More than a few historians might quibble with such a characterization, but the focus on Europe also distracts us from what was going on in the United States. Morris offers a quite comprehensive account of the American economy in this decade, but it is one that tends to emphasize the positive. To be sure, there was much to celebrate：The decade witnessed significant gains in productivity, driven by the automobile industry and “the marriage of electricity with mechanical production.” He does an excellent job sketching these developments without succumbing to a simplistic entrepreneur-as-hero narrative.
But there was more going on at this time. Two related trends merit more than a mention. The first was the enormous and growing role of finance. Thomas Philippon, an economist at New York University, has published papers on the financial service industry's share of the nation's gross domestic product, or G.D.P. In the 1920s, finance's share of G.D.P. doubled, with most of the growth taking place in the second half of the decade.
A comparable boom in the financial services industry took place in the lead-up to the 2008 crisis, and in both cases it's hard to read these as anything but a misallocation of economic resources. In each instance, metastatic growth of finance, along with staggering amounts of debt, yielded towers of leverage that came crashing down. And then, as now, this had real effects on the larger economy.
As in our own age, the growing dominance of finance in the 1920s went hand in hand with another trend：rising inequality. While Morris grudgingly acknowledges this fact, his claim that “the good times of the 1920s were such that even people on the bottom rungs of the ladder ... could claim a modest share of the booming consumer economy” is more typical of his rosy view.
So, too, is his account of a black sharecropper buying a Model T with cash, to which he devotes three pages. But this was an anomaly. Yes, more people could afford more things, but most of those things came by purchasing on credit, not rising wages. Inequality skyrocketed in the 1920s, and the reason that this unpleasant fact could be ignored was because of the increase of personal debt and financial intermediation, much as in the years preceding 2008.
There is a growing literature within economics that examines the possibility that inequality, household debt and financial crises may be related, but Morris shows little interest in this kind of work, and he dismisses Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez's ground-breaking analysis of inequality as a “hoary theory,” a breezy rejection of the most widely discussed work in recent years.
Generally, however, Morris is remarkably evenhanded, giving both sides of scholarly debates in deep detail. This is particularly the case in his coverage of the New Deal, where he weighs the practical effects of the dizzying array of policies begun by Roosevelt, from his devaluation of the dollar to the creation of Civilian Conservation Corps. And Morris explains in accessible prose how economists have used modeling to study the New Deal (he wryly notes that this “is still a work in progress - if only because results are often suspiciously consistent with the political disposition of the modelers”).
“A Rabble of Dead Money” is a deft synthesis, blending colorful accounts of the past with the scholarly literature of the present. It may not be the last word on the Great Depression, but it is hard to imagine a more accessible and entertaining introduction to the subject.
