This 1980 work is best read as an edited policy compendium on business cycles and stabilization, not as a single Haberler article. Its chapters gather contributors around a common problem: whether the lessons of 1929–80 made another depression impossible, or whether late-1970s inflation, recession, protectionism, and monetary disorder were producing a different route to systemic crisis.
No wonder that the question is asked with increasing urgency and anxiety—will it happen again?
Haberler’s contribution supplies the collection’s historical anchor. He treats the Depression as a global watershed in economic thought and policy, one that discredited laissez-faire confidence, strengthened planning and collectivist alternatives, and transformed macroeconomics.
It gave rise to the Keynesian revolution and shook the confidence in the free market-capitalist economy.
The historically oriented chapters and contributors use the 1930s to separate ordinary recession from cumulative collapse. Haberler’s chapter emphasizes that the catastrophe was not simply “capitalism” failing, but a sequence of monetary contraction, banking breakdown, rigid exchange-rate commitments, and trade retaliation. The volume’s recurring distinction is between shocks that begin a downturn and institutions or policies that magnify it into depression.
Money GNP fell by 16 percent, real GNP by 13 percent, industrial production by 32 percent and unemployment shot up from 11 percent in March 1937 to 20 percent in June 1938—all in the short span of 13 months.
Other chapters broaden that analysis from the interwar episode to postwar policy practice. Monetary contributors stress lender-of-last-resort duties, the dangers of deflation, and the importance of preventing collapse in nominal income. Fiscal and Keynesian-oriented discussions consider when public spending or deficits can arrest cumulative contraction, while more market-oriented contributors warn that permanent activism, controls, subsidies, and regulation may weaken productivity and perpetuate inflation. The contributors therefore do not offer one doctrine so much as a structured debate over rules, discretion, and institutional learning.
The international chapters make the collection especially comparative. The gold standard appears not as a neutral background but as a transmission mechanism for deflationary policy, while tariffs and quotas show how national rescue measures can become collectively destructive.
In their global effect these protectionist measures greatly aggravated the world depression, although such measures, regarded in isolation and in the short run, did stimulate the economy of the country in question.
By the end, the volume’s answer is double-edged. A deflationary depression on the 1930s model is presented as unlikely because central banks, governments, deposit insurance, and more flexible exchange arrangements make a passive repetition improbable. But the contributors do not equate “unlikely” with “safe.” Their common warning is that the modern danger lies in inflationary recession, policy panic, protectionism, and political intolerance of unemployment. The collection’s significance lies in this tension: it treats the Great Depression as a preventable monetary-institutional disaster, while insisting that bad anti-depression policy can create new forms of instability.
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