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Revisiting the Great Depression

Author(s): ROBERT J. SAMUELSON

Source: The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) , WINTER 2012, Vol. 36, No. 1 (WINTER 2012), pp. 36-43

Published by: Wilson Quarterly

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THE WILSON QUARTERLY

Revisiting the Great Depression The role of the welfare state in today's economic crisis recalls the

part played by the gold standard in the calamitous 1930s.

BY ROBERT J. SAMUELSON

The Great Depression cast a dark shadow over the 20th century. It arguably led to World War II,

because without the Depression, Adolf Hitler might

never have come to power. It discredited unfettered

capitalism- which was blamed for the collapse- and

inspired the expansion of government as the essential

overseer of markets. This economic catastrophe has

long fascinated historians and economists, but for de-

cades serious reflection on the Depression didn't extend

much beyond the scholarly world. It couldn't happen

again. We knew too much. There were too many eco-

nomic and regulatory controls. But the Great Recession

has made us wonder. Can we learn from the Depres-

sion? Are there parallels between then and now? Most

ominously, could we suffer another depression? The

conventional wisdom still says no. Unfortunately, the

conventional wisdom might be wrong.

There is no precise definition of a depression; it's

a term of art. Generally speaking, it's a broad eco-

nomic collapse that produces high unemployment

from which there is no easy and obvious escape. The

crucial difference between recession and depression is

that recoveries from run-of-the-mill recessions occur

Robert J. Samuelson writes a regular column for The Washington Post and is the author most recently of The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath:

The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008).

fairly rapidly in response to automatic market correc-

tives and standard government policies. Businesses

work off surplus inventories or repay excessive debt.

Governments reduce interest rates and allow budgets

to swing into deficit. A depression occurs when these

mechanisms don't work, or don't work quickly. The

pivotal question becomes: Why?

One answer is that powerful historical, social, and

political changes overwhelm the normal market and

policy responses. Modern depressions are not ordi-

nary business cycles susceptible to routine remedies,

because their origins lie in institutions and ideas that

have been overtaken by events. But letting go of or

modifying these powerful attachments is a painfully

slow process, precisely because the belief in them is so

strong and the alternatives are often unclear. Hence,

adjustment occurs slowly, if at all. Change is resisted

or delayed, or wanders down dead ends. Economies

languish or decline. The Great Depression was one of

those moments. We may now be in another.

There are parallels between then and now, largely

unrecognized. Then, the forces suffocating economies

stemmed from a jarring historical rupture: the end

of the gold standard. In the late 1920s and early '30s,

countries clung to the gold standard- backing paper

currencies with gold reserves- as a defense against hy-

36 Wilson Quarterly ■ Winter 2012

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In 1931, panic sent depositors flocking to institutions such as Washington, D.C.'s Perpetual Building Association Bank, where bank officials tried

to calm them. Amid another epochal economic crisis, Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City express a different kind of worry.

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Lessons off the Great Depression

perinflation. Gold was thought to be the foundation of

sound money, which was deemed necessary for prosper-

ity. Most simply, gold regulated economic activity. When

gold drained out of a country, supplies of money and

credit tended to shrink; when a country accumulated

gold, they tended to expand. But defending the gold

standard caused country after country to suffer bank-

ing runs and currency crises. These fed each other and

deepened the economic collapse. By 1936, more than

two dozen countries had reluctantly jettisoned gold.

Once this happened, expansion generally resumed.

Something similar is happening today, with the

welfare state- the social safety net of wealthy democ-

racies-playing gold's destructive role. In Europe, gov-

ernment spending is routinely 40 percent or more of national income. In the United States, it exceeds

a third. Like the gold standard 80 years ago, these

protections command broad support. They mediate

between impersonal market forces and widely shared

norms of fairness. The trouble is that many countries

can no longer afford their costly welfare states. Some

nations have already overborrowed; others wish to

avoid that fate. Their common antidote is austerity:

spending cuts, tax increases, or both. The more auster-

ity spreads, the greater the danger it will feed on itself.

What may make sense for one country is disastrous

for many- just as in the 1930s.

The exhaustion of economics is another parallel

between our time and the Depression. Then, as now,

economists didn't predict the crisis and weren't able to

engineer recovery. "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks,

liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," said Presi-

dent Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary, Andrew Mel-

lon. In the 1930s, this "liquidationist" view dominated.

