But America’s past economic success is no guarantee of its future, writes Joseph Stiglitz
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY years ago, the United States was largely an agrarian economy—affected, of course, by weather but without real business cycles. Those came with the development of capitalism in the 19th century. And so began the deep fluctuations of the modern era, the two worst being the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession that began in 2008. Fortunately, John Maynard Keynes, the great economist of the 20th century, showed us that we did not have to suffer these dysfunctions of capitalism. The government could do something about them.