The Slump Goes On: Why? | The New York Review of Books

The Slump Goes On: Why? | The New York Review of Books: "Books on the Great Recession are still pouring off the presses—but for the most part they are backward-looking, asking how we got into this mess rather than telling us how to get out. To be fair, many recent books do offer prescriptions about how to avoid the next bubble; but they don’t offer much guidance on the most pressing problem at hand, which is how to deal with the continuing consequences of the last one. ...In what follows, we’ll provide a relatively brief discussion of a much-belabored but still controversial subject: the origins of the 2008 crisis. We’ll then turn to the ongoing policy debates about the response to the crisis and its aftermath. Not to keep readers in suspense: we believe that the relative absence of proposals to deal with mass unemployment is a case of “self-induced paralysis”—a phrase that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used a decade ago, when he was a researcher criticizing policymakers from the outside. There is room for action, both monetary and fiscal. But politicians, government officials, and economists alike have suffered a failure of nerve—a failure for which millions of workers will pay a heavy price.