S. Or Canada today. Regarding the worries about the 'jobless recovery,' Watson believes decreases in employment do not always presage more serious recessions later on.
There are profound differences between today and the 1930s. The difference seem to lie in the political climate: there was widespread support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's instituting of government programs to help the unemployed and dispossessed. Today, an intransigent Republican minority faction in Congress is stymieing such efforts. Watson's sunny forecast does not provide any advice about how to prevent a similar crisis in the future, he simply advises the reader to watch and wait unemployment figures creep up: "IPA forecast sees the national unemployment rate rising to an average of 8.1% in 2009 -- not good but not catastrophic -- but then falling steadily to 6.4% in 2012. It obviously would be better not to have had such a slowdown. But what awaits us may not be the economic equivalent of blitzkrieg. And if it is -- well, we survived blitzkrieg, we can survive this."
In the short-term, the recession may have abated. But in the long-term, the systemic injustices have not been addressed, such as the wide disparities between rich and poor n America, inadequate regulation of the financial markets, a developed world held hostage by debt and credit, and workers with obsolete educations and jobs.
Will the forecast in job growth be good jobs, jobs with health insurance (for U.S. workers), and long-term growth prospects for young graduates? Asserting statistical forecasts without analysis or much basis, as Watson does regarding the supposed future recovery, is cold comfort in the face of these unanswered questions, and those economists who looked to the past alone did not predict either the Great Depression or the current crisis. The real wish of Watson should be to say that future historians of the 2008 crisis can say it was a 'good thing' given that it purged America of the Friedman mania for deregulation. America requires a new impetus to make healthcare available for all, to resume the Glass-Steagall Act's separations between commercial and investment banking, and to attempt to spread prosperity in a more equitable manner. Instead, all Americans are left with is a failed opportunity, in contrast to the Roosevelt Administration's proactive stance in the wake of the Great Depression.
William Watson, "Lessons from the Great Depression: Not the 1930s all over again," Policy Options, February 2009, p. 41
Watson, p.42
Watson, p.43
Watson, p.44