Let wages, stocks, and land values fall until prices are

attractive, it said; recovery will occur spontaneously as

businesses hire and investors invest. It didn't work. To-

day's orthodoxy is Keynesianism (after John Maynard

Keynes), and governments responded to the 2007-09 financial crisis with its textbook remedies. The Fed-

eral Reserve and other central banks cut interest rates;

governments ran huge budget deficits. Arguably, these

measures did prevent a depression. But, contrary to

expectations, they did not promote a vigorous recovery.

As in the 1930s, economics has disappointed.

Of course, analogies shouldn't be overdrawn. We're

still a long way from a second Great Depression, even

if such an economic disaster is conceivable. Compared

to what happened in the 1930s, the present distress- here and abroad- is tame. From 1929 to 1933, the

output of the U.S. economy (gross domestic product)

dropped almost 27 percent. The recent peak-to-trough

GDP decline, from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the

second quarter of 2009, was 5.1 percent. From 1930

to 1939, the U.S. unemployment rate averaged 14 per-

cent; the peak rate, in 1932, was 23 percent. Rates elsewhere in the world were as bad or worse. Unem-

ployment among industrial workers had reached 21

percent in the United Kingdom a year earlier; it hit 44

percent in Germany in 1932. The social protections

we take for granted barely existed. Congress didn't

enact federal unemployment insurance until 1935.

Still, the economy's present turmoil resembles the

Great Depression more than anything since. As this is

written, Europe is sinking into recession. In the United

States, unemployment stayed above nine percent for

21 consecutive months, and then another seven after

a short period slightly below that level. The longest

previous stretch was 19 months, in the early 1980s.

Against this backdrop, it's natural to reexamine the

Depression and search for parallels.

The Depression is usually dated from late 1929 to

the eve ofWorld War II. But people didn't immediately

recognize ťhat they had entered uncharted economic waters. "Down to the last weeks of 1930, Americans could

still plausibly assume that they were caught up in yet

another of the routine business-cycle downswings that

periodically afflicted their boom-and-bust economy,"

David Kennedy writes in his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-

winning history Freedom From Fear: The American

People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 . Unemploy-

ment, for example, reached nearly 12 percent in the reces-

sion year of 1921 and was 8.9 percent in 1930. The riddle

is: What caused the Depression to defy history? Over the

years, many theories have been floated and discredited.

Chief among the fallen is the stock market crash of

1929. True, it was terrifying. From October 23 to No-

vember 13, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped

almost 40 percent, from 327 to 199. Fortunes were

lost; Americans were fearful. But steep market de-

clines, before and since, have occurred without causing

a depression. The most obvious connection would be

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Lessons of the Great Depression

the "wealth effect." Shareholders, being poorer, would

spend less. However, very few Americans (about 2.5

percent in 1928) owned stocks. Moreover, stocks

rebounded, as historian Maury Klein has noted. By

March 1930, the Dow had recovered 74 percent from their December level. Stocks later fell, but that was a

consequence of the Depression, not the cause.

Another familiar villain is the Smoot-Hawley tar-

iff. It has "become synonymous with an avalanche of

protectionism that led to the collapse of world trade

and the Great Depression," writes Dartmouth econo-

mist Douglas Irwin. But Irwin's recent book Peddling

Protectionism demolishes the conventional wisdom.

The tariff's direct effects were modest, and its timing

also argues against its significance. President Hoover

signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in June 1930, well

after the Depression had

begun. Average U.S. tariffe

on imports did rise from

40 percent in 1929 to 59

percent in 1932, but two-

thirds of U.S. imports had

no duties at all. Europe did

retaliate with higher tar-

iffs, but only six percent of

Europe's exports came to

the United States. Trade did collapse in the Depression,

but (again) that was consequence, not cause.

