False Dawn

Reviews / Votes

"[George Selgin] asks if the New Deal's varied experiments produced the promised recovery. In dispassionate, careful and finally devastating detail, False Dawn shows that, with a few exceptions, FDR's experiments did not work. . . . Using decades of economic research, False Dawn should long remain the definitive word on the New Deal's effectiveness." * The Wall Street Journal, "Best Books of 2025" * "Selgin challenges the hypothesis that New Deal policies helped stimulate recovery from the Depression...Instead, Selgin points to what he calls 'the Great Rapprochement' that happened during and after World War II. This entailed reconciliation between business and government, which had been at loggerheads in the 1930s, and the elimination of uncertainty on the part of investors about the future of the market system. Selgin dismisses arguments that strong and steady growth after the war reflected the stabilizing impact of a larger public sector, improvements in monetary policy, a robustly expanding global economy, and strict regulation that suppressed the risk of banking crises for a quarter of a century. That growth in fact stemmed from the resurgence of a private sector formerly cowed by government." -- Barry Eichengreen * Foreign Affairs * "Obviously, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal didn't end the Great Depression, as the US economy remained well below potential and unemployment stayed at historically high levels until the end of the 1930s. Did the New Deal help achieve economic recovery? George Selgin tackles this [issue] head on, with the advantage of having read virtually everything that can help answer the question." -- Robert Whaples * Business Economics * "George Selgin suggests in his highly accessible, readable, and well researched False Dawn, macroeconomic policy during the Great Depression and World War II eras can indeed impart powerful lessons that are salient today." -- Shawn Kantor * Business Economics * "False Dawn is a remarkable contribution that will undoubtedly stand as the authoritative account of the New Deal for years to come." * Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics * "False Dawn [details] the parts of the New Deal that impeded economic recovery during the Great Depression, promoting the argument that contemporary policymakers and economists confronted with economic downturns should treat the New Deal as a warning about steps to avoid rather than as a model to emulate." * Journal of Economic Literature * "Selgin mines a mountain of scholarship to prove this: New Deal measures failed to achieve, and often impeded, recovery from the Depression." * The Washington Post * "George Selgin breaks new ground by investigating and debunking the favorite claim that World War II ended the Depression at last. . . . Selgin's careful and comprehensive review of economic data presents a complicated picture, siding with many criticisms of New Deal economics while leaving for further deliberation a menu of possible factors in what finally ended the Depression." * The New York Post * "Selgin has convincingly compiled a wealth of economic evidence to show that, for the most part, the New Deal did not encourage recovery. His analysis should be taken seriously by economists, historians, journalists, policymakers, and students interested in learning the lessons of the Great Depression." * EH.Net * "Selgin delivers an admirable and honest reckoning of the New Deal's economic consequences, one that builds upon the insights of an intellectually diverse range of scholarship. . . . While questions regarding the New Deal as an economic regime remain, False Dawn is an indispensable starting point for future scholars, policy analysts, and the curious lay reader." * Fusion * "Selgin's history is not a conventional narrative of the Roosevelt years (and a few of the Truman ones) but a kind of battle of the books. . . . The author ably draws on the mass of historical and economic scholarship to present both sides of the interpretative quarrels that generations of scholars have left unresolved. The eclectic [Selgin] arrives at some arresting conclusions about the decade and a half you can be glad you didn't live through . . . turning Selgin's informative pages, one sometimes feels like a spectator at an intellectual tennis match." * The Claremont Review * "The popular belief that Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal rescued the country from the Great Depression, Selgin argues, is more folklore than fact." * Choice * "False Dawn is an important contribution to the literature on the Great Depression. . . . With extraordinary scholarship and intellectual impartiality, Selgin documents every major New Deal initiative, concluding that the two pillars of the recovery strategy-the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)-failed and, worse, reversed the first signs of recovery." * El Financiero * "An excellent book-impressively readable, copiously well-informed and cogently argued. It is highly recommended to anyone who desires a clear and succinct picture of how US policy makers tackled the worst macro-economic disaster of the 20th century." * Society of Professional Economists * "False Dawn is perhaps one of the best books ever written about the Great Depression. It is thoroughly informed by academic literature, comprehensive in its coverage, balanced in its treatment, and a lively and engaging read. A great achievement." -- Charles Calomiris | Columbia Business School "Norman Thomas, six times presidential candidate of the American Socialist Party, and for decades the second most popular speaker in America behind whoever was president, used to complain that the Democrats and FDR had stolen the Socialist Party Platform of 1928. Thomas was right. Read Selgin's new book and learn why that was a false dawn for the US economy." -- Vernon Smith | Chapman University, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics "False Dawn is an extraordinary achievement. Economists, historians, and others have been researching the New Deal's recovery programs and policies since the 1930s, but no one has ever done so as comprehensively and astutely as Selgin. False Dawn will be required reading for all who seek to understand how the New Deal affected the course of the Great Depression." -- Robert Higgs | author of "Depression, War, and Cold War" "The New Deal is the proverbial elephant grasped by blind men. No one is quite sure what it is. The NRA, the AAA, the RFC? Something else, something more? And did it all add up to recovery or malaise? Selgin has done a great service in writing this comprehensive, engaging, and fair-minded appraisal-one that is destined to become a standard reference." -- Benn Steil | Council on Foreign Relations