The strange delusion that war production suddenly solved what Roosevelt didn’t assumes that going from >25% unemployment to <10% unemployment did no good, either for the economy or for preparing the economy and the populace.

Indeed, the strange idea that having returned to the pre-Depression levels of output doesn’t mean you are out of the Depression seems rather confusing. (If we are defining it as a Depression because of a ca. 10% unemployment rate, then Nixon and Reagan both presides over short Depressions.)

I made a comment elsewhere that said something like,
if a patient is lying by the roadside after a smash, and you “say stopping the bleeding won’t solve the cause the smash, or bring the patient back to full health” – does that mean though that you shouldn’t do it?

I’m impressed that Arnold didn’t sign this. It’s sad that this will help confuse the public. They won’t realize that the economists who signed this did so not because smart government investment won’t increase growth in wealth, science, technology, and total societal utility greatly. Instead they signed this for these reasons:

1) They understand that smart government investment will increase growth in wealth, science, technology, and total societal utility greatly, but they are willing to give this up to gain even little bits of extra economic freedom, that is they’re very libertarian.

2) They don’t understand the macroeconomics. They became economics or finance professors producing research in a very different, and perhaps very narrow, specialization. It’s like asking a civil engineer, or even a civil engineer who narrowly only works on a specialization in tensile strength, for advice on a computer engineering. Even if he’s a great civil engineer he may understand very little about computer engineering. Fama’s the quintessential example of this.

3) Government being more valuable would make their research less valuable, so they lie and/or mislead about the value of government.

4) They’re well compensated, or hope to be, with high paying jobs, consulting, etc. by the right wing machine.

5) They just hate it when the government takes their money and the money of the wealthy and they care more about decreasing this than the fact that smart government investment will increase growth in wealth, science, technology, and total societal utility greatly.

It should also be noted that a petition in favor of smart government spending was signed by far more Nobel Laurents and top economists in 2003.

(MeThinks recovery more linked to being lone industrial power standing AFTER the war, allowing for real growth after wasteful spending of war)

Ted jumped of the cliff, fell, and smashed his brain open too.

So if Lisa did the same thing, the outcome will be different?

So if we looked at all the evidence we have of exercise, and we could not a demonstrable improvement in weight (ditching the silly solve/help dynamic), then yes, your analogy would hold.

My analogy:

If there are no examples of X leading to a demonstrable improvement in Y, should I infer that X won’t help Y in this new context?

I’m on the fence on stimulus, but let’s be frank, the most compelling argument for stimulus admits we have no evidence it will work, but argues that the sample size is so small that we can’t rule out that it will work, and that it’s worth the risk.