This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 27th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Did the New Deal help ease the Great Depression?

Many popular narratives on both sides of the matter are basically wrong.

So says Regulation magazine managing editor Tom Fiery.

He says the erroneous stories about the effects of the New Deal survive despite decades of economic research that

tell a different more nuanced story.

There was no single set of proposals called the new deal. Basically we refer to the New Deal. We use the term

New Deal to refer to basically anything that Roosevelt and Congress passed between

1932 and 1940.

But there's this notion today that Roosevelt

had this single set of proposals

or maybe a set of proposals they built on over time,

that's not the case.

What really happened is he came in, he tried a bunch of stuff,

some of it worked, some of it didn't.

He tried a bunch of other stuff,

some of the work, some of it didn't't that's all become called the new deal and

some of it was an attempt to stimulate the economy in the 1930s of course we were in the

great depression others were attempts to long-term reshape the economy.

In terms of a stimulative effect of a big massive public works spending, you know, the last 50 years of trying to study the New Deal and

understand it better. Where are we left in terms of evaluating the

...