. So any rise in the stock would be a huge boom. But

01:38any speculative boom is eventually going to end. The economy hit a run-of-the-mill recession in the

01:43summer of 1929. The slowdown in economic activity led the market to peak on September 3rd. But because

01:50so many of these stocks were not held outright, but by loan, any fall in the price meant a cascading

01:57chain of everyone calling in their loans. Which meant by October, we experienced a huge crash. Here's a

02:04picture of Wall Street on the corner of Wall Street and Broad, showing the crowds all worried about their

02:10falling fortunes. Now, despite what everyone thinks, the stock market is not the economy. Only 1-2% of

02:16Americans at the time held any stock. This event could have primarily just affected folks in New York

02:21and other financial markets. How did it start affecting the rest of the economy? A falling stock

02:26market means there's less wealth in the economy. Less wealth means less consumption. Businesses can't move

02:32goods. They're not able to hire people. They got to let others go. Things start cascading into the real

02:37world once we start seeing massive bank failures. You see, if a bank loses a lot of their stock,

02:43they're not going to be able to honor folks who put their deposits in. This is how a bank works.

02:50You come along, you put your money in the bank, they take it, and then they lend it out to other

02:54people. But if those loans aren't being paid back, then the bank can't pay their depositors back.

02:59Which means you, as a depositor, are only going to get there if you're first. And how do you get there

03:04first? You got to be the number one person in that line. If you're too far back, the banks ran out of

03:09cash, and they're not going to be able to pay you back. The bank doesn't have any loans available

03:12because the people who owe them money are now going bankrupt. And so banks are starting to fail.

03:17It's not just one or two banks here and there. It's 10,000 banks that are collapsing across these

03:23years. One of the reasons is because all these banks are forced to be really small. So if you get a

03:29modest shock, they don't have the resources to insure themselves or to draw on other regions.

03:34Surprisingly, just north of the border, Canada only had 10 banks served the entire country,

03:40and they didn't experience runs. This was unique to the United States and our fractured banking system.

03:46Year by year, things kept getting worse. By 1932, the unemployment rate had reached 25%. That meant

03:56one out of every four people can't find work who want to find work. Men would line the streets

04:01advertising themselves for work. Relief efforts set up soup kitchens to serve the unemployed.

04:07Economists still today debate on what are the ultimate causes of the Great Depression,

04:10but these are the primary events that got us along the way.

04:14The Names Dr. Jane asks,

04:16When does a Great Depression start and who declares it?

04:19A Great Depression is going to involve a lot of economic collapse, not just production,

04:24but will have high unemployment. All across the board, we're going to see a slowdown in economic

04:29activity. And the period between 1929 and 1933 was the worst economic decline in United States

04:34history. Now who declares it? That's the National Bureau of Economic Research. They're actually not

04:39part of the government. They're a non-profit research group based in Massachusetts. And after some

04:43time, for research purposes, the committee gets together and they decide what month and year a

04:49contraction starts. And then when does the economy start growing again?

04:53A Reddit user asks,

04:54Why do Americans call the 1930s depression they had great? Wasn't it bad? What are they, stupid?

05:00It was bad. Actually, the term depression goes all the way back to James Monroe. This is the term

05:05that they would use for any economic downturn was depression. And they actually called the episode in

05:11the early 20s a Great Depression. It started having capital letters as the Great Depression by about the

05:17mid-30s. We have Lionel Robbins, an economist who wrote a book called The Great Depression. In the subsequent

05:22years, we capitalized it, called it The Great Depression. Zobby Topps asks, What effect did the Smoot-Hawley

05:29Act have on the Great Depression? The Smoot-Hawley Act was a large increase in tariffs. One of the

05:36hypothesized reason for the Great Depression at the time was not enough economic activity at home and a

05:44greater need for protection from abroad. The idea was, if you increase the tariffs here, it'll protect

05:50our businesses and they'll be able to succeed more and that'll get us out of the depression.

