Listen: Sometimes, Things Can Change
The federal government has passed big reforms in response to economic crises before. Could it happen again?
The Harvard University historian Lizabeth Cohen wrote about comparisons between today’s economic crisis and the Great Depression. She joins James Hamblin and Katherine Wells on the podcast Social Distance to share lessons—and warnings—from the New Deal.
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What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
Katherine Wells: Many people are trying to make connections between the Depression and today. And I’m curious, what are the parallels you see, or do you think it’s a very different time?
Learning from history is always complicated. It’s not really valid to say that history repeats itself. Circumstances are always different, but there are lessons to learn. And they’re more on the level of the kinds of commitments, the strategies broadly employed, not so much the nitty-gritty of this program versus
