In response to Laura Perrins: Thursday’s reading list: God’s kingdom, expanding the economy and women in science, Owen Morgan wrote: A lot more people should be reading Amity Shlaes. Continued belief in the effectiveness of the New Deal must be in defiance of a mountain of evidence against it, just as Roosevelt himself turned (as Shlaes demonstrates) to policies only recently proved to have failed. Roosevelt’s failure in the Thirties created the Great Depression. Certainly, there was a depression already and Herbert Hoover had made a string of wrong decisions, but Roosevelt took the worst of Hoover’s ideas and made them worse still.
