Scott B. Sumner is Professor of Economics at Bentley University, USA. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and he edits the influential blog ""The Money Illusion."" In 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education referred to Sumner as ""among the most influential"" economist bloggers, along with N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University and Paul Krugman of Princeton University. In 2012, Foreign Policy ranked Sumner jointly with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke 15th on its list of ""100 Top Global Thinkers."" Professor Sumner is a contributor to numerous scholarly volumes, and his articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Political Economy; Business and Society Review; Journal of Policy Modeling; and Economic Inquiry.
"The Midas Paradox fills a gap in our understanding of the Great
Depression. The author continues the work of a long and
distinguished line of scholarship that goes back to Rueff and
Mundell in pinpointing the role of the gold market and the price of
gold as a key factor in some of the salient episodes of the
period." --Michael D. Bordo, Board of Governors Professor of
Economics and Director of the Center for Monetary and Financial
History, Rutgers University
"Having done some recent research myself on the causes of the Great
Depression, I have found Scott Sumner's book The Midas Paradox a
source of new insights on that subject. In particular, he sheds
light on why deflation proved to be such an important factor in
disrupting economic activity after the 1929 Crash. He makes a
properly global appraisal of monetary policy and concludes that
central banks, on balance, were actually tightening the money
supply when they should have been easing to offset the loss of
liquidity in the financial sector from the 1929 crash. The Midas
Paradox is an important contribution to the study of the Great
Depression, because it adds another explanation to such known
factors as ill-timed protectionism of why producer prices dropped
so sharply from 1929 to 1933, causing much distress in a heavily
agrarian economy." --George Melloan, former Deputy Editor, The Wall
Street Journal; author, The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to
Socialism
"In The Midas Paradox, Scott Sumner adopts an ideal method (for my
taste) of writing economic history. He presents plenty of details
on episodes, including pending and enacted legislation, and on
contemporary consensus or disagreement on explanations and
recommendations.Sumner also presents judicious amounts of
statistical and econometric evidence. I find all this a gripping
story." --Leland B. Yeager, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Auburn
University and University of Virginia
"In The Midas Paradox, Scott Sumner provides a fascinating account
of how monetary policy under the gold standard got us into the
Great Depression and how wage policies under the New Deal slowed
the subsequent recovery. The book is deep and rich and has
important lessons for today--a must-read for anyone interested in
monetary policy and history and the errors of government policy."
--Douglas A. Irwin, Robert E. Maxwell '23 Professor of Arts and
Sciences, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College
"Scott Sumner is one of the most original economists around. Having
been a pioneer in making the case for nominal GDP targeting, he has
now turned his insightful talents to economic history, providing an
important and fresh reexamination of the causes of the Great
Depression and the halting recovery thereafter. Provocative, well
argued and well written, The Midas Paradox is an important
contribution to our understanding of the roots of the worst
economic period in the nation's history." --Robert E. Litan,
Non-Resident Senior Fellow and former Vice President for Economic
Studies, The Brookings Institution
"Scott Sumner is one of the preeminent monetary thinkers today. The
Midas Paradox represents his twenty years' study of the Great
Depression, one of the most important economic events of the
twentieth century. Highly recommended." --Tyler Cowen, Holbert C.
Harris Chair of Economics, George Mason University
"Scott Sumner offers a unified view of the Great Depression as seen
through the lens of how financial markets' expectations of future
monetary policy appeared in the price of gold especially but also
in other asset markets like the stock market.In addition, the
detailed, rich historical narrative is full of insights about the
causal nature of policy (monetary, fiscal, and regulatory) not
captured in a single, abstract model. Unlike the gold standard at
the time, The Midas Paradox is not orthodox, but it certainly
forces the reader to examine critically his or her prior views
about the Depression." --Robert L. Hetzel, Staff Economist, Federal
Reserve Bank of Richmond "Scott Sumner has provided a tour de force
of the Great Depression in The Midas Paradox. He convincingly shows
in this accessible but thorough retelling of the Great Depression
that policy errors were behind the long economic slump. In
particular, Sumner demonstrates that the combination of
contractionary monetary policy working through the gold market and
supply-side disruptions arising from New Deal policies created a
large drag on economic activity. This is a must read for anyone
wanting to better understand the Great Depression and its
implications for policy today." --David Beckworth, Assistant
Professor of Economics, Western Kentucky University; Editor, Boom &
Bust Banking: The Causes and Consequences of the Great Recession
"Whatever you know, or think you know, about the Great Depression,
The Midas Paradox will teach you something new. And as Scott Sumner
points out, properly understanding what happened in the 1930s
matters a great deal for getting policy right in our own time."
