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Suddenly, everything old is New Deal once more. Reagan is through; FDR is in. Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt series really offer for today’s earth?

The respond is, a catalogue. But Barack Obama should make one’s self master of from FDR’s failures as adequately as from his achievements: The conformity to fact is that the New Deal wasn’t as lucky in the short hurry as it was in the long run. And the sense for FDR’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too heedful.

The institutions FDR built have proved both durable and vital. Indeed, those institutions remain the bedrock of our nation’s economic stability. Imagine how much worse the financial crisis would be suppose that the New Deal hadn’t insured most bank deposits. Imagine how insecure older Americans would feel right now if Republicans had managed to dismantle Social Security.

Can Obama achieve something comparable? Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s of recent origin chief of staff, has declared that “you don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste.” Progressives hope that the Obama the cabinet, probable the New Deal, direction respond to the current household and financial crisis by creating institutions, especially a universal-health-care system, that will change the shape of American society for generations to come.

But the new direction should try not to emulate a less-successful aspect of the New Deal: its inadequate reply to the Great Depression itself.

The New Deal brought real relief to in the greatest degree Americans. That said, FDR did not, in truth, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his pristine pair stipulations. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian political economy, which says that increased public spending have power to get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal cunning in the ’30s, by the MIT economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: Fiscal stimulus was ill-fated “not because it does not drudge, but because it was not tried.”

This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of Americans on the general payroll by way of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day, we drive on WPA-built roads and send our children to WPA-built schools. Didn’t all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus?

Well, it wasn’t as major as you might think. The effects of federal public-works spending were largely offset by means of other factors, notably a large tribute greaten, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the treaty level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.

And FDR wasn’cheek by dint of. jowl fit unwilling to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion — he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt superintendence divide expenditure and raised taxes, precipitating every economic fall back that drove the unemployment duty back into double digits and led to a greater defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.

What saved the management, and the New Deal, was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which in the end provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s of necessity.

This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.

The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly mine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — mete they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don’privately expect instant results from the incoming president and cabinet, but they do expect results, and Democrats’ euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.

The economic lesson is the importance of doing sufficiency. FDR thought he was being provident by reining in his spending plans; in fact, he was taking big risks through the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to conformation out how much prevent they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s plenteous better, in a depressed good housewifery, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

In short, Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely put on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently audacious. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

Paul Krugman is a regular columnist for The New York Times.