As we work through this material on the Great Depression and our several successive responses to it, I’m sure we are all thinking about the potential parallels to the current crisis. As I said last Thursday, I want you to think actively about the ways in which these situations are the same and in which they are different. This will help us contextualize our current situation and, perhaps, investigate additional potential responses to it.

Irwin–whom we are reading again now and whom we’ll host in several weeks–has recently been engaged in this exercise. Here are some things he’s recently written in this vein:

– http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01irwin.html?_r=2&emc=eta1

– http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/1474