Fishback Referenced in Wall Street Journal Article on President Biden’s New Deal

Price Fishback, APS Professor of Economics in the Eller College of Management, was cited in a November 17 Wall Street Journal article in which he gave insight comparing President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Plan to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Fishback claims that it is more difficult for President Biden to be as transformational as President Roosevelt and President Lyndon B. Johnson—whom President Biden and his aides are referring to as role models—because, thanks to them, there is a large social safety net in place, calling what has survived of the current President’s agenda similar to “nibling around the edges.”

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.