But that number hides something: A third of the people Shlaes counts as unemployed had a job that the New Deal gave them through its relief programs. Based on such a statistic, you could think the New Deal wasn’t alleviating the Great Depression. That’s appalling-almost as bad as 23 percent in 1932. Let’s look at a figure Shlaes gives twice in her book and again in her Wall Street Journal editorial: She has unemployment at 20 percent in the 1937-38 recession. In Roosevelt’s rhetoric, the phrase stood for Americans who had not reaped enough economic benefits relative to the capitalists and captains of industry and. The forgotten man became a kind of shorthand during FDR’s election campaign and subsequent presidency. If you want to know how the New Deal treated ordinary Americans, this choice really matters. And that is the subject of the Amity Shlaes book, The Forgotten Man. Instead she chooses different estimates of unemployment that (she acknowledges) show a much larger share of Americans out of work during the New Deal. And though she quotes an unemployment number, she doesn’t quote the figures I’ve just mentioned. She starts each chapter with a rat-a-tat of just-the-facts, but instead of GDP, which represents the overall economy, she quotes the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which represents the maybe 10 percent of Americans who owned stock. Shlaes makes a different argument about numbers, because she uses different numbers.
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