Myths about the Great Depression?

Don Boudreaux recommends the book Depression, War and Cold War, by Robert Higgs who questions the generally accepted view that World War II was the chief reason for recovery from the Great Depression and suggests that the New Deal prolonged it through what he calls 'regime uncertainty';

“It is time for economists and historians to take seriously the hypothesis that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by creating an extraordinarily high degree of regime uncertainty in the minds of investors.

Of course, scholars have had their reasons for not taking the idea seriously. For a long time, historians have viewed the statements of contemporary businesspeople about “lack of business confidence” as little more than routine grumbling—sure, sure, what else would one expect Republican tycoons to have said? Historians generally report such statements as if they were either attempts to sway public opinion or unreflective whining.

Since World War II, economists, with only a few exceptions, have overlooked regime uncertainty as a cause of the Great Duration for other reasons, such as the availability of standard macroeconomic models whose variables do not include the degree of regime uncertainty and, even if one wanted to incorporate it into an existing model, the absence of any conventional quantitative index of such uncertainty. Somewhat inexplicably, most economists regard evidence about expectations drawn from public opinion surveys as scientifically contemptible. Moreover, economists crave general models, equally applicable to all times and places, and so they resist explanations that emphasize the unique aspects of a specific episode such as the Great Depression…”