05:55Unfortunately, economists have long known and argued and warned at the time that trade is one of the

06:01ultimate secrets for long-run economic growth. Trade allows a country to specialize. It allows more

06:07economic activity, more diversity, and more options across the world. Now, how much effect did this have?

06:13It was signed into law by President Hoover in 1930, just as we were getting started on the depression.

06:19Now, the effect on the American economy was modest, largely because the U.S. economy was one of the

06:25biggest on the globe, and the role of international trade was relatively small. Economists have estimated

06:31it declined our economy by maybe a couple of percentage points. But the effect on Smoot-Hawley was

06:37bigger across the globe. Other countries, seeing that we were no longer playing fair, raised their

06:44own tariffs, their own retaliatory tariffs. And we started to begin what we call this Kinderberg cycle,

06:50where the tariffs got higher and higher across the world, and global trade shrunk and shrunk and shrunk

06:55every year throughout 1932 and 1933. Carbon Capture Shield asks,

07:00What caused the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s? A drought! But we get droughts all the time. The Dust Bowl was one of the worst environmental disasters in United States history.

07:10In the 1920s, we start seeing mechanization spread across agriculture. We get tractors and other machinery to help us till up the land.

07:18In the late 20s, a huge increase in migrants to the Oklahoma panhandle area, Colorado, Kansas, and in northern Texas, dug up millions of acres of prairie grass.

07:30The rain was great those years, and they got bumper harvest crops. 1931, we get a drought. 1932, the drought continues. It goes for year after year.

07:42The area experiences dropped from time to time before, but the native grasses had a deep root system that would keep the dirt in place when it would dry out.

07:52But this all got plowed up. So without the rain, the wheat wasn't growing, and we were left with huge fields of dirt.

07:58So you'd get a real big windstorm come in. It would kick up the dust and spread. By 1935, they called it Black Sunday,

08:06the dust was being spread to Chicago, to Washington, D.C.

08:10So the government started doing things about it. They told them to plow in a way that would reduce erosion.

08:15They planted trees to help put a windbreaker all across the Great Plains.

08:19They bought hundreds of thousands of acres to turn back into prairie land.

08:23Now, the effect on the macroeconomy was relatively minor. It affected around 100 million acres.

08:29For reference, the United States had around a billion acres of agricultural land.

08:33Also, only 20% of the economy's workers were in the agricultural sector by 1930. So it was hugely harmful

08:43for that panhandle region. But for the nation as a whole, it wasn't a cause of the Great Depression.

08:48The local pain that we did witness was a large migration outward. This is where we get the famous novel,

08:53The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It's also where we get the most famous picture for the Great

08:58Depression. This was taken by Dorothea Lange. And this is a family of migrants that came from the Dust Bowl,

09:03Oklahoma region into California. And in California, these migrants were living in very, very, very poor

09:11conditions. And the United States government hired photographers to go around and take pictures of these

09:17stories to help document it. And when Dorothea Lange saw this family, she took them in a bunch of different

09:21poses, taking the snapshot that tells a story for the ages.

09:25Dole Swing 135 asks, how was the military affected during the Great Depression?

09:29After World War One, the veterans were promised a bonus that was going to be paid out in the 1940s.

09:36But because of the severity of the depression, these veterans were unemployed and asked for that

09:42support to be paid earlier. And over the course of months, they organized a march all the way on to

09:48Washington DC, setting up camps to sit there and ask that their promised support could be paid early

09:55during this depressive era. Congress was slow to act. Hoover didn't want to do it. And due to some

10:01local strifes between some of these camps and the local police, Hoover directed General Douglas MacArthur

10:07to forcibly remove these veterans. MacArthur came in with force and bayonets, set the camps on fire,

10:14and forced these veterans out. Aragon233 asks, are we following in the footsteps of the Great Depression?

