Yglesias wants someone to manage demand

He goes aback to the Great Depression in reviewing a book,  Alexander Field’s reinterpretation of the Depression and the War , a book that discusses the great productivity improvements from 1920 to 1940.  Then why the Gret Depression? Says Yglesias:

The Depression was caused by bad demand management and whatever bad supply side policies the Hoover or Roosevelt administration may have engaged in did nothing to change the fact that potential output was growing and poor macro outcomes were driven by demand-side issues.

Yglesias is of the opinion that there is a demand knob in Washington DC.

Let me explain how demand worked in 1928. The consumer hears about a great deal on furniture from the radio. He gets in the car, drives downtown and sits in traffic for an hour.  The cost of final delivery exceeded the gain from production.

Delivering goods from productive factories is not easy, it has never been easy. It is costly, and in 1929, the nation was short some 500,000 miles of automobile roads; Radio, suburbia and the automobile required a restructuring of transportation, not the setting of some socialist variable in DC.

I blame that socialist banker, Milt Friedman for misleading two generations for economists, and yes, I read Milt's book.