Krugman's claim is evidently about macroeconomics. And I think he was probably on to something. There was certainly a widely held, although not universal, orthodoxy that called for balanced budgets, the gold standard, and free international trade. Whether you consider this pure Laissez Faire is another issue because, among other things, the existence of a central bank that would enforce the rules of the gold standard game was part of orthodox thinking. But I think the Krugman claim would be wrong if extended to micro-economics. A number of years ago I surveyed the leading U.S. economic journals during the 1890-1930 era on issues such as wage regulation, utility regulation, social security, and so on. You find mostly favorable articles about regulation based on experiences at the state level in the United States or the experiences in other countries, and widespread support for reforms. The New Deal I concluded, was, to some extent, just what the doctors of economics ordered. I apologize for citing my own work, but it was in a volume that historians of economic thought might not take a look at. Many of the other articles in this volume, incidentally, contain discussions of the origins of particular New Deal policies that might be of interest to historians of thought. "By Way of Analogy: The Expansion of the Federal Government in the 1930s" In Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White, eds. _The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century_, 1998, 125-154. Hugh Rockoff