J. Bradford DeLong looks at two books on the Great Recession and concludes that we acted incorrectly to solve the problems:

The first book is The Shifts and the Shocks, by the conservative British journalist Martin Wolf, who begins by cataloguing the major shifts that set the stage for the economic disaster that continues to shape the world today. His starting point is the huge rise in wealth among the world’s richest 0.1% and 0.01% and the consequent pressure for people, governments, and companies to take on increasingly unsustainable levels of debt.

The second book: Hall of Mirrors, traces our tepid response to the crisis to the triumph of monetarist economists, the disciples of Milton Friedman, over their Keynesian and Minskyite peers – at least when it comes to interpretations of the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. When the 2008 financial crisis erupted, policymakers tried to apply Friedman’s proposed solutions to the Great Depression. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the wrong thing to do, as the monetarist interpretation of the Great Depression was, to put it bluntly, wrong in significant respects and radically incomplete.    What Caused the Great Recession