This has been a good crisis for economic history. It will not surprise most members of this audience to learn that there was a sharp spike in references in the press to the term “Great Depression” following the failure of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008.Footnote ¹ More interesting is that there was also a surge in references to “economic history,” first in February of 2008, with growing awareness that this could be the worst recession since you know when, and again in October, coincident with fears that the financial system was on the verge of collapse. Journalists, market participants, and policymakers all turned to history for guidance on how to react to this skein of otherwise unfathomable events.

It is widely observed that the “lessons of history” were influential in shaping the policy response. There were obvious parallels with the early stages of the Great Depression: an unusually sharp drop in asset prices, an unusually sharp drop in output, and then the failure of prominent financial institutions, all followed by generalized financial distress. There was the fact that this crisis, like that of the 1930s, was not just a U.S. economic and financial crisis but a global economic and financial crisis. The decline in global industrial production from the spring of 2008 closely tracked the decline that followed the peak in the summer of 1929. References to the Great Depression became widespread. References to articles referring to the Great Depression became widespread.Footnote ²

The analogy legitimated certain responses to the collapse of economic and financial activity while delegitimizing others. It supported the notion that the Fed should respond aggressively to prevent the collapse of a few investment funds from precipitating a cascade of financial failures. This reflected the widespread currency of Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz's interpretation of the Great Depression—that what had made the Depression great was the inadequate response of the Federal Reserve.Footnote ³ Recall Ben Bernanke's remarks at the conference on the occasion of Friedman's 90th birthday. “You're right, Milton. We did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.”Footnote ⁴

The analogy with the Great Depression informed the policy response to the crisis more generally. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation increased deposit insurance coverage to $250,000 per depositor exactly one day after press references to the Great Depression peaked. The action was presumably informed by the view of the banking panics of the Great Depression as runs by uninsured depositors, and the historical interpretation, widely shared, that those panics had played a key role in the contraction of the money supply and the impairment of the payments system.Footnote ⁵ The analogy with the Great Depression similarly lent legitimacy to the argument that the Congress and Administration should respond with fiscal stimulus. This reflected the “lesson” of history that the depth and duration of the Depression were attributable in no small part to the fact that fiscal stimulus was not used to counter the collapse of private demand.Footnote ⁶

The analogy with the Great Depression also delegitimized the temptation to respond with protectionist measures designed to bottle up the remaining demand. This reflected the lesson, widely taught to undergraduates and invoked by policymakers, that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff aggravated the crisis of the 1930s. In fact, this “lesson” of history is not supported by modern research, which concludes that Smoot-Hawley played at most a minor role in the propagation of the Depression.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, it has been suggested that Smoot-Hawley, inclusive even of foreign retaliation, had a modestly positive impact by putting upward pressure on prices in what was a sharply deflationary environment, thereby moderating the destabilizing impact of debt deflation.Footnote ⁸ That said, using tariffs to support prices and production was second-best then. There were more direct and less distortionary ways of achieving the same end. Repeating the action would have been second-best again. So this was an instance of bad history in the service of good policy.Footnote ⁹

In addition to shaping the policy response, the analogy with the Great Depression shaped the reaction of the markets. It was not just policymakers but also market participants who viewed current events through the lens of history. The “Four Bad Bears” graph, showing the parallel movement of equity prices in the United States following the 1929 and 2007 crashes, circulated widely and surely shaped perceptions—or fears—of how market conditions were likely to evolve.Footnote ¹⁰ In turn, this played a role in how market conditions did, in practice, evolve.

Some argue that the comparison with the Great Depression was exaggerated, leading to an exaggerated response by financial market participants and policymakers. Bringing us to the question of why the analogy was so widely invoked and influential.

An attempt to answer this question starts with the observation, from cognitive science, that analogical reasoning is central to human cognition.Footnote ¹¹ While resort to relational patterns is similarly evident in the cognitive behavior of other primate species like the chimpanzee, explicit relational matching is extremely difficult for chimpanzees that lack special training in symbol use. It is impossible, so far as we know, for monkeys.Footnote ¹²

Among very young members of the human species, in contrast, the use of analogy appears to develop spontaneously.Footnote ¹³ Analogies are found in the written record as far back as there is evidence of well-developed written language, in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, for example.

