This paper comments on the experience of the U.S. economy in the 1930s, its lessons for managing the current economic downturn, and the relation of U.S. economic conditions to our future national security.

A temporary housing intervention during the Great Depression offers lessons for how to deal with our current crisis.

With tax day around the corner, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) today releases its annual report on Americans' opinions about taxes compiled by public opinion expert Karlyn Bowman. This AEI public opinion study looks at attitudes since the first questions were asked in the mid-1930s to today.

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Can the current post-Bretton Woods international monetary system prevent a return to the beggar-thy-neighbor policies and competitive devaluations that so harmed international prosperity in the 1930s? What are the system's flaws? Can they be corrected, and if so, how? An expert panel will address these and related issues.

‘A prolonged and solemn farce,” Churchill’s description of 1930s disarmament talks, applies even more accurately to the annual round of UN climate talks, which just wrapped up their 17th year of world-saving negotiations in Durban, South Africa, with another 11th-hour “breakthrough” that amounts only to agreeing to meet again next year and repeat the farce.

The main farm subsidy programs were introduced in the 1930s when many dirt-poor Dust Bowl farmers were in dire straits, as, of course, were many Depression-decimated families in the cities. Since the end of World War II, however, farmers and their families have substantially improved their absolute and relative economic stations. 

This event will examine more radical reforms that — while aiming to accomplish the same goals as the current Social Security program — would do so through fundamentally different structures.