The Past Speaks

John V. C. Nye has published an extremely erudite article on the Great Depression, world trade, and its lessons for today. Nye is one of these brilliant polymaths. His undergrad degree was in physics, but then he went on to teach both economics and history at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. He now holds the Frédéric Bastiat Chair in Political Economy at George Mason University. He is a specialist in European economic history. He has done research on a variety of topics from firm size in France and the rise of the British fiscal state to Soviet collusion in championship chess, demography and the history of superstition. He is the author of War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade 1689-1900 (Princeton, 2007).

You may also be interested in Prof. Robert E. Wright’s recent blog post “The Great Recession of 2008 and the Sordid Historiography of the Great Depression“