The Forgotten Man: A New History of The Great Depression - Reception

Reception

The Forgotten Man has been praised by Republican politicians such as Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Mark Sanford, Jon Kyl, and Mike Pence. Fred Barnes of the conservative Weekly Standard has called Shlaes one of the Republican party's major assets. "Amity Shlaes's book on the failure of the New Deal to revive the economy, The Forgotten Man, was widely read by Republicans in Washington." In February 2009 during the Senate confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Republican Senator John Barrasso waved a copy of the book and announced, "In these economic times, a number of members of the Senate are reading a book called The Forgotten Man, about the history of the Great Depression, as we compare and look for solutions, as we look at a stimulus package."

On the other hand, The Forgotten Man and its key arguments have been criticized by liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, among others. Krugman wrote of "a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that FDR actually made the Depression worse.... But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the 1930s, by the MIT economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: Fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful 'not because it does not work, but because it was not tried'." Krugman is among a number of reviewers who criticized Shlaes for "misleading statistics"—specifically the use of a series for employment during the 1930s that omitted those working in public works programs. Shlaes responded to Krugman in the Wall Street Journal that the Bureau of Labor Statistics series she had used "intentionally did not include temporary jobs in emergency programs—because to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects". Shlaes said that if the Obama administration "proposes F.D.R.-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn't." Writing in Forbes, former United States Department of Labor chief economist and Hudson Institute fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth called it the "economic fight of the year."

Other critics of The Forgotten Man include: Depression historian Robert S. McElvaine, who classifies it in a review in the journal Labor History as "born-again Antisocial Darwinism" and calls it "as much a brief for the Bush tax cuts of 2001 as it is a history of the Depression of the 1930s"; historian Matthew Dallek, who has called Amity Shlaes a "revisionist" with a "blind view of the New Deal"; historian Eric Rauchway, who wrote that Shlaes ignored historical GDP easily available in the Historical Statistics of the United States; and journalist Jonathan Chait of The New Republic who wrote, "intellectual coherence is not the purpose of Shlaes's project. The real point is to recreate the political mythology of the period."