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Matt Yglesias posts the chart on the right today, and it’s a useful reminder that as bad as the Great Recession has been, it’s still not within light years of being in the same league as the Great Depression. This has all sorts of implications for assessing things like monetary policy, Obama’s ability to get things done, the depth of anger in the country, and so forth.

So yes: things are much better today then they were in 1933. Still, whenever I look at comparisons like this, I’m always struck by one way in which our situation today is worse. In 1933, nobody really knew what to do about a massive, persistent economic downturn. Keynes’s theories hadn’t yet gained wide currency, and conventional wisdom of the day was uniformly unhelpful. Certainly FDR was never a deliberate Keynesian: He did end up spending a lot of money, but mainly because he wanted to help people, not because he really thought that deficit spending per se was the answer to our problems. So in some sense it’s forgivable that they didn’t do a better job of combatting the Great Depression. They really didn’t know any better.

Today we do, of course. And yet, we’re still not willing to do what needs to be done. Partly this is thanks to mindless partisanship, partly because we just don’t have the guts. It’s pretty damn discouraging. At least our predecessors had the excuse of ignorance. What’s our excuse?