Finally, there's Herbert Hoover. The anti-Hoover

indictment is that he passively let the Depression

deepen and, by trying to balance the budget, made it

worse. This argument is unfair and inaccurate. After

the crash, Hoover urged businesses to maintain wages

and continue investment projects. In three years, he

nearly doubled federal public works spending and

pushed the states to do likewise. In 1932, he did suc-

cessfully propose a tax increase- Roosevelt also ad-

vocated balanced budgets, a widely shared goal- but

the federal budget still ran a large deficit: four percent of GDP. "It would be hard to find an economic histo-

rian to argue that fiscal [budgetary] tightness was a

significant factor in worsening the Great Depression,"

writes Timothy Taylor, managing editor of The Journal

of Economic Perspectives .

None of these familiar scapegoats solve the puzzle:

Why did the economy continue getting worse? Some

other force or forces must have been responsible.

Scholarship on this question has proceeded in spasms.

In 1933, Irving Fisher ofYale, then one of the nation's

most prominent economists, published an article titled

"The Debt-Deflation Theoiy of Great Depressions."The

chief causes of the Depression, he argued, were "over-

indebtedness to start with and deflation following soon

after." Debts were written in fixed dollar amounts, and

so deflation- falling prices, wages, and profits- made

it harder for farmers, businesses, and households to

repay loans. Defaults dumped more land and jobless

workers onto the market, causing prices and wages to

fall further and worsening the slump. It was a vicious

circle. Still widely accepted, Fisher's analysis explains

why modern economists dread deflation. From 1929 to

1933, prices for wheat, corn, and other farm products

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dropped 54 percent; those for building materials fell

25 percent. But Fisher didn't explain precisely what

caused the 1930s' deep deflation.

In 1936, Keynes provided his answer in The General

Theory ofEmphyment, Interest, and Money. The culprit

was insufficient "effective demand"- what economists

now call "aggregate demand." People and firms weren't

spending enough. Keynes rejected the "classical" econo-

mists' view that spontaneous shifts in wages and interest

rates would generate recovery. Wages might be rigid.

Low interest rates might not stimulate new investment

in plants or products, because businessmen's "animal

spirits" had deadened. The economy "seems capable of

remaining in a chronic condition of subnormal activity

for a considerable period without any marked tendency

either towards recovery or towards complete collapse,"

he wrote. Keynes's remedy was to boost "effective de-

mand" through more government spending.

But his argument, like Fisher's, was abstract. It

lacked a detailed explanation of the Depression itself.

Wilson Quarterly ■ Winter 2012 39

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Since then, scholars have

scoured the historical record to obtain a fuller

answer. A breakthrough occurred in 1963 with the

publication of A Mone-

tary History of the Unit-

ed States , 1867-1960 by Milton Friedman (a sub-

sequent Nobel Prize win- ner) and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. Friedman and

Schwartz argued that the

Federal Reserve caused

the Depression by failing

to rescue the banking sys-

tem. From 1929 to 19ЗЗ, more than two-fifths of

the nation's 24,970 banks disappeared through fail-

ure or merger. The nation's money supply- basically,

bank deposits plus currency in circulation- shrank

by a third. This steep decline, said Friedman and

Schwartz, drove prices and production down. The

irony was that Congress created the Fed in 1913 to

backstop the banking system.

What would have been a normal, if severe, reces-

sion became a depression. Friedman and Schwartz

blamed the Fed's passivity on the death in 1928 of Ben-

jamin Strong, head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, who had been the Fed's most forceful figure and

would have, they contended, acted aggressively to limit

bank failures. By contrast, economist Allan Meitzer cites the "real bills" doctrine as the cause of the Fed's

passivity. Under "real bills" (bills are a type of loan), the

Fed lent to banks only against collateral they present-

ed. During the Depression, they didn't present much;

the supply of money and credit shrank. Whatever the

truth, these accounts had the Depression starting in

the United States and spreading abroad. It was an

American story with global side effects.

Not so, argued the economic historian Charles

Kindleberger in his 1973 book The World in Depres-

sion , 1929-19З9 . The collapse was international and re-

flected the inability of a Britain weakened by World War

I to continue to stabilize the world economy. Among

other things, Kindleberger wrote, Britain's leader-

ship role had required it (a) to act as 'lender of last

resort" to stem banking

crises, (b) to keep its mar-

kets open to sustain trade,

and (c) to maintain stable

exchange rates. After the

war, Britain couldn't per-

form these tasks. It lacked

sufficient gold reserves to

make loans to stop for-

eign banking crises. High

joblessness weakened its commitment to free trade.

