Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Eric Roushway, professor of history at the University

of California at Davis in the author of The Great Depression and the New Deal, a very

short introduction. Eric, welcome to Econ Talk. Thanks very much for having me. And I want

to tell our listeners that I suspect this will be the first of a number of podcasts that

we will do on The Great Depression. As Eric mentioned, as we were preparing for this interview,

unfortunately, we're at a time in American history today where there's interest in The Great

Depression, because I think people are correctly worried about the state of the economy. So

to start our conversation, Eric, I'd like to go back to the 1920s as you do in your book,

which is very nicely written. It is a very short introduction, but you manage to cover

a great deal, and you spend a reasonably large amount of time on the run-up to The Depression,

which I found very, very interesting. Talk about what was happening in American in the 1920s

in the economy. Sure. I think it's impossible to understand the

new deal without first understanding the Great Depression, and I think it's impossible to

understand the Great Depression unless you go back at least to, let's say, 1919. So if

you spot me one year on the 20s, that would be helpful. I think you need to understand

that both in the world and in America, there's a new system of debt that's created after World

War I. So in the book, and I think in our discussion, it would be helpful to talk about both

of those areas. You can refer to the pre-World War I period as well, which is also relevant

...