The Return of Depression Economics Review
It Begins: “Most economist, to the extent that they think about the subject at all, regard the Great Depression of the 1930′s as a gratuitous, unnecessary tragedy.”
And it Ends with: “Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.”
It was 191 pages and took me 12 days.
I would recommend this book to people that are not economists but want to understand what the hell happened to cause The Great Recession of 2008. This book is written in a manner that caters to non economists and uses simple analogies to get the concepts across.
What I got out of this book is a much better sense of economic fluctuation both past and present. He started with explaining how a recession can happen; which is something that has baffled me up to this point. To align with the title, he explains the causes and effects of the American banking system which led to the Great Depression. Krugman then uses a whole bunch of recessions and downturns from a variety of countries as examples; Japan, Argentina, Taiwan,and Mexico. He describes a bit of the policies that lead to these recessions, which taught me that I should actually give a crap about who is making major financial decisions in the government.
I’ve studied a bit of economics in my day but nothing on the scale of phantom banking systems and currency lending. Krugman doesn’t go into boring detail of explaining these but rather tells the story that they were a part of, which makes the book actually enjoyable. What I most enjoyed about this book is how the underlying key was that cause and effect aren’t always so obviously linked. But in the economies of today, an underappreciated cause can lead to some scary effects.