Analogical reasoning is not the only form of human reasoning, to be sure. There is deductive reasoning based on arriving at an understanding of events on the basis of a set of principles or a general theory—in the present context, on the basis of economic theory. In the 2008/09 crisis economic policymakers could have worked top-down, from first principles, deducing how to respond. With little stretch of imagination, one can envision them in the New Executive Office Building and the corridors of the Fed sketching on their yellow pads IS-LM diagrams or their DSGE alternatives as a guide to action.

Then there is inductive reasoning, which builds up a diagnosis of the crisis and a guide to action from close scrutiny of the facts. This was how Alan Greenspan, famously a connoisseur of data on freight car loadings, is said to have formed his understanding of the state of the economy and its financial markets.Footnote ¹⁴ I can identify. Like many people, I spent an inordinate amount of time in 2008 and 2009 scanning the press and Internet in a desperate effort to make sense of a news flow full of economic and financial events the like of which I had never seen, and attempting to assemble them into a coherent whole.

As economic historians well know, these approaches to human reasoning are not really alternatives. In practice they are used in conjunction. The question is under what circumstances individuals on their own and as members of groups rely most heavily on analogical reasoning. The literatures on cognitive science and organizational learning suggest two situations. First, when there is limited time to reach a decision and those reaching it have limited information-processing capacity. In 2008/09, not having time to acquire and process all relevant information about the causes and dynamics of the crisis, policymakers and others had to take logical and empirical shortcuts when reasoning their way to decisions. The analogy with the Great Depression was a powerful intellectual shortcut. It provided a ready diagnosis and an implied set of do's and don'ts.

Second, the literature suggests that individuals are likely to rely on analogy when they disagree on the principles needed for deductive reasoning. Saltwater and freshwater economists relied on different bodies of theory when attempting to make sense of the events unfolding around them in 2008/09. The models of the economy they sketched on their yellow pads had little in common. Their theories pointed to different diagnoses (or in some cases no diagnosis) and recommended different policy responses (or in some cases no response). Given pressure for action, this encouraged less reliance on deductive reasoning and more use of analogical reasoning than in other circumstances. In the absence of a theoretical consensus, the analogy with the Great Depression moved policymakers toward a shared understanding of the problem. It offered a guide to action.

This suggests that while policymakers may regularly employ analogical reasoning, they will lean on it most heavily in crises. Crises are when the pressure to act is greatest but also when there is least time for theorizing and data gathering. President Kennedy and his advisors, when reasoning through how to respond to Soviet provocation in the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaned heavily on the analogy with Pearl Harbor.Footnote ¹⁵ President Ford and his advisors, in thinking about how to respond to the swine flu outbreak in 1976, reasoned by way of analogy with the 1918 influenza.Footnote ¹⁶ President Obama and his advisors, when seeking to comprehend the consequences of the Gulf Oil spill in 2010 and frame a response, invoked the analogy of the Exxon Valdez.

Some have suggested that this reliance on analogical reasoning in crises leads policymakers to systemically exaggerate the gravity of events. When drawing analogies, they focus on “searing” or “molding” events of “transcendent importance” in the words of Philip Zelikow.Footnote ¹⁷ In seeking to understand why President Truman, having previously dismissed South Korea as “militarily worthless,” went to war over it in 1950, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May cite Truman's tendency to reason in terms of the transcendent analogy for Truman's generation, namely the “fateful events of the nineteen-thirties, when aggression unopposed bred more aggression and eventually war.”Footnote ¹⁸

