Volume 14, No. 4 (Winter 2011)
In a recent article appearing in this journal, Douglas MacKenzie (2010) argues that President Hoover’s business conferences artificially propped up wages in the early years of the Depression, aggravating unemployment. MacKenzie’s (2010) critique of Hoover fails on at least two counts: it commits an aggregation fallacy and ignores the vast literature on real wage cyclicality, and it exaggerates a series of historical points on the authority that Hoover had to implement his high-wage policy. Readers of MacKenzie (2010) could also benefit from new research on Hoover’s business conferences by Rose (2010), although MacKenzie (2010) himself certainly cannot be blamed for failing to incorporate such recent research.