Consequently, it couldn't

stabilize exchange rates.

The gold standard transmitted the break-

down around the globe, argue economic historians

Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin in, respectively,

Golden Fetters : The Gold Standard and the Great

Depression, 1919-1939 (1992) and Lessons From the

Great Depression (1989). Countries that backed their

paper currency with gold sacrificed much economic

independence. For example, gold outflows through

trade deficits might trigger recessions, because the

loss of gold could automatically contract the supply

of money and credit. But countries could not respond

by devaluing their currencies to boost exports; gold

fixed currency rates. Gold's straitjacket was its sup-

posed virtue. By eliminating inflation and currency

fluctuations, it reduced uncertainty and encouraged

commerce. This was the theory and belief.

After World War I, countries sought to restore the

gold standard, which had been widely suspended dur-

ing the fighting. Because the reliance on gold had de-

livered prosperity, this was understandable. But there

were daunting problems: Prices had exploded during

thewar; gold was relatively scarce; exchange rates had

shifted; countries were saddled with large debts. As a

result, the restored gold standard was unstable. Skewed

exchange rates meant that two countries, the United

States and France, ran large trade surpluses and accu-

mulated disproportionately large gold stocks. By 1930,

they owned nearly 60 percent of the world's gold.

The resulting gold scarcity- for most countries-

John Maynard Keynes's ideas became the new economic orthodoxy

after the Depression, but economists' guidance still often disappoints.

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Lessons of the Great Depression

created a fatal interdependence. If one country raised

interest rates, it might drain gold from others. De-

positors and investors, foreign and domestic, would

withdraw their money or sell their bonds, convert

the receipts into gold, and transfer the gold to the

country with higher interest rates. There, the process

would be reversed: Gold would be converted into local

currency and invested at the higher rates. The gold

standard created a potential domino effect of tighter

credit that would make the Depression feed on itself.

While credit was plentiful, the danger was theoretical.

Once economies turned downward, the scramble for

gold intensified the slump.

Germany's Reichsbank, the Bank of England, the Fed, and other central state financial institutions were

handcuffed in their efforts to aid their countries' banks.

The Depression weakened banks by increasing their customers' loan defaults; loan losses then made the

banks more vulnerable to depositor runs. But a central

bank couldn't inject too much money and credit into

the system without raising doubts about its country's

commitment to gold. Politics compounded the effect

by closing another avenue of escape: international

rescues to stop bank runs. In May 1931, Austria's larg-

est bank, Credit-Anstalt, faced a panic. The Bank of

England's reserves were too meager for it to provide

an adequate loan on its own, and France- still scarred

by World War I- insisted that Austria renounce a cus-

toms union with Germany before providing funds. The

rescue was delayed. Panic spread and confidence fell.

Gold's oppressive consequences ultimately caused

countries to abandon it. Austria, Germany, and Britain

did so in 1931. (The United States left two years later,

while France hung on until 1936.) The process was long

and punishing because faith in gold was so pervasive.

It was hard to let go. But once countries did let go, they

could spur their economies. Eichengreen writes, "They

could expand the money supply. They could provide

liquidity [cash] to the banking system at the first sign

of distress. They could increase the level of government

expenditure. They could take these actions unilaterally."

By 19З7, world manufacturing output was 71 percent

above its 1932 level and had exceeded its 1929 level.

Why was the Depression so deep and long? All this

scholarship provides a crude answer. Whether the

cause was the gold standard, the "real bills" doctrine,

I Benj amin Strong's death, Britain's postwar weakness,

; or rancor from World Wax I- or all of these factors-

i government economic policies perversely reinforced

I the original slump. Banks were not rescued. Defaults

I and bankruptcies fed deflation. Unemployment spi-

! raled up, production down. Prevailing economic doc-

; trine was suicidal. The good news, it's said, is that we

understand what happened and can prevent a repeat.

Heeding Fisher, we can avoid deflation. Following

Keynes, we can prop up aggregate demand. Per Fried-

man and Schwartz, we can defuse financial panics.

Learning from Kindleberger, Eichengreen, and Temin,

we can practice international cooperation.

