AMITY SHLAES HAS A NEW BOOK OUT, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. Arnold Kling has read it, and has some observations, including this one:

The struggle over economic policy in the 1930’s was really an episode in the long, historical conflict between business participants in the market and anti-business academics. Roosevelt gave free rein to the professors, until the start of the Second World War led him to realize that he would need the tycoons to help mobilize to defeat Hitler. I suspect that one reason that Roosevelt and the New Deal come off so well in the conventional wisdom is that history books are written by professors, not by entrepreneurs.

Read the whole thing, which is quite interesting.