Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

I actually like Herb ( I named a fish after him ). I think he was handed a poor hand when he came into office ( unless you think his 8 months in office is what triggered the Great Depression ) and he did the best he could to get out of it. He was a republican who not only raised taxes, but laid the groundwork for recovery under FDR. He was so good BTW that he was brought back into Washington after he was voted out to help run things. Like I said we need more engineers running the country

View on HN

I'm not much of a fan of Hoover. Mainly because of his handling of the crash and how he should have know better. Calvin Coolidge kept taxes low and held spending which had a positive effect on the economy. Hoover was his Commerce Secretary and did the exact opposite as President. He got bad results and a broken economy. FDR didn't recover the economy, he was dead and Truman was President when the economy recovered. Some would even give credit to the Congress of the time for cutting taxes and removing price controls.

Calvin Coolidge remarked on Hoover "for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice—all of it bad.".

> he was handed a poor hand when he came into office

I think mainstream criticism is that his measures, while well-intentioned, actually made the depression significantly worse.

Cause and effect are difficult to figure out, though we have the benefit of lots of hindsight. When you get into a problem so crazy and horrible, you sometimes have to experiment a bit to figure out how to fix things (aka "doing something"), and some of these experiments will invariably go backwards. Hoover's problem was probably he underestimated and misidentified the causes of the crash. Roosevelt experimented a lot also, and had just as many failures as successes, but he was like General Grant during the Civil War who wasn't afraid to loose troops in order to win.

Well, I understand he didn't knew about the Keynesian macroeconomic framework, or was understandably suspicious of it's validity, as new as it was. Microeconomic theory just couldn't model an event such as the Great Depression, at the time. And even FDR, who had the correct framework, had a very unlikely event happen to the world that relieved the economic pressure of the depression. Wouldn't find blame on him for that.

"Recovery" ...if you count the great depression as a recovery! He laid the groundwork for the depression.

You are aware he was only in office for a few months before the stock market crashed ? If you think it was his fault then I don't think I can convince you otherwise, however If you also feel that the problems we had in the late 20's could be fixed in a few years then also good luck with that. There is a reason why it took decades for the stock market to rebound after the crash and a World War to kick industrial America back into gear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com