Unfortunately, vious pression and couldn't more these discouraging end reassurances until people lesson: omit changed The an De- ob-

Unfortunately, vious and more discouraging lesson: The De-

pression couldn't end until people changed

their beliefs and behavior- a lengthy and tortuous

process, because people cling to what's familiar. Here

is where the parallel with the present becomes relevant

and sobering. Just as the gold standard amplified and

transmitted the effects of the Depression, so the mod-

ern welfare state is magnifying the effects of the reces-

sion. The United States, Europe, and Japan, together

representing about half of the world economy, face

similar pressures: aging societies, high government

spending, and soaring debt levels. These pressures

! impose austerity on country after country- just as the

! gold standard did. The cumulative effect is to make it

I harder for the world to recover from what started as an

! ordinary, though severe, recession- just as happened

I under the gold standard.

Casting the welfare state in this role will strike

I many as outrageous. After all, the welfare state- what

! Americans blandly call "social spending' -didn't cause ¡ the 2007-09 financial crisis. This dubious distinction

I belongs to the huge credit bubble that formed in the

I United States and elsewhere, symbolized by inflated

! real estate prices and large losses on mortgage-related

I securities. But neither did the gold standard directly i cause the 1929 stock market crash. Wall Street's col-

I lapse stemmed, most simply from speculative ex-

! cesses. Stock prices were too high for an economy

¡ that was already (we now know) entering recession.

I But once the slump started, the gold standard spread

! and perpetuated it. Today, the weakened welfare state

Wilson Quarterly ■ Winter 2012 41

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Lessons of the Great Depression

is perpetuating and spreading the slump.

What has brought the welfare state to grief is not

an excess of compassion, but an excess of debt. After

World War II, governments in most advanced countries

grew enormously, a reaction to the suffering of the De-

pression coupled with early postwar optimism about

the power of social engineering. By 2007, government

spending totaled 53 percent of GDP in France, 44 per-

cent in Germany, 45 percent in Britain, and 37 percent

in the United States, reports economist Vito Tanzi in

Government Versus Markets (2011). Most spending rep-

resented income transfers. Even in the United States,

inevitably, the financial crisis shattered this equilib-

rium. Economic growth fell from already low levels;

government debt rose. Suddenly, financial markets-

banks, pension funds, insurance companies, wealthy

investors- turned skittish. Perhaps debts wouldn't be

repaid. Greater risk translated into higher interest

rates on government bonds.

Once this happened, welfare states became an en-

gine of international austerity. Countries' choices were

constricted. To maintain existing levels of spending, they

needed to borrow. But lenders demanded higher inter-

est rates, and to keep these down, governments had to

with its sizable military budget, "pay-

ments for individuals" (which means

entitlements such as Social Security and

Medicare) amounted to two-thirds of

federal spending in 2010, up from a

quarter in I960.

But this system required favorable

economics and demographics- and

both have moved adversely. A younger

population was needed to lighten the

burden of supporting the old, the larg-

est claimants of benefits. Rapid eco-

nomic growth was needed to generate

the tax revenues to payfor benefits. In-

deed, the great expansion of benefits

started in the 1950s and '60s, when

annual economic growth in Europe

and the United States averaged about Reform meets reality: Protesters in 2010 denounce changes in French pension laws.

four percent or more, and the expectation was that

this would continue indefinitely. Long-term economic

growth is now reckoned closer to two percent a year, a

little more for the United States, a little less for Europe.

Meanwhile, older populations are exploding. In 2010,

the 65-and-over population in Italy was 21 percent, and

heading toward 34 percent by 2050; for the United

States, the figures were 13 percent and 20 percent.

The means of escape from these unhappy trends was to borrow. Some countries with extensive welfare

systems that didn't borrow heavily (examples : Sweden

and Finland) have fared well. But most governments

became dependent on bond markets. Until the finan-

cial crisis, they coexisted in a shaky equilibrium. Most

European governments could borrow cheaply. Their

bonds were considered safe investments. Perhaps

resort to austerity, which meant cutting social programs

and raising taxes. Some countries were completely shut

out of private markets and had to rely on international

financial bailouts; but these bailouts (i.e., loans) came

with a string attached: austerity. First Greece, then Ire-

land and Portugal submitted to this logic. But almost

all advanced countries, including the United States, are

potentially subject to it. Countries embrace austerity to

keep their credit worthiness. Or they embrace it because

they lose their credit worthiness.

