Fishback Compares President Biden’s Economic Plan to President Roosevelt’s New Deal

Price Fishback, APS Professor of Economics in the Eller College of Management, was featured in an October 11 C-Span clip comparing President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

“I think the situation was dramatically different back then,” says Fishback. “They were dealing with a depression. The response with the new deal was they spent a lot of money initially trying to provide relief and unemployment benefits. They did not have unemployment insurance at the time. Today what has happened is we have come out of a terrible pandemic and spent a huge amount of money during it, but we are close to recovering to where we were before.”

Fishback joined the Eller College of Management as associate professor in 1990 after teaching at the University of Georgia. He was appointed the Thomas R. Brown Professor of Economics in 2010. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Washington in 1983. His research area of interest is the political economy of Roosevelt’s New Deal during the 1930s, examining both the determinants of New Deal spending and loans and their impact on local economies throughout the U.S. He also works on state labor legislation during the Progressive Era, the American Economy during World War II and changes in agriculture in response to climate, government policy and technology. Fishback is also a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic History at Australian National University, a CAGE Fellow at Warwick University, a program scholar for the Hoover Program on Regulation and the Rule of Law, a fellow at the TIAA-CREF Institute and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.