10:21There's always parallels. There's always worry that it could happen again. It could. But we're not

10:26seeing anything anywhere close to that magnitude today. During the 2022-2023 inflation period, a lot

10:32of people on social media asked if we were living in another silent depression. We weren't. Homeownership

10:38rates are way higher than they were then. People owned cars at way higher rates than they did then. The food

10:44stamp program and other assistance didn't exist. In 2008, we did experience another major financial

10:50crisis. Arguably bigger than the collapse that we saw in 1929. Yet the Federal Reserve acted in a way

10:56to preserve the financial system and prevent that spread from going further into the deeper economy.

11:03Today, people are worried about an increase in tariffs. It's true, we are raising tariffs to the levels

11:09that we last saw in the 1930s. We do trade a whole lot more today, the United States, compared to what

11:14the U.S. was trading in the 30s. The economic harm from tariffs will be worse today than what it was.

11:19But the difference is the tariffs of the 1930s caused one to two percentage points of the Great

11:24Depression. Today, the tariffs might harm the economy one to two percentage points again.

11:29Magic Karma asks, the Great Depression was awful, but it wasn't as bad for some of the rich. What business

11:35or sectors held their own or improved during the Great Depression? How did the rich stay rich during

11:39that time? Well, most of the rich held their wealth in the stock market and the stock market collapsed.

11:45So the rich actually didn't do that well. This is a period of a huge decrease in inequality. Now, this

11:52is one of the episodes of decreasing inequality that's not so hot. Destruction is not a good way to

11:57make the economy more equal. The difference today is during 2008 and during the COVID crisis,

12:03the wealthy were saved. Their wealth was preserved. And this has led to a lot of debates about the

12:09moral role of the wealthy in society. In previous crises, all the way back to the Black Plague of

12:15the 1300s, to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rich experienced pain along with everybody else,

12:21and so worked to get everybody back on board again. Today, the sentiment feels different,

12:26and that can explain movements from Occupy and others.

12:30History Defined asks, Shantytowns, what was life like in the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression?

12:35The Depression was so severe that the quantity of homeless and unsheltered increased drastically,

12:43and in every major city in America, they started to set up makeshift homes, either out of corrugated

12:49tin or cardboard or loose construction materials or digging holes in the ground for hovels.

12:54We've never seen homelessness at that scale before, and the United States wasn't even collecting

12:58statistics on it. After FDR was elected, he hired a sociologist to go out and measure it.

13:04He came up with an estimate of 1.5 million homeless out of a total population of 120-plus million.

13:11That comes out to about 1.2% of the population. For reference, today, the homeless population is

13:19around 700,000. This is a quarter of a share of the population compared to what was experienced in 1933.

13:27A Reddit user asks, How much did Herbert Hoover's policies contribute to the Great Depression?

13:32President Hoover largely didn't do much, and it was somewhat against his instinct. On his path to

13:38the presidency, he served in the post-World War I reconstruction. He was a humanitarian,

13:43he was an engineer, and he wanted the best for the country. His advisor, Andrew Mellon,

13:49told him that recessions are healthy and necessary in an economy. They cut out the fat. If you're a

13:56business that has a bad model, a recession cleans it out so we can use our resources more effectively.

14:02After the Depression, Hoover, in his memoirs, lambasted that previous view and completely regretted

14:08his lack of action. He complained that Mellon simply wanted to liquidate labor, liquidate investment,

14:14liquidate Wall Street, liquidate everything, and clearly you can't liquidate an entire economy.

14:20This sets up a debate. Still today, there is a split between economists on how much should the

14:27government get involved in a depression. But Hoover wasn't entirely actionless. He brought in folks

14:33from industry, and he pled with them to keep wages high. There are some economists who think that

14:39this effort to keep wages at a high level prevented the economy from self-correcting, that it encouraged

14:47monopoly practices, and that distorted the market, slowing it down even further.

14:52Dinaboy J asks,

14:54Why are Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats more well-known than other presidential attempts at

14:58directly connecting with the public? Well, they were new. The radio was new technology. And by the end of

15:03the 1930s, nearly everybody had a radio, all across the income distribution. So for the first time,

15:08a president was able to communicate with their own voice about what is happening in Washington DC.

