Ezra Klein has the best piece yet on the policy response to the recession, and why it wasn’t enough. He highlights the way that bad data led to bad policy mistakes.
To understand how the administration got it so wrong, we need to look at the data it was looking at.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency charged with measuring the size and growth of the U.S. economy, initially projected that the economy shrank at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the last quarter of 2008. Months later, the bureau almost doubled that estimate, saying the number was 6.2 percent. Then it was revised to 6.3 percent. But it wasn’t until this year that the actual number was revealed: 8.9 percent. That makes it one of the worst quarters in American history. Bernstein and Romer knew in 2008 that the economy had sustained a tough blow; they didn’t know that it had been run over by a truck.
Ezra then goes on to discuss in great detail the choices and constraints of the Obama Administration, and comes to a fascinating conclusion.
Yet the Obama administration did too little. Its team of interventionist Keynesians immersed in the lessons of the Depression and Japan did too little. Everyone does too little, even when they think they’re erring on the side of doing too much. That’s one reason “this time” is almost never different.
The tendency thus far has been to look at these crises in terms of the identifiable economic factors that make them different from typical recessions. But perhaps the better approach is to look at the political factors that make them turn out the same, that stop governments from doing enough even when they have sworn to err on the side of doing too much.
The political crisis–here, in Europe, and in Japan in the 1990s–is not separate from the economic crisis, but lies at its heart.
