Harvard Economic Historian Says, ‘We’re in a depression’

Two big-time economic thinkers duked it out in a debate about the causes of the Recession Tuesday night. The event was sponsored by The Aspen Institute and Roosevelt House, Hunter College’s Public Policy Institute. Jeff Madrick, a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, faced Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Moderator Brian Lehrer, host of the Brian Lehrer Show, asked tough questions about the economic crisis.

After the debate, attendees had the chance to ask questions of their own. One audience member asked when the Recession would be over. For the first time during the evening, the two men largely agreed.

Ferguson took the question first. “We’re not in a recession,” he said. “We’re in a depression. I would say it’s a slight depression, rather than a Great Depression, but we’re looking at five years of subprime growth.”…