Event Date:11 October 2012
MBS0-04/05
Royal Holloway
University of London
Royal Holloway University of London Department of History
The Great Depression and the Great Recession Compared:
Introduction by Dr Emmett Sullivan (RHUL).
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Talks by
Luisa Porritt (The Economist and Sciences Po, Paris)
accompanying images:
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Jason Brock (Royal Holloway, University of London)
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Seminar Discussion:
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Reading:
Crafts, Nicholas and Peter, Fearon. Lessons from the 1930s. Oxford University Press; Oxford, 2010.
This is an entire issue of Oxford Review of Economic Policy (vol. 26 no. 3) which was devoted to how we might learn insights from the Great Depression as the Great Recession progressed.
Skidelsky, Robert. Keynes: The Return of the Master. Revised Edition. Penguin; London, 2010.
The College has Keynes: The Return of the Master as an e-book: http://lib.myilibrary.com/Open.aspx?id=248717
Krugman, Paul. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. Penguin; London, 2008.
Krugman, Paul. End This Depression Now! W. W. Norton & Co; New York: 2012.
This book has only recently been published, and copies for the library have yet to arrive. However, the book can be Kindled for a reasonable price: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_binding_browse-b_mrr_3?rh=n%3A266239%2Ck%3Akrugman+end+this+depression+now%2Cp_n_binding_browse-bin%3A368165031&bbn=266239&keywords=krugman+end+this+depression+now&ie=UTF8&qid=1349349085&rnid=492562011
Paul Krugman is a Nobel-prize winning economist, and liberal critic of the current macroeconomic stance of governments in the west. See, for example,
Krugman, Paul. ‘When Zombies Win’. New York Times. 19 December, 2010.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20krugman.html)
You can follow up on Krugman, and other commentators, through their media comments. For example, Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of New York (http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/bernanke.htm) is a former economics professor at Princeton and Stanford, who wrote as an academic extensively on the Great Depression: in 2004 he famously wrote
“to understand the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics”
(http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1885318,00.html). The Economist and the BBC also have very good section on the contemporary difficulties. Other than this, the key text for the course (Dewey, Kennedy, etc.) will be relevant background for the Great Depression. Come to the talk prepared, and with questions.
