Question

According to Lawrence white in The Clash of Economic ideas that shaped the new deal?

Answer 1

The Clash of Economic Ideas interweaves the economic history of the last hundred years with the history of economic doctrines to understand how contrasting economic ideas have originated and developed over time to take their present forms.

In The Clash of Economic Ideas: The Great Policy Debates and Experiments of the Last Hundred Years, George Mason economist Lawrence H. White provides a masterful treatment of the struggle between different approaches and different schools of thought. Mr. White’s book is an uneasy cocktail: He beautifully mixes history of economic thinking, political history and bites of biography (each chapter begins with a vignette) that humanize economists for his readers but also convey a sense of the real excitement that research and policy advocacy can engend.

Lawrence White thoroughly overviews the long-standing “clash ofeconomic ideas”. Loosely defined, this clash contrasts those who favour market solutions toeconomic problems with those in favour of government interventions. The book is as much an economic history of the twentieth century as it is about the theory behind it. White uses cases of applied policies – the adoption of central banking in the United States, command economies during the World Wars, communist central planning in the Soviet Union, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the Bretton Woods monetary system, among others - to illustrate the clash of economic ideas that shaped them.

The Clash of Economic Ideas traces the connections running from historical events to debates among economists, and from the ideas of academic writers to major experiments in economic policy. The treatment offers fresh perspectives on laissez faire, socialism, and fascism; the Roaring Twenties, business cycle theories, and the Great Depression; Institutionalism and the New Deal; the Keynesian Revolution; and war, nationalization, and central planning. After 1945, the work explores the postwar revival of invisible-hand ideas; economic development and growth, with special attention to contrasting policies and thought in Germany and India; the gold standard, the interwar gold-exchange standard, the postwar Bretton Woods system, and the Great Inflation; public goods and public choice; free trade versus protectionism; and finally fiscal policy and public debt. The investigation analyzes the theories of Adam Smith and earlier writers on economics when those antecedents are useful for readers.