An archival case study : revisiting the life and political economy of Lauchlin Currie

This paper forms part of a wider project to show the significance of archival material on distinguished economists, in this case Lauchlin Currie (1902-93), who studied and taught at Harvard before entering government service at the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Board as the intellectual leader of Roosevelt's New Deal, 1934-39, as FDR's White House economic adviser in peace and war, 1939-45, and as a post-war development economist. It discusses the uses made of the written and oral material available when the author was writing his intellectual biography of Currie (Duke University Press 1990) while Currie was still alive, and the significance of the material that has come to light after Currie's death

Hawtreyan 'credit deadlock' or Keynesian 'liquidity trap'? Lessons for Japan from the great depression

This paper outlines the ideas of Ralph Hawtrey and Lauchlin Currie on the need for monetised fiscal deficit spending in 1930s USA to combat the deep depression into which the economy had been allowed to sink. In such exceptional circumstances of 'credit deadlock' in which banks were afraid to lend and households and business afraid to borrow, the deadlock could best be broken through the spending of new money into circulation via large fiscal deficits. This complementarity of fiscal and monetary policy was shown to be essential, and as such indicates the potential power of monetary policy - in contrast to the Keynesian "liquidity trap" view that it is powerless This lesson was not learned by the Japanese authorities in their response to the asset price collapse of 1991-92, resulting in a lost decade as ballooning fiscal deficits were neutralised throughout the 1990s by unhelpfully tight monetary policy with the Bank of Japan refusing to monetise the deficits

Evaluating the historiography of the Great Depression: explanation or single-theory driven?

Following James Rule and Colin Clark, a single-theory-driven approach to scientific inquiry which focuses on testing particular theories can be distinguished from an explanation-driven approach which is open to all observations and whose results do not cease to have value with the passing of a particular theory. Several 'decision points' in the historiography of the Great Depression are examined and it is shown that the decisions made at each point reflect a single-theory-driven orientation. It is argued that the single-theory-driven approach likely characterizes other fields of Economics, and also that this paper's method of applying a 'test' to various decision points in the evolution of economic thought is of widespread utility. The likely cost of a single-theory-driven bias in terms of our collective understanding is discussed.Great Depression, historiography, methodology, macroeconomics, structuralism, technology,