This brings us back to the possibility that the comparison between the events of 2008/09 and the Great Depression was exaggerated, leading policymakers to overreact. And this in turn points us to the further question of how the analogizer chooses the base case mapped onto the target case. Although the Great Depression was clearly the dominant base case in discussions of the 2008/9 crisis, there were other possible analogies. There was the 1873 crisis, driven by an investment boom and bust like that of the period leading up to 2007, which led to the failure of brokerage houses, in parallel with the problems in 2008 of the investment banks. There was the 1907 crisis, in response to which J.P. Morgan organized a lifeboat operation that resembled in important respects the 2008 rescue of Bear Stearns by none other than J.P. Morgan & Co. Moreover, in 1907 depositor runs centered not on the banks but on the trust companies, whose situation was not unlike that of the modern shadow banking system.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet the 1930s, and not 1907 or 1873, was the dominant analogy. Cognitive scientists in the “structure-mapping” tradition would explain this on the grounds that structural parallels between the Great Depression and the recent episode were in fact more extensive.Footnote ²⁰ In this view, it is the extent of structural similarities between the base and target cases that results in the former being chosen. Nineteenth-century cycles had in common with the recent episode that they were investment-boom- and-bust driven. The 1907 crisis had in common a similar financial rescue. But the Great Depression had in common with 2008/09 a host of further features. The Great Depression, even more than earlier financial crises, was global in scope. It saw the collapse of housing prices. It saw the collapse of international trade. More generally, the interwar economy more closely resembled today's in terms of economic structure and policymaking institutions.

But there are alternative explanations. Other cognitive scientists, focusing on the first stage of analytical thinking, which involves retrieving the relevant analogs stored in long-term memory, point to the “accessibility” of the base case when explaining why it is chosen. Whether an analogy is invoked depends, put simply, on the ease with which it is recalled.Footnote ²¹ This is basically Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's “availability” heuristic in another guise.Footnote ²² The Great Depression had going for it that it was more recent than pre-World War I financial crises. A few older members of the commentariat had experienced it firsthand, which cannot be said of previous financial crises.Footnote ²³ The Great Depression is more widely taught and therefore more familiar to policymakers, investors, and the general public.Footnote ²⁴ It was the analogy to which they turned not because it was the most appropriate guide to policy and action but simply because it was the most accessible.

In part, this accessibility reflects the same fact just mentioned— that the Great Depression was the most recent full-blown financial crisis. But its accessibility also derives from the fact that its far-reaching economic and social consequences lent it prominence in the individual and collective consciousness. The institutional and policy legacy of the 1907 crisis was not inconsequential—most obviously, it provided impetus for the creation of the Federal Reserve System—but the economic and social consequences of the Great Depression were greater still. The Depression was the kind of “searing” or “molding” event that Zelikow has in mind when explaining why certain analogies resonate with policymakers. Not without reason, three of our colleagues have called it “the defining moment.”Footnote ²⁵ Again, this points to the possibility that the same cognitive mechanisms that led to the focus on the Great Depression may have caused those relying on analogical reasoning to overestimate the gravity of events unfolding around them.

Still another explanation in the literature of cognitive science is that analysts select the base case on the basis of its “goal relevance.”Footnote ²⁶ Keith Holyoak argues that the analogy chosen and the inferences drawn on its basis are those that fit with the reasoner's goals in problem solving; he refers to this as “pragmatics.”Footnote ²⁷ In 2008/09 the key goals of policymakers were to stabilize the financial system and to prevent unemployment from rising more than necessary. The sins of omission and commission that had caused the financial system to collapse and unemployment to rise to high levels in the 1930s were thus the attributes of the base case on which policymakers focused.

But this emphasis on pragmatics points to the possibility that cognitive scientists and others—not excluding yours truly—may be exaggerating the importance of analogical reasoning. Decision makers may simply be cherry-picking historical analogies as a way of justifying decisions taken on other grounds.Footnote ²⁸ Foreign policy specialists are alert to this possibility.Footnote ²⁹ Ernest May's 1973 classic “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy focuses on the role of historical analogy in foreign policy decisions.Footnote ³⁰ May argued that foreign policymakers are powerfully influenced by their “beliefs about what history teaches or portends.” He illustrated the point with examples of how historical analogy influenced American policymaking during World War II, in the opening phase of the Cold War, in the Korean intervention, and in the decision to go to war in Vietnam. May's work spawned a large subsequent literature, the capstone of which was Yuen Foong Khong's Analogies at War.Footnote ³¹ Khong looked more closely at the Vietnam decision, drew explicitly on research in cognitive science and psychology, and tabulated the number of times analogies were used by key decision makers in both public speeches and private documents.

