UCLA's Lee Ohanian: Hoover, Roosevelt and the Great Depression

[guerre1859]

'distorting market forces and incentives' 'inefficient' are these code words?

I think this fellow unwittingly revealed his underlying bias when he made a comment 'what if McDonalds paid its workers $500 and hour?'

Oh, how terrible! How could you possibly pay somebody running around like a headless chicken in a hot kitchen that much?

It's inefficient to pay workers anything close to a living wage...but paying CEOs millions, that's efficient, that's not a distortion, is it?

[guerre1859]

2) very significant advances in worker productivity had taken place in the 1920s, overall, workers in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, railways went up an average of 76%. On average did worker pay increase by a similar percentage during this time period? Doesn't seem to be borne out.

3) deflation in the Depression could vary from 12% to 30%; wages fell much, much lower. If a labor wage gap was the culprit in Ohanian's 'whodunit' why didn't corporations go on a hiring spree at this point

[guerre1859]

Dr. Marder:

Very interesting but the information presented here doesn't convince me. Ohanian claims that the price of labor was too high and that it presented a gap between deflating prices, that corporations were squeezed between having pledged to President Hoover to maintain high wages while the deteriorating macroeconomic situation forced them to lower the prices they charged for their products.

1) I'm not convinced that these wages were 'high' to begin with, or were indeed maintained.

[hu48go22]

You're awesome! Great lecture. Murray Rothbard writes something similar to this.

[pdxpumped]

econ.ucla.edu/people/papers/Oh­anian/Ohanian499.pdf

Here is the paper.

[pdxpumped]

@pdxpumped

econ.yale.edu/seminars/echist/­eh02/ohanian-021008.pdf

Other paper.

[chao5cuber]

brilliant lecture

[slaol121]

Fantastic lecture... learned a lot.