getting smarter?

Kevin Drum points out that despite the gloom and doom of the past several months, and the fact that no one seems to know what they are doing, the government is, in fact, doing a much better job than Hoover and Mellon did in 1930-1, and as a result job losses are much less severe now than then (so far, at least):

Consider, after all, that our response to the Depression appears to have been 180 degrees wrong. We literally did almost everything possible to make it worse: we tightened the money supply, balanced the budget, raised interest rates, passed protectionist legislation, and allowed banks to fail by the hundreds. It escalated a panic into a Depression.

And this time around? Just the opposite: interest rates are close to zero, we're running an enormous budget deficit, protectionism has largely been kept at bay, money is being pumped into the economy prodigiously, and with the notable exception of Lehman Brothers banks are being saved right and left. These actions have reduced a panic to a severe recession.

If we had taken the same policy actions that Hoover and Mellon took in the 30s, does anyone doubt that the results would have been another Great Depression? I don't. We may still be doing a lot of dumb things, but we're an awful lot smarter than we were 80 years ago.

A victory for technocratic liberalism? Let's check back in five years.
(PS - click through to his post for a graph illustrating our relatively benign job losses compared to the depression)