This led to a popular literature invoking their themes.Footnote ³² It led also to a backlash against the analogical-reasoning view and to efforts to test its relevance. Thus, Andrew Taylor and John Rourke examined the association of the Munich and Vietnam analogies with the voting behavior of members of Congress in the Persian Gulf crisis of 1991.Footnote ³³ They found that whether or not these analogies were invoked by a member in floor debate added nothing to the extent to which voting behavior could be explained by standard variables like ideology and partisanship. From this they inferred that analogies were mostly used by members of Congress as post hoc justifications for policy choices taken on ideological and partisan grounds. I am not ready to dismiss the importance of analogical reasoning on this basis, there being some obvious problems with Taylor and Rourke's empirical strategy. But their work suggests a direction for those who wish to be serious about testing for the influence of historical analogy.

May further suggested that policymakers use analogy badly. They tend to seize on the first analogy that springs to mind, like the consumer who impulsively grabs the first box of breakfast cereal at eye level on the supermarket shelf. They do not search more widely; they rely on the availability heuristic, in other words. They are oblivious to small-sample problems. Cognitive scientists have noted that individuals relying on analogical reasoning tend to retrieve only a small number of analogs.Footnote ³⁴ Under pressure of time, they pay inadequate attention to the correspondence between the base and target case. Feeling pressure to decide, they do not adequately analyze the historical case, test its fitness, or ask in what ways it might mislead. One worries that some future scholar of our recent crisis will argue that our economic policymakers, when drawing lessons from history, displayed some of these same behaviors.

In principle, it is possible for policymakers to use history more judiciously. They can seek multiple historical analogies to the problem at hand and attempt to discern whether they all seemingly have the same implications for policy. When different historical analogies have different implications, they can analyze the characteristics of the multiple cases responsible for those different implications, and determine which characteristics are also shared by the target case.

They can then use the resulting portfolio of historical analogies to develop a “consideration set,” a set of options that the decision maker then evaluates. Those who work in business schools will recognize that this term comes from marketing, where researchers seek to determine, inter alia, what brands of breakfast cereal a supermarket shopper is prepared to consider, how that set of brands is formed, and how it might be manipulated.Footnote ³⁵ The role of historical analogy in policy, from this point of view, is not to dictate action but to shape the consideration set—that is to say, to define the options.

As an example of how this is possible, May cites the Cuban Missile Crisis. In thinking of what policy to adopt, President Kennedy thought not only of Pearl Harbor but also of the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1948/49 Berlin Blockade, the German invasion of Czechoslovakia prior to World War II, and the escalation of military tensions that followed the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. As May shows, Kennedy consciously sought multiple analogies, weighed their applicability, and contrasted their policy implications. The president was thereby able to move beyond the most readily available analogy and identify characteristics of several historical cases that applied to the crisis at hand. This led to the development of a consideration set that included not just air strike but also naval blockade and negotiation.

Kennedy seems to have been aware of the bias toward “searing” or “molding” events. He was a student of history, having written a popular history that won the Pulitzer Prize. It did not hurt that among his advisors were academics who had taught history as well as social science courses with an historical dimension. Here it is tempting to echo the observation, not original to me, that we were enormously lucky in 2008/09 that several key policymakers were serious students of business cycles and financial crises.Footnote ³⁶

Of course, one cannot rely on the good luck of having historically literate policymakers. In analyzing the decision to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, for example, Khong suggests that President Johnson and his advisors used analogical reasoning less judiciously than had Kennedy and his circle.Footnote ³⁷

That one cannot always count on individuals points to the importance of developing institutionalized mechanisms so that policymakers, when reasoning by analogy, know where to turn to access the historical record.Footnote ³⁸ In the United States, institutional memory is probably best developed in the State Department, Abraham Lincoln having established the Office of the Historian in 1861. That office's principal product, Foreign Relations of the United States, will be familiar to this audience.Footnote ³⁹ The Office of the Historian also prepares “policy supportive” studies and memos for State Department principals and agencies.Footnote ⁴⁰ More broadly, the institutionalization of historical memory in the foreign policy context is of long standing. In preparation for the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, for example, the British government commissioned studies of previous peace conferences. Militaries in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere have regularly commissioned histories of major wars.