15:15I mean, before the radio, the only way you'd hear from me representatives in Congress was

15:20through the newspaper. This was a very serious time for the country, and leadership is needed. FDR was an

15:27optimist. He had a way with people, and he encouraged and lifted them up.

15:31I Heart Alpacas asks, What role did being on the gold standard play during the Great Depression?

15:37Everything. Monetary policy is one of the primary tools we have to help recessions. And Hoover,

15:44and initially FDR, did not want to get off the gold standard. The gold standard at the time said one

15:50ounce of gold could be purchased for $20. And that price could not fluctuate. And the way to maintain that

15:57is to have a certain quantity of gold on hand. So if the value of the gold changed,

16:04then the central bank can buy and sell gold to maintain that dollar peg. But the problem is this

16:10is going to tie your hands to respond to an economic crisis. Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman and

16:15his co-author Anna Schwartz published this book, The Monetary History of the United States. And it was

16:21monumental. It argued that the Great Depression was largely the fault of the central bank, in part,

16:26trying to hold on to that gold standard. The total demand in the United States economy was collapsing.

16:32Prices were falling. This meant that businesses couldn't pay back their loans, which meant you saw

16:38more and more bank collapses, which in turn would put more businesses out of line and decline more and

16:44more wealth. If you allow the currency to change, if you get off the gold standard, in other words,

16:50you allow the central bank to print money, that's going to increase the amount of cash in the economy.

16:56That's going to make it so the banks can stay open. That's going to allow the economy to start growing

17:01again. This is such a big deal that as we see, when each country got off the gold standard, their

17:07depression stopped and growth returned. The first to do this was Scandinavia, way back in 30 and 31. And then

17:13Great Britain did it in 1931. The United States and Germany, we did it in 1933. And then finally,

17:20France waited all the way to 37 before their economy started recovering. Tatum 1961 asks,

17:27In 1933, the US government seized all the gold owned by private citizens. Why didn't that result in a

17:33massive protest or a civil war? I think to understand this best, we have to understand how dire this

17:39situation was in 1933. How desperate everybody was for drastic political change. Herbert Hoover

17:47wanted to keep the gold standard. FDR on the campaign said he wanted to keep the gold standard,

17:51but it became very clear that if we're going to have the system reset, we had to change the currency.

17:57And FDR was very popular. People saw the need for it. In April of 1933, FDR signs an executive order,

18:04changing the value of one ounce of gold from $20 to $35. And requiring that people couldn't hoard

18:11gold anymore. If you held more than $100 worth of gold, you were required to sell it back to the

18:16government. For reference, that's the equivalent to around $10,000 worth of gold today. And of course,

18:21there were exceptions for jewelry and coin collecting. There were a handful of arrests across the country.

18:26Some people didn't want to return their gold. But the law was held up in court, and the Supreme Court

18:31ruled it okay over multiple rulings between 34 and 36. Dark Matter 2025 asks,

18:38when did the FDIC start? The FDIC is part of FDR's new deal in the whole alphabet soup. It stands for

18:45Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And this thing stopped the bank runs.

18:51Here's how it works. You have a deposit with the bank. As long as that bank's in business, you can go

18:55and you can ask for your money at any time. The bank doesn't keep all your cash in a vault.

18:59It makes money by taking in deposits and lending it out to other folks, businesses, mortgages,

19:06investing it in somewhere. Now, if those investments go sour, if those businesses don't pay back,

19:11if folks stop paying back their mortgages, then the bank won't have the ability to pay you back

19:16your deposits. And we had three, four years of bank run after bank run. When the FDIC came along,

19:24it said, hey, hey, hey, banks, you pay a little premium into the system. We'll guarantee

19:29a deposit of a certain amount. If you've got your deposit in the bank, you know they're running into

19:34some trouble. You know that the bank might be having difficulties. You won't need to go run to

19:38the bank and get their last remaining cash out of their vault. You can just wait because you know that

19:43the government is backing up the insurance. From 1933 on, this solved the bank run problem.

19:50Boston Driving Is Worse asks, what would happen if there were a run on banks similar to 1929 today?

