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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that an example of the "multiplier effect" ... which has never really been seen in the wild (or so I understand)?

E.g. because on the other side of the ledger the government crowds out private borrowing (see my comment in this thread to byrneseyeview) and/or taxes others to get this money, plus this almost always is accompanied by attacks on businesses of all sorts, on Main Street as well as Wall Street. Extreme examples include 1937, when capital in the US went on strike and we had the Recession of 1937–1938 and didn't really recover until WWII changed the game.

In serious times of trouble, can you point out examples where this has worked in more than the short term? It didn't for the US in the Great Depression, and Japan is now nearing the end of it's second lost decade (we through they were pulling out of it, but that turned out to be a side effect of the world wide bubble that popped a little later this decade).

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The meat of my post was simply an attempt to show that the economic value of an individual is far greater than their salary, thus demonstrating that if one looks only at specific jobs and salaries, the analysis is not complete.

As for more specific discussion, I'm not motivated to spend weeks putting together semi-legitimate models of various stimulus efforts, and doing less than that would be pointless. That said, when you talking about crowding out effects and such, you should be aware that economists are aware of these effects, and they are part of the math that sits behind a stimulus model.

The only thing I'll address in passing about the roosevelt recession is that it emphatically did not occur during a period of government stimulus, rather it came at a time when the government was adopting austerity measures and increasing taxes, which is pretty much the opposite of the situation today.

That said, I stand by my original point that proper analysis is complex, and that there really isn't any substitute for it. Anything less is just noise... so let's leave it to the technocrats.

Analysis of this sort is indeed very complex and I did increase the scope of the thread beyond what you were addressing.

As for the "Roosevelt Recession", it's worth pointing out that sooner or later you have to tighten the screws (later might be when external to your country effects come into play, e.g. right now I think the biggest question is when will the Federal government run out of people willing to finance its 1.5 trillion dollar a year deficit (yeah, its supposed to go down to 1 trillion soon, but who believes that absent some major political shifts?)).

That late '30s experience suggests that counter-cyclical spending might only delay the day of reckoning, with perhaps the Japanese showing what happens when you mostly try to indefinitely delay it ... and they can finance their deficit spending for at least a little while longer (well, until too many retirees try to draw down their assets).

Hmmm, I should also point out that a lot of this has to do with whether you have a liquidity ("It's a Wonderful Life") or solvency problem. There are a lot of short term fixes you can justify for the former that for the latter work only if the surviving institutions can earn their way back to solvency ... until which they're zombies.

The Austrian School is dedicated to zombie killing ^_^.

The japanese are generally regarded as not having done nearly enough in counter-cyclical spending over the last 2 decades, specifically at the beginning.

The problem in 37 is generally understood to have been "too much, too soon" in terms of austerity measures. Penny-wise and pound-foolish if your austerity measures cause the economy to collapse back into recession.

That late '30s experience suggests that counter-cyclical spending might only delay the day of reckoning

It in no way suggests this.

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