I sat in on Jeff Hummel’s graduate course in Monetary Theory at San Jose State University last night. In the first part of the lecture, Jeff gave a quick tour through macroeconomics: the various schools of thought plus what various schools had said about the Great Depression. He said that the G.D. was sui generis, a statistical outlier. One of the students, Sherwin de la Cruz [he gave me permission to use his name], asked:

If you regard the Great Depression as a statistical outlier, what’s the point in studying it?