What can we learn from economic policy disasters?

Is it morbid or therapeutic to analyze the economic catastrophes of the past? What critical strategies can be imported from the realms of medicine and military history to the study of the current state of the economy? Richard Grossman, author of Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them, skillfully dissects the cadavers of economic policies. In the following videos he argues why it is cogent to examine the economic policy disasters of the past and how potential antidotes to current financial maladies can be located by carefully diagnosing economic policy missteps throughout history.

How the living can learn from the dead in economics:

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What we can learn about economics from the Irish potato famine:

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On the state of the economy:

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What we should expect from our politicians in regards to economic policy:

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Richard S. Grossman is the Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them and Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800. Read his previous blog posts and follow him on Twitter @RSGrossman.

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