[fennecfoxen]

Unlikely. One reason the Great Depression was so bad because there was an environmental catastrophe (the Dust Bowl) which made agriculture very hard at a time when agriculture was still a really, really big deal. The virus does not make normal economic activity particularly hard; we are avoiding economic activity for mostly humanitarian reasons, and we can resume economic activity either when everyone gas been infected anyway (yay pandemics), or when testing and treatment is more readily available.

Another reason the Great Depression got worse than a normal depression was that the Hoover administration unwisely decided to make money and credit less available during the crash. Today's policy response is more about throwing money at people (sometimes just at the politically connected, sometimes fairly). One can and should question many specifics (the response is not super coherent) but at least it is the opposite of fiscal and monetary tightening.

Another reason the Great Depression stayed so very bad for so very long was as a consequence the FDR administration's unprecedented intervention into the economy. I don't mean Social Security, either, I mean things like the National Recovery Administration, which explicitly sought to turn the US into a planned economy, with minimum and maximum prices for everything, run by local politically-connected cartels with their own police powers.

When the NRA was declared unconstitutional, its practices were shifted into other places. A few of the more ridiculous practices led by other agencies are still around. For instance, the Supreme Court only killed the USDA's Raisin Board in 2015 when a raisin farmer objected to them seizing 89,000 tons of raisins (30% of his crop) to give away for free in school lunches. (The USDA of that time was also great at encouraging the big agribusiness factory farming and pushing out what small farmers were still able to operate.)

None of this planned-economy stuff is on the table today — not in the US, not with this administration anyway, and not with the current US senate. There's an outside shot of a fully nationalized health system if Bernie Sanders wins and Democrats take the Senate, and that's the most ambitious plan, and even if we assume the taxes to fund it were quite stultifying indeed, it's unlikely to be as harmful. No one is coming for our raisins.

[graeme]

The Great Depression was global. It affected much more than the US. The dust bowl was local colour. The premise of your entire analysis is faulty.

[fennecfoxen]

The Great Depression was global, but much of the damage was US-led, so the factors that made it a great depression, not just another footnote in economic history, are relevant worldwide. The world economy was already integrating, particularly in the areas of banking and finance, so US monetary tightening affected many European economies and currencies, causing crises in European banks and currencies worldwide. Meanwhile foreign direct investment from the US dried up, neutralizing what had been a major source of European productivity growth in that era.

Today, everyone's quit the gold standard and the forex situation is very different, blunting impacts of wild currency movements. US and European banks are not at risk of bank runs (as they are stabilized by general government policy and specific interventions), and whatever chaos we see, a ~35% contraction in the supply of USD is not on the table. If we are beset by deflation it's going to be puny in comparison.

It is worth mentioning that the Depression was also associated with major breakdowns in international trade, in part due to lots of tariffs. The bad news is we're tariff-happy again, but not as bad as Smoot-Hawley for now? The protectionist impulse bears monitoring.

And I'll finally clarify that we will still have a recession, and it might be pretty nasty. It's just not going to be Great Depression bad where we can't recover for a decade, not with just what's happened so far.

[gshdg]

The Dust Bowl was a US catastrophe that made the Depression worse here. But the Depression was a worldwide phenomenon.