As a Krugman fanboy, I’ve been getting a big kick out of his victory dances of late– rubbing it in the faces of the rightist ideologue economists, the austerians from the Austrian School of Economic Destruction. His latest end zone taunt is a blog post entitled, simply, 1937. (If it really were a football game, he’d have a yellow flag thrown in his face for excessive taunting. Yet the crowd roars for more! The dance goes on to be a huge hit known as The Macro-ena! Ok, sorry.)

As he has so patiently (and not-so-patiently) explained over lo these many years, 1937 was a particularly inauspicious year in applied macro-economics as the Roosevelt administration rapidly pulled back from its alphabet soup economic stimulus programs. It was a futile attempt to balance the budget. As everyone who took Econ 101 should have learned, it had the exact opposite effect, throwing the economy right back into a depressionary tailspin, making budget balancing just that much more difficult/impossible. FDR essentially snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Obama repeated the mistake, rapidly drawing down his somewhat successful–if under-amped–Recovery Act, thereby muting the incipient recovery.

But at least it was something.

The Europeans got straight up austerity from the get-go resulting in all the unmerited, self-inflicted suffering of sky-high unemployment that continues to this day.

Indeed, the oh-so-much-smarter-than-Americans Germans are relearning that lesson–again, and again, and again– even as we speak.

The lessons of 1937 have been a long-running theme of Krugman’s. Every time he references it, I keep thinking back to a very prosaic, but telling remnant literally written in the landscape in an older neighborhood of Norman, Oklahoma…

…I present, my 2013 photos, “1937: The End of Road for the Works Progress Administration’s Work”:

Or, maybe “The Depression that Wasn’t Ended Now”:

I keep thinking Krugman could use these as a centerpiece/banner graphic for his blog….!