--Ramesh Ponnuru, Senior Editor, National Review "Scott Summer
offers readers of The Midas Paradox a bountiful harvest of new
nuggets about the 'gold standard view' of the Great Depression.
This rewarding read begins with Summer's excellent preface--an
important element that allows the author to review his own book, a
privilege usually denied by journals." --Steve H. Hanke, Professor
of Applied Economics, Johns Hopkins University "Just over 50 years
ago, the publication of A Monetary History of the United States, by
Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, was a crucial episode in the
monetarist counterrevolution that overturned the Keynesian
dominance over postwar macroeconomics, gradually persuading most of
the economics profession that the Great Depression was largely
caused by the monumental ineptitude of the Federal Reserve.
However, the account of the Great Depression provided by A Monetary
History, its many virtues notwithstanding, was defective in a
number of respects, the most important of which being that its
strictly quantity-theoretic focus on the behavior of the monetary
aggregates was inconsistent with the workings of the international
gold standard that was in operation for much of the Great
Depression. A number of subsequent researchers have since pointed
out that the gold standard was a critical factor in causing and
propagating the Great Depression. Now in The Midas Paradox, Scott
Sumner has, with great theoretical and empirical insight and
ingenuity, provided a masterly narrative account of the onset and
propagation of the Great Depression, and of its decade-long
duration, buttressed by striking quantitative and statistical
evidence of the pivotal role played by the international gold
standard in the Great Depression. It is no exaggeration to say that
The Midas Paradox has completely eclipsed all previous accounts of
the Great Depression, and I have little doubt that a half century
from now The Midas Paradox will remain the definitive account of
that catastrophe." --David Glasner, author, Free Banking and
Monetary Reform; Economist, Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade
Commission "The Great Depression is the biggest puzzle in the
history of modern capitalism. How could millions of people be
prospering one year, then out of work the next? Building on the
work of previous scholars and adding fresh insights, Scott Sumner's
book, The Midas Paradox, offers perhaps the most ambitious analysis
of the Depression yet, which seeks to explain its major ups and
downs as well as how it got started. Sumner's book has important
(and worrying) implications for today. He argues that the Great
Recession of 2008-09 was so severe because economists and central
banks still have not fully learned the lessons of the Depression."
--Kurt A. Schuler, Senior Fellow, Center for Financial
Stability
"The Midas Paradox succeeds in shedding new light on the Great
Depression and the gold market approach provides an effective
unifying thread as the author navigates through the many shocks and
policy shifts occurring over this key period.The integration of
international events over this period is also the best I have seen
and the connection between the 1930s policy dilemmas and those of
today could not be more relevant." --Richard C. K. Burdekin,
Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna
College
"Think you know what caused the Great Depression? If so, be
prepared to think again: The Midas Paradox bristles with
well-mounted challenges to orthodox--and to many
unorthodox--accounts of history's most notorious economic crisis.
Whether it manages to change your most confidently-held beliefs or
not, Scott Sumner's painstaking book is bound to improve your
understanding of the deepest and longest-lasting business downturn
of them all." --George A. Selgin, Director, Center for Monetary and
Financial Alternatives, Cato Institute
"Scott Sumner's wonderful book The Midas Paradox provides a
thought-provoking reinterpretation of the Great Depression: it
combines a monetary approach based on shocks to the gold market
with a supply-side approach based on legislated real-wage shocks
that fits the evidence for the entire interwar period. Sumner's
insights into the Great Depression are also highly relevant to the
global financial crisis. The Midas Paradox is a major contribution
both to economic history and to contemporary economic policy
issues." --Kevin Dowd, Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham
University and Professor Emeritus of Financial Risk Management at
the University of Nottingham, England
"With special attention to gold and labor market legislation,
Sumner's book The Midas Paradox provides an enlightening blend of
detailed, warm-bodied financial and economic history of the 1930s
with its broad-based statistical counterpart, using both national
income accounts and financial data. His perspective will be seen as
a unique contribution to the large and still growing literature on
the Great Depression." --Roger W. Garrison, Professor Emeritus of
Economics, Auburn University
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