I am very grateful to James Galbraith for his post. It is very important to count in the people the government directly employed on the WPA and other programmes when calculating the impact on unemployment. James's father's analysis of the economic impact of public works projects that stimulated private sector employment is still indispensable. My only note of caution is that the New Deal was unable to fulfil Hopkins's hope that WPA jobs would have the same legitimacy and moral worth for the unemployed that private sector jobs had. Congress never allowed the WPA to pay wages that were comparable to the uncertainties created by unpredictable appropriations meant that workers could be suddenly laid off for reasons nothing to do with job performance.

One practical note on Jonathan Alter's shrewd observations about the importance of communications. Will all those millions of people engaged and energized by email and the web by the Obama have the same impact n Congress as those thousands who wrote every week to Roosevelt and members of Congress in 1933? Will they be activated to demand that Congress enact the President's program?

I agree with my old friend, Lon Hamby, about the need to look at the World Economic Conference, i.e. to look at 125 days instead of just 100. Indeed, I devoted a chapter to it in my book. I agree that the consequence of the failure of the conference was that economic diplomacy was not one of the weapons that could be used to halt the rise of Hitler. It is also clear that Roosevelt's bombshell message that scuppered the conference was irresponsible and casual. But I think that Patricia Clavin and Elliott Rosen have shown that FDR was a convenient scapegoat for the British and others who had no intention of giving up the competitive advantages of devaluation and protection. It was much easier to blame the US for failing to make the sacrifices they were refusing to make. It confirmed Neville Chamberlain's view in the 1930s that the US could not be trusted which, in turn, underpinned the appeasement policy. But the Foreign Office already believed that. They sneered at American foreign policy-making as amateurish: a mere tool of shifting public opinion. And surely Keynes was right when he praised FDR for not going down the internationalist route. FDR may have scuppered the conference for the wrong reasons but an international agreement would have tied the US government to a balanced budget. Fiscal discipline was what attracted orthodox economists and people like Lewis Douglas to fixed exchange rates and free trade. Governments would have to rein in their domestic spending. It would prevent political demagogues (or 'knaves' as the British Treasury) called them spending irresponsibly. Roosevelt was right to maintain his room for manoeuvre.

On the question of the extent of imagination that lies behind current job creation proposals, readers might be interested in the observations of the political editor of the New Statesman (the left of center British weekly). Martin Bright complains that the people round Gordon Brown have been too cautious about the type of work creation they are sponsoring

'Thus far', he argues, 'ministers have been surprisingly unimaginative in their approach to work creation. While the government is mining the New Deal for ideas for credit-crunch Britain, it should take a look at the less cautious elements of the programmes.

Bright suggests British policy makers look at the bold and imaginative WPA projects for artists, writers and musicians. He calls for 'A New Deal of the Mind'. See

15 January 2009 New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/martin-bright/2009/01/deal-work-fdr-government

and 8 January 2009 New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/martin-bright/2009/01/gordon-brown-deal-government