Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com