In a word - no.

Citing Justin Fox’s terrific chart of unemployment then and Kevin Drum’s comments, the always-insightful Matt Yglesias writes:

Populists on the left and opportunists on the right have taken to condemning the series of “bailouts” the government has undertaken since the fall of Lehman Brothers. And certainly I think these situations have been mishandled in a number of respects. And beyond that, I think these situations are inherently problematic in a variety of ways. But there’s a strong case to be made that the policy response to the recession has made things better than they might otherwise have been. When I say something like that, people tend to pester me in response for specifics: What, exactly, would have happened if we’d just let AIG and Citi and Bank of America and others collapse? The problem is that it’s impossible to say, in detail, what would have happened.

Yglesias is right: It’s hard to say exactly what might have happened without the bailouts and stimulus.

But something much bigger is at work today then in the 1930s. It’s the structure of our economy that’s the key – and that dwarfs the effects of government bailouts, stimulus, and related policy.

Our economic class composition and occupational structure have changed dramatically over the past several decades. In the 1930s, the majority of Americans worked in manufacturing and related industries. We had an enormous working class. These industries and jobs are very vulnerable to recessions and business cycle shifts with tremendous ups and downs. Recessions – never mind bigger events like the current crisis – devastate manufacturing and working class jobs -  as Michael Mandel, Ryan Avent (which Yglesias more recently cited), and our own research at the Prosperity Institute has detailed. The creative class, which now accounts for some 40 million workers and about a third of the workforce is much more flexible and resilient. It is this changed economic class and occupational structure which are keeping us from Depression-level unemployment rates.

The bailouts and stimulus, while they may help at the margins, also pose an enormous opportunity costs.  On the one hand, they impede necessary and long-deferred economic adjustments. The auto and auto-related industries suffer from massive over-capacity and must shrink. The housing bubble not only helped spur the financial crisis, it also produced an enormous mis-allocation of resources. Housing prices must come a lot further down before we can reset the economy – and consumer demand – for a new round of growth. The financial and banking sector grew massively bloated – in terms of employment, share of GDP and wages, as the detailed research of NYU’s Thomas Phillipon has shown – and likewise have to come back to earth.

On the other hand, there is the classic question: What better and more effective things might have been done with these trillions? That’s for historians to ponder and decide. But the combination of the massively misallocated resources produced by the bubble (plus the costs of military adventures) combined with humongous bailout spending puts the U.S. behind the economic eight-ball in a way it has not been in more than a century. Having hold on the reserve currency helps, but it cannot absolve all these compounded sins.  Sooner or later the money will run out; bills will come due.

That creates a wide open structural opportunity to accelerate what Fareed Zakaria has dubbed the “rise of the rest” to accelerate. Crises are periods where the relative position of nations and regions can and do change dramatically. (Do I think the U.S. will lose its hegemonic position: Of course not. My hunch is that the U.S. is in the same position structurally as England at the onset of the Long Depression of 1873. It was not until the next major crisis – the Great Depression of 1929 and the onset of WWII that it lost its position to the United States. So worst case: The U.S. has one more long-cycle at the top of the heap). But, just think of all the ways the trillions of bailout money could be used to build the economy of the future. And while you’re doing that imagine that some other places outside the United States that have been patiently building and conserving their resources may start to figure out how to do just that.

The clock of history ticks on. Over time, it tends to leave behind those places who get stuck, get trapped, or try too hard to breathe life back into the old order, neglecting the new one that is emerging. And that’s what really worries me.

Kevin Drum thinks maybe the rush to stimulus ignores the deeper problems facing the U.S. economy.

I continue to wonder if a massive stimulus package that spurs domestic consumption means that just as we propped up the economy in 2002 by replacing the dotcom bubble with a housing bubble, we’re now propping up the economy in 2008 by replacing the housing bubble with continuing support for our ever-ballooning trade deficit bubble …. See Tim Duy for more on this. I don’t know if he’s right, but I don’t feel too bad for bringing this up since no one else really seems to know either.

In any case, I do know that pretty much every economist in the country agrees, in general, that eventually U.S. consumption has to go down, savings have to go up, and we have to start exporting more than we import. It’s just a question of whether we can afford to worry about that with the economy collapsing around our heads. Still, here’s a thought: if this is a serious long-term concern, shouldn’t we at least try to construct a stimulus package that stimulates export industries more than other sectors of the economy? If so, how would we go about doing that? And what else should we be doing to prepare for the day when the current panic subsides, the great T-bill bubble bursts, and the rest of the world decides that 0% yields on treasuries suck and they don’t want to buy any more of them? And what they’d really like instead are some tangible goods and services…?

I don’t know. Maybe we really can’t worry too much about this at the moment. But the trade deficit bubble is going to pop eventually just like the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. We at least ought to be thinking about this a little bit.

Yeppers. And here he is on the bailout “prepackaged bankruptcy” option.

It actually sounds like a decent compromise to me: it keeps the companies from imploding in the middle of a huge recession, but at the same time it gives a bankruptcy court considerable leeway to impose serious restructuring of the kind that a political process probably can’t. The end result — if it’s done right — is a pair of companies that will end up smaller but still viable in the long term, and an economy that takes only a moderate hit instead of a killing blow.

I mainly agree, but am much less optimistic on their long-term prospects. The key will be how to minimize such “incumbent claims” politically and shift investments to the new idea-driven economy.