What this means is that governments, against their

will, are being forced to reconsider some basic post-

World War II premises around which their economies

and societies are organized, much as countries in the

1930s were forced to reconsider economic premises

based on the gold standard. Now as then, the process is

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Lessons of the Great Depression

unwelcome, painful, and agonizingly slow. It involves

a balancing of political and economic imperatives : not

dismantling the welfare state, but shrinking it to a size

that is politically acceptable and economically viable.

Social protections and benefits must be reduced so

that the resulting obligations don't impose crippling

levels of debt or taxes. It is not clear where this point

is and whether wealthy democracies are capable of

identifying and reaching it. It will differ for different

countries, depending on their underlying economic

vitality and political culture.

The ultimate danger is that the welfare state will

go into a death spiral. The political impetus to provide

promised benefits keeps taxes and debt high, to the

point that economic growth suffers; but slower growth

or longer recessions make it harder to pay promised

benefits, an outcome requiring still further cutbacks.

As political leaders grapple with these problems, they

are constantly reacting to events- doing too little too

late. The fact that many governments are caught in this

trap simultaneously means that their collective actions

exert a drag on the world economy that makes it harder

for all of them to reconcile political and financial-

market pressures. The further fact that Europe's banks

are large holders of government debt means that a debt

crisis could become abanking crisis- with failures and

runs- or a credit squeeze, as banks suffer large losses

on their bond portfolios.

Governments are losing control over their econom-

ic fates, because high debt also undermines standard

Keynesian anti-recessionary tools, a.k.a. "stimulus,"

spending more and taxing less in times of economic

weakness. The prospect of more debt simply sends

interest rates up, nullifying some or all of any "stimu-

lus" and, for some countries, closing access to private

credit markets. It's true that some major debtor coun-

tries, notably the United States and Germany, have

so far escaped this squeeze. Their interest rates (at

this writing) remain low, about two percent on 10-

year bonds. But there's no ironclad reason why these countries should remain immune forever. If investors

come to believe that the United States can't control

its debt, they might dump Treasury bonds and other

dollar securities. Interest rates would rise; on foreign

exchange markets, the dollar would fall.

So it's not preposterous to compare the gold stan-

dard then with the welfare state now. In both cases,

a framework is imposed that impedes recovery from

what might otherwise be a recognizable recession. The

obstacles lie in institutions and beliefs that are deeply

woven into the social, political, and intellectual fabric

of societies. It takes time to adjust- and sometimes ad-

justment doesn't happen at all- because the status quo

has established stubborn habits of thought and strong

vested interests that can be dislodged only by powerful,

incontestable evidence and experience to the contrary.

Even then, the destruction of the old does not ensure

replacement by the new. There may simply be a void.

This does not mean we are condemned to a second

Great Depression. The messy process of grappling with

overcommitted government may lead to slow growth,

long recessions, or stagnation- but not the dramatic

collapse of the 1930s. China, India, Brazil, and other

developing countries, representing about half of the

world economy, don't face the dilemmas of mature wel-

fare states. Their economic growth may provide a safety

net for the "old world" of Europe, North America, and

Japan. But here, too, there are cautionary comparisons.

China's rise and America's problems have fragmented

economic power. Cooperation is strained. The analo-

gies with Britain's post-World War I weakness and the

paralyzing rancor between Germany and France are

obvious. Another parallel with the 1930s is the euro,

which, as the gold standard once did, has created a

straitjacket that makes recovery harder.

All of these challenges suggest that a second de-

pression or some prolonged period of economic disap-

pointment and hardship is no longer implausible, as it

seemed for most of the past half-century. The mastery

of economic activity we thought we had achieved- not

in the sense that we could eliminate all business cycles

or financial panics, but in the more limited way that we

could avoid pervasive instability- can no longer be taken

for granted. The mistake, popularized largely by econo-

mists, was to believe that regulation of the economy

could be derived from theory and converted into practi-

cal precepts for policy. The reality is that economic life is

not solely described or dictated by rhythms suggested by

economic models. It moves in response to institutions,

technologies, beliefs, and cultures that follow their own

logic, sometimes with completely unexpected, mystify-

ing, and terrifying consequences. ■

Wilson Quarterly ■ Winter 2012 43

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