While making the case that George W. Bush is the worst economic manager this country has ever seen, Joseph Stiglitz writes:
Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover's policies, the country began to recover.
Huh. My understanding was that Hoover is largely believed to have gotten a bum rap. His policies weren't enough, but they thrust in the right direction. He called industrialists to the White House and used the threat of regulation to force them to maintain wages, even getting Henry Ford to increase pay; he expanded public work projects and extracted promises of private infrastructure investment in order to accelerate job growth; he sought higher farm prices and increased government spending. In the overall, he did far too little, but his worst sins were of scale, not misjudgement. As for his largest blunder, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act wasn't the world's wisest decision, I agree, but I'd been under the impression that its significance had largely been overstated, at least so far as worsening the Depression went.