19:57This is a great question because it's so far out of our lifetimes. We haven't experienced bank runs like

20:03this because of the creation of federal deposit insurance. What we can see are bank runs of a

20:11different type. Not every bank is covered by deposit insurance. In the 2008 crisis, a lot of that

20:18banking activity was bank to bank. One investment bank to another investment bank. This is part of

20:22the shadow banking sector. It doesn't have the same regulation and standards as a regular deposit

20:29consumer bank does. So we did say a run between investment banks in 2008 that led to the collapse of

20:35Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and ultimately AIG, whom the government stepped in to bail.

20:41Don Khan asks, did the New Deal actually help Americans or not? And did it help during the

20:47Great Depression? The New Deal was kind of like taking spaghetti and throwing it on the wall and

20:52seeing what sticks. Some's going to, but some of the noodles are going to fall down the counter.

20:56Some of the policies that were effective, such as the CCC or the WPA, hired the unemployed and got

21:03them working on public works. These are pictures of my great-grandfather, Levi Bybee, and he worked in the WPA.

21:10He lived in rural Utah during the Great Depression and didn't have work and had 14 children to feed.

21:16The WPA gave him employment, but more than just employment to be able to feed his family,

21:21it gave dignity and it gave purpose. Some of these public works included famous buildings,

21:26such as the Griffith Observatory in LA. They built schools, they built libraries,

21:31they built town halls all across the country. They helped improve parks. Now, some of the criticism of

21:36the WPA and the CCC were these were make-work programs. They had them do things that weren't

21:42needed. For instance, my other grandpa, the WPA built an outhouse in their backyard. One can say,

21:47we don't need the government to come in and build outhouses for people. But on the other hand,

21:51we know through long years of economic research that the longer you're unemployed, the more harm you

21:56have in your total lifetime earnings. It's harder to go back into the workforce and find a job.

22:01Another criticism comes from the very first African American to get a PhD in economics,

22:07Sadie Alexander Moser. She was a huge critic of the New Deal because it was implicitly designed

22:14to exclude African Americans. Now, there was no direct racial language in any of these programs,

22:20but primarily, most African Americans worked either as domestic household servants or as tenant farmers.

22:28And programs such as the introduction of minimum wage explicitly excluded domestic workers. Social

22:34security that was set up in 1935 explicitly excluded domestic workers as well. She felt that African

22:42American tenant farmers were being pushed out by the aid that was given to the large farmers,

22:49but not to the smaller ones. A Redditor asks, what did Americans eat during the Great Depression?

22:54Surprisingly, economic productivity increased throughout the 30s. We started getting better

22:59technology. More households owned a refrigerator by the end of the 30s than they did in 1930.

23:05This meant you can eat food that spoils more. So if you look at studies of their diet,

23:09they ate more fruit and they ate more meat in 1940 compared to what they were doing in 1930.

23:15Cauliflower Nice asks, wait, why did the Federal Reserve do nothing during the Great Depression?

23:20Where is the money? This is a really important question. This is everything.

23:25The Fed, some argue, basically caused the whole thing. Milton Friedman said that the decline in the

23:30money supply between 1929 and 1933 was a huge increase in it. Ben Bernanke recently won the Nobel

23:37Prize for his work on the Great Depression, where he said, when a bank collapsed, it lost information.

23:43So say you need a loan to get your business going, you're going to go to the bank and ask for it.

23:47That bank will give you a loan because they know who you are. They know you're good for it and they

23:50know you'll pay it back. But if that bank collapses, now you got to go to a new bank and now you're a

23:54stranger. You can bring your paperwork, you can bring a letter of recommendation, but they really

23:58don't know who you are. And that asymmetry in information caused even more economic decline.

24:04Ben Bernanke became the Fed Chair during 2006 and led us through the Great Recession. And his

24:12biggest thing was to prevent more banks from falling. We've known since 1873 in Walter Badgett's

24:19book that central banks' jobs are to be a lender of last resort. If the private economy isn't lending

24:26to each other, the central bank needs to lend to these banks because otherwise good banks,

24:30who otherwise have a great business, are going to go over just because they're in the middle of a

24:35crisis. So why didn't they act? One reason is the Federal Reserve was smaller back then. Most of the

24:41banks that collapsed in the 30s were small rural banks, not necessarily under the federal system.

