Paul Krugman:

Don't Give Up

I've just painted a portrait of immense human disaster. But disasters do happen; history is replete with floods and famines, earthquakes and tsunamis. What makes this disaster so terrible--what should make you angry--is that none of this need be happening. There has been no plague of locusts; we have not lost our technological know-how; America and Europe should be richer, not poorer, than they were five years ago.

Nor is the nature of the disaster mysterious. In the Great Depression leaders had an excuse: nobody really understood what was happening or how to fix it. Today's leaders don't have that excuse. We have both the knowledge and the tools to end this suffering.

Yet we aren't doing it. In the chapters that follow I'll try to explain why-- how a combination of self-interest and distorted ideology has prevented us from solving a solvable problem. And I have to admit that watching us fail so completely to do what should be done occasionally gives me a sense of despair.

But that's the wrong reaction.

As the slump has gone on and on, I have found myself listening often to a beautiful song originally performed in the 1980s by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. The song is set in an unidentified time and place of mass unemployment; the despairing male voice sings of his hopelessness: "For every job, so many men." But the female voice encourages him: "Don't give up."

These are terrible times, and all the more terrible because it's all so unnecessary. But don't give up: we can end this depression, if we can only find the clarity and the will.

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