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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

No, Hoover’s austerity policies are viewed as having elongated the GD. Without the ND the Hoover dam wouldn’t exist. LV, NV wouldn’t exist - pretty sure the US would be much less developed all around and thus poorer. I’d posit the US losing WWII without the ND.

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Well, here's a few examples of people saying that the New Deal either had no major effect on the Great Depression or even extended it:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123353276749137485

https://fee.org/articles/fdrs-folly-how-roosevelt-and-his-ne...

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/ask_a_scholar_did_the_new_...

(I basically googled "did the new deal extend the great depression" to find these)

Now, you could say that these are all "conservative" sources, and thus invalid. (Of course, you'd then have to throw out support for the New Deal from "progressive" sources, which might also be painful) But either way, it does show that "The New Deal didn't help" is a position held by people.

"Although the central causes of the depression are still hotly con- tested, there is a consensus that the "passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression."34 Vice President Albert Gore's assertion (in his NAFTA debate with H. Ross Perot) of our consensus on this issue, has been corroborated. On top of the profession's lack of agreement about the genesis of the Great Depression, there is a disagreement about the effect of the New Deal. In fact, the economists in the sample are almost evenly divided on the question of whether or not when taken "as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." The consensus among historians is that the new Deal did not lengthen and deepen the depression."

Whaples, Robert (March 1995). "Where Is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions" (PDF). The Journal of Economic History. Cambridge University Press. 55 (1): 142–151. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.482.4975. doi:10.1017/S0022050700040602. JSTOR 2123771.

Widely described as authoritative on the GD: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Crash,_1929

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