24:48And one of the changes in the 30s was to expand the role of the Federal Reserve's influence so

24:52that they can help save other banks. Another one is they were constantly concerned about staying on

24:57the gold standard. People were worried about inflation coming along, even as they were watching

25:01the opposite, deflation coming along. The United States Federal Reserve was created in 1913 as a response

25:07to the crisis of 1907. The fact that the next big crisis came along and they didn't prevent it

25:13is a huge stain on the history and a huge lesson for us today. Nice Guy Bad Boy asks,

25:18How much truth is there to the stories of hitherto wealthy people throwing themselves out of windows

25:23when the market crashed in 1929? Not a lot. There were some international reports that this happened,

25:29really gruesome stuff about bodies strewning the ground. But when we dig into the history,

25:33we don't really see it. JJVMT asks, Why do massive job creation projects like FDR's Works Progress

25:41Administration seem to have largely gone away by the late 20th century? When you have millions of

25:46people who are unemployed, anybody working, doing anything is important. But eventually,

25:52the economy recovers. We had 25% unemployment in 1932. It comes down to about 9% in 1937. Bumps up in

26:011938 again. By the beginning of World War II, we're back down to 9%. And by the end of World War II,

26:07we're only at 2% unemployment. When the rest of the economy is humming on all cylinders,

26:11you don't need public programs to get people to work. There is a large debate about whether

26:16the government should always have this public jobs option so that we reduce unemployment to zero

26:22all the time. The debate here is about efficiency. Markets, when they function, have a huge power

26:28to put in information from all these buyers and all these sellers and allocate our scarce resources

26:33to the most efficient part. Governments are going to be more clunky to do that. And so,

26:38if your public sector is too big, it distorts what the economy can do and we underperform,

26:43leading to less long-run economic growth and prosperity.

26:46BREATH1100 asks, Was World War II really what ended the Great Depression? The economics of war

26:52is war is bad. War is bad for your economy. The reason the US did so well in World War II is basically

26:57because the fighting didn't happen here. But you look at Europe and they collapsed. They had two

27:01giant civil wars during the first half of the 20th century. Not good for their economy. It's a whole

27:07lot better to build houses, to build businesses than it is to build weapons and bombs. On the other hand,

27:14World War II gave a reason for the government to increase their spending at levels that they hadn't

27:21seen ever in the history of the country. And they did this through deficit spending. That means through

27:28borrowing. This is a relatively new idea. Under Hoover and under FDR, they originally wanted to balance the budget.

27:34John Maynard Keynes was an economist back in England and he is the most influential economist in the 1920s.

27:40The modern study of macroeconomics basically can get its start looking at this guy. When he published his book,

27:45his general theory, in 1936, and from his writings that he had been doing in the years previous,

27:51he said during a recession, the government needs to step in and be the spender of last resort. In his

27:58world, it didn't matter what you spent on. Anything is better than nothing. This position has largely been

28:03dominant in the years since. Every time the economy experiences a recession, the government is going

28:08to increase its deficit spending. During COVID, we spent five trillion dollars to make sure that folks

28:14were taken care of. And they were. The amount of economic suffering we had in the 2020 recession

28:18was a fraction of what we saw just previously. Studying macroeconomics and learning how to prevent

28:25catastrophes like recessions and massive depressions is one of the most important things we can do.

28:31We want to prevent economic suffering. We want to encourage prosperity for everyone. And that's it.

28:37I hope you've learned something. I hope we can prevent these catastrophes from ever happening again.

28:44I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

28:46I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

28:48I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

28:50I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

28:52I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

28:54I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

28:56I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

28:58I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

29:00I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

29:02I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

29:04I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

29:06I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

29:08I hope you've learned something. I hope you've learned something.

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