Examples from the world of economic policymaking are fewer. One familiar to me is the official historian of the International Monetary Fund. In the early 1960s, the impending 20th anniversary of the Fund prompted management to commission an official history as a way of explaining to the outside world how the IMF had evolved. Prior to that, the relatively secretive nature of the Fund's activities had fed public suspicion, a problem which rendered the proposal for an official history compelling. The result proved to be useful internally, evidently to the surprise of those responsible for the commission.Footnote ⁴¹ This led to four additional histories of subsequent periods.Footnote ⁴² While the Fund has never established a permanent office of the historian, it has regularly filled the position, and the job description is now explicit about the historian's institutional memory function. In a number of recent instances, such as the adoption of new guidelines for conditionality, decisions regarding surveillance and the creation of new lending facilities, the published histories provided valuable source material on what had been tried, what had worked, and what hadn't. Indeed the historian was actively involved in the decision-making process.

Another less happy tale is from the Historical Section of the British Treasury. In 1957 Sir Norman Brook, permanent secretary of the treasury and influential mandarin, instituted a “funding initiative” to encourage British government agencies to make more systematic use of history. Brook had been involved in the meetings of the Cabinet and its Egypt Committee during the Suez Crisis, which was a financial as well as a geopolitical crisis, and in that context had found invaluable the War Book, a running reference work encapsulating British experience in the transition from peace to war.Footnote ⁴³ Brook and his assistants felt the absence of a civil history to inform their decision making on peacetime matters. Brook noted that the absence of a civil history made it hard to determine “promptly and authoritatively” what had been done in the past to solve peacetime problems. This led him to encourage departments to commission historical memoranda concerned with civil problems. In 1957 Brook authorized the first of a series of treasury historical memoranda covering peacetime and urged Whitehall to follow the lead of his department.

But while the Treasury moved forward, other departments did little in response to the initiative.Footnote ⁴⁴ And although substantial studies were produced within the Treasury, they were not well received. There was the sense that policy-relevant history took too long to write and that the results were too difficult to digest.Footnote ⁴⁵ The principal civil servant tasked with writing historical analyses, James Ogilvy-Webb, produced as his first project a three-volume 100,000 word history of wages policy. Richard Clark, the head of Home and Overseas Planning Staff, then instructed Ogilvy-Webb to prepare a shorter history, which eventually emerged as a Treasury Historical Memorandum.Footnote ⁴⁶ Other divisions of the Treasury enlisted historians to produce memoranda on topics ranging from aircraft purchasing to nationalized industries.

There appears to have been some criticism by the historians of these short-form memoranda as insufficiently nuanced. Senior civil servants, for their part, were largely dismissive of the final product; a few overworked officials were positively hostile. There is little indication that the memoranda had much impact on policymaking. In-house historians, the conclusion was drawn, were not especially useful, and in 1976 the Historical Section was closed down.

The alternative is to draw on outside expertise. In March 1990 at Chequers, Margaret Thatcher famously met with six historians in an effort to better understand the implications of German reunification, although the proceedings, by some accounts, were less than constructive.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Europe, there exist networks of economic historians, with public funding, whose express purpose is to inform the policy process.Footnote ⁴⁸ The problem of relying on independent scholars is, of course, that they will not have the same access to the confidential documents as the IMF's Official Historian or the State Department's Historian.Footnote ⁴⁹

So far, I have skated over the distinction between analogy and historical analogy. In describing the role of analogical reasoning in the U.S. decision to commit to ground war in Asia in the 1960s, the cognitive scientists Arthur Markham and Page Moreau cite the influence not of the historical analogy with Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia but the ahistorical analogy with a row of dominos.Footnote ⁵⁰ The latter, alluding not to a specific historical event but to the comparison with the child's game of lining up a row of dominos, was influential in framing the political debate over U.S. policy in Asia. It suggested that even if South Korea or Vietnam was politically insignificant in and of itself, a Communist takeover could not be ignored because it would lead to other Communist takeovers, much as tipping over one domino can cause the entire row to come tumbling down. That mental image, in turn, was not inconsequential for how policymakers in fact chose to respond.

