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Article Artículo

Economic Growth

Government

How It Could Have Been Different This Time

I have been dismissive of the claim that the financial crisis has condemned the country to 8-10 years of high unemployment and low growth. This claim is derived from the book by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, "This Time is Different."

Reinhart and Rogoff perform a valuable exercise in recounting the history of financial crises over the last six centuries. They note that these crises have been followed by a long period of adjustment in which economies are subject to weak growth and high unemployment. Based on this history, they and others have argued that the United States is condemned to a prolonged period of stagnation. The moral of the story is to stop your whining and live with it.

I find this to be a case of incredibly bad induction. If we had looked at the probability that newborns would live to age five, examining random 20-year intervals in different countries over the last six centuries, we would find that in most of these intervals, most newborns do not live to age five. If we therefore concluded that we should expect children born today to die before the age of five, we would be utterly crazy. The advances in health care, nutrition and sanitation over this period make it possible for the vast majority of children almost everywhere to survive to adulthood.

CEPR / September 15, 2011