When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal

The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 was the most severe since The Great Depression. This book is a methodical evaluation of the parallels between the Great Depression and the 2007-2008 global economic meltdown. Although many books have been written on this topic, the unique aspect of this book is the analysis of the positive and negative lessons for contemporary policy-making of the New Deal response to the crisis, through viewing both the New Deal and recent economic crisis as a combination with the current environmental crises. It also will assess the politics of the market and the regulatory failures by helping readers better understand the structure of these crises and the constitutional reforms proposed to mollify them. This book offers new perspectives on comparisons of the intersection of economic and environmental crises of these two periods. Integrating a unique blend of disciplines, it plans to demonstrate some possible ways of escaping our malaise, approaches that were begun but never fulfilled in the 1930s, that were raised as possibilities by popular movements but never allowed onto the political agenda, or approaches that were simply unforeseen in an earlier era. Thus, the book presents a set of guideposts, some beneficial, some cautionary, for the future.