Scott Sumner: uncertainty

Transcript context

…To witness events, monetary or otherwise, to where would you like to go back in time? Assume you have immunity against disease and you speak the appropriate languages. I would want to go back to Mexico before the Spanish conquest, probably. What’s your pick? Probably not that far back. Because of my interest in economic history, I think the period of the 19th and 20th century is the most interesting for me. I don’t know exactly. The 1890s might be interesting for me, because I don’t know as much about it as the Great Depression, which I studied intensively. But I think the 1890s probably saw some similar dynamics play out as we saw in the Great Depression: hoarding of gold, deflationary period, uncertainty about the stability of the monetary system. Going back and seeing that in real time, what were the political issues involved, how did people think about those, that would have been interesting. William Jennings Bryan’s famous speech about the cross of gold was during that period. You’ve researched extensively the 1920s and ’30s, and you’ve seen a large number of movies from those decades. What do you feel are the biases in the movies? What do we get wrong if we only watch the movies?…

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