manufacturing rose by 3.4 percent per QUARTER, and output by 5.0 percent per QUARTER. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, America's top economist, says in his excellent book Essays on the Great Depression (on page 248) that "between 19, employment in U.S. Roosevelt reversed the contraction, ended the Depression, and restored America's industrial prosperity to the pre-Depression level. Gross private domestic investment increased a staggering 880.38% over that same time period! The Business Index in 1937 briefly reached the previous output peak of 110 before the Great Depression started in 1929. Personal income increased 45.5% from the beginning of 1933 through 1937. The growth of personal income (money in the hands of consumers after taxes) grew at about the same robust rate as GDP over that time period. WOW! This strong growth was boosted by FDR's temporary job programs. In 1934 GDP grew a robust 17% to 66 billion. In 1933, the year that Roosevelt took power, GDP dropped only 4% to 56.4 billion as FDR stopped the worst of the crisis. Even the GDP numbers are not included in "The Forgotten Man!" More telling, the unemployment numbers in "The Forgotten Man" do not seem to match the numbers in the Historical Statistics of the United States! Instead, the numbers in "The Forgotten Man" portray the unemployment numbers to be worse! THE ECONOMIC STATISTICS SHOW A STRONG PERFORMANCE BY FDR, even if full employment did not return until World War Two. Oddly, the "Forgotten Man" does not include the most important economic statistics. He reversed the economic contraction, increased employment, and engineered a recovery as reflected in many statistics. The GDP numbers and other statistics also show a strong economic recovery under FDR. There has never again been another depression or panic since the New Deal reforms were enacted. The final result is that the New Deal cured the economy of the severe volatility. FDR said they should try something new and if it worked, great, and if not, try something else.
The real debate is FDR's pragmatic willingness to do something to confront the economic catastrophe, versus the old flawed policies. (That is not meant to offend Republicans or business people today.) Those volatile flawed policies caused the Great Depression. Before the New Deal, the economy was not free from long-standing flawed policies by big business and the Republican Party that had caused several depressions, panics, and volatility over many decades before the New Deal, again and again. "The Forgotten Man" emphasizes selectively-picked "moving stories of individual Americans" against government elites, which incorrectly frames the debate as government intervention ruining recovery versus supposedly free markets before the New Deal, but that is not historically accurate.
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