The essential lesson of the Great Depression was that we destroyed food to boost market prices while people were starving.
Paul Krugman seems to get it. He wants a vastly larger stimulus program -- that is, a program that would create jobs, more more generally, support actual people, using government money. But he doesn't really get it -- not if you look at his language. He doesn't talk about supporting people, but about supporting the "Economy." What about the people?
The term "Lost Decade" is also being bandied about a lot these days. The term refers to the 1990s in Japan, when wages and the economy actually declined. It's the sort of term only an economist could create. Did the people of Japan literally fall of the map? Did they experience no emotion, joy, sadness, death? Of course they did. And yet the term implies that millions of people wasted ten years of their lives.
If we don't start speaking of this economic crisis in human terms, we will continue to be manipulated by large financial firms, and people will continue to suffer. In fact, as a human crisis, our economic problems don't seem so dire (our health and environmental problems do, however). Is there enough food? Enough water? Air? Manpower? Technology? Yes, we still have all of these things. The works are gunked up, and so some of these things aren't being properly distributed, while other things are still being overly distributed, but that's a fixable problem. Not having enough to food to feed people is not a fixable problem.
Obviously, economic growth cannot be infinite (barring some miraculous invention), and yet that is the prevailing goal in the economic policies of most developed nations. The question is, why do we prioritize economic growth over perpetuating some baseline quality of life? The short answer is that we don't take care of each other. Many of our elderly are largely on their own, relying on the growth of their investments to maintain a reasonable quality of life. When an industry is downsized (necessarily), like the auto industry, we don't provide a net to catch its workers as our nation transitions. And so, it becomes politically necessary to babysit the mechanization of our current economy even after they've become junk.
We don't have to do this, but we have no faith in each other. We are Hobbsians. We believe that if people are unemployed, they will become deviants or vampires subsisting off welfare forever. During the Great Depression we destroyed our food surplus to raise the price of that commodity while people were starving; we also believed, and still believe, as Congresswoman Cynthia Davis explained, that hunger is a great motivator.
I don't believe this. I don't believe money is a great motivator, either. Am I a sissy Socialist? Yes I am.