Some will say that the comparison with falling dominos was less an analogy (a relational mapping) than a metaphor (a figure of speech suggesting a parallel between two otherwise very different objects).Footnote ⁵¹ One might say the same of “a crisis of Great Depression-like severity.” When used in this fashion in 2008/09, “Great Depression” had more symbolic than historical content. It symbolized a grave economic situation that presumably required urgent action on the part of policymakers, but it did not come lumbered with historical detail. While highlighting the need for action, it did not point to or away from particular steps. As Keith Shimko explains, metaphors tend to have less a direct, immediate, and identifiable influence on policy than analogies because the correspondence between the two objects drawn is less detailed.Footnote ⁵² The domino metaphor implied the need to do something, but what exactly was not clear. The historical analogy with Munich and the Nazis' invasion of Czechoslovakia, in contrast, pointed U.S. foreign policymakers in the 1950s and 1960s toward specific steps.

Viewed in this way, the notion of a “Great Depression” was invoked in 2008/09 both as metaphor and analogy. As a metaphor, it helped to mobilize public support for extraordinary action of some, unspecified type. As an historical analogy, it pointed to specific steps and away from others.

Where for political scientists the danger with historical analogy is that policymakers will use it injudiciously—they will fail to consider multiple analogies, weigh their correspondence with the current situation, and emphasize not just similarities but also differences—economic historians will recognize an additional issue: the existence of multiple interpretations of the same events. If history is the distilled, authoritative encapsulation of society's memory of its past, then the history of the Great Depression, like all history, is still being written. Existing accounts, in other words, are less than fully distilled and authoritative.

And insofar as this was the case, the historical analogy to the Great Depression offered less guidance to policy. Did we need a new New Deal? Well, that depended on whether you sided with historians who argue that the New Deal helped to end the Depression or only prolonged it. Did we need a jolt to the exchange rate to vanquish deflationary expectations? The answer depended on whether your view was that Roosevelt's decision to take the United States off the gold standard in 1933 was a critical step that transformed expectations and ended deflation or whether you thought it was a sideshow. For those attempting to move from metaphor to analogy, this was a reminder that the distilled, authoritative encapsulation of the period remains a work in progress.

This brings me to a final question. How will the 2008/09 crisis influence historical scholarship? This is the other dimension of historical analogy. Not only does the base case shape perceptions of the target case, but the mechanism operates also in reverse.Footnote ⁵³ It is likely that there will now be less Whig history of the Great Depression. The mainstream narrative is that the experience of the Depression led to a series of institutional and policy innovations making it less likely that something similar would happen again. American economic historians refer in this connection to federal deposit insurance, unemployment insurance, Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the concentration of monetary-policymaking authority at the Federal Reserve Board, and automatic fiscal stabilizers. Historians of other countries have similar lists. Although the stabilizing impact of particular entries on these lists has been disputed, the thrust of the dominant narrative is clear.

We now have had a graphic reminder that we have less than fully succeeded in corralling threats to economic and financial instability. While policy responses may avoid the repetition of past threats, they are no guarantee against future threats. Markets tend to adapt to stabilizing policy innovations in ways that render those innovations less stabilizing. As memories of the earlier crisis fade, policymakers themselves become more likely to consort with market participants in this effort. I suspect that we will now see more attention to these longer-term adaptations to the legacy of the Great Depression and less to the short-term policy response.

The recent crisis also reminds us that the policy response is as much a matter of ideology and politics as it is a matter of economics. In 2010/11 the debate over a second stimulus seemed to be governed less by evidence on the size of the multiplier than by the analyst's ideology and by political backlash against earlier government interventions in the economy. Accounts explaining the failure of the authorities to intervene more effectively in the 1930s mainly as a matter of bad economics are now likely to be revised. Elsewhere, Peter Temin and I have emphasized the role of ideology.Footnote ⁵⁴ Economic historians starting with Leonard Arrington and Gavin Wright and extending to John Wallis, Price Fishback, and Shawn Kantor have done important work on the political economy of the policy response.Footnote ⁵⁵ We will surely see more such work in the wake of the recent crisis, especially for countries other than the United States where there are fewer similar studies.

The profession having been reminded that crises have long-term effects, we will also see more studies of how the Depression affected household behavior: attitudes toward saving, spending, and risk taking, for example.Footnote ⁵⁶ We will see more studies of how it affected educational attainment and labor-market outcomes over the life cycle.Footnote ⁵⁷

Finally, the widespread use of the Great Depression analogy in the recent crisis having reminded us that historical narratives are contested, we will see more explicit attention to the question of how such narratives are formed.