The System Worked

Dan Drezner says the system worked:

The initial shock of the 2008 financial crisis was worse than what happened in 1929, and yet we didn’t experience another Great Depression. Outside the developed world, the global economy has actually done remarkably well. That’s the interesting story, as far as I’m concerned.

This is true. It didn’t work perfectly, or even as well as it should have. But it worked. What’s more, you can make a pretty good case that the United States did a better job—or, at a minimum, as good a job—as any other major region in the world. We could have done a lot better if we had been plagued by fewer of what Keynes famously called “slaves of some defunct economist,” but still. It’s worth celebrating that for all the mistakes we made, we really have learned a lot, and we really are able to handle global economic meltdowns a lot better than in the past.