Harvard economist Robert Barro is one of my personal favorite resources on economic growth. He is also a student of fiscal policy and the Great Depression. The Barro interview at Five-Books.com is first rate. Excerpt:
So you?re not saying the New Deal was a mistake, you?re saying basically we don?t know.
One of the things I?ve been trying to do in my research is to calculate the effect, particularly on Gross Domestic Product, of government expenditure programs. And I?ve been focusing on the US experience, because that?s where I have the information, although it would be good to go beyond that. But the thing you can clearly isolate is the effect of wartime expenditure ? particularly World War Two ? it is so big that in a statistical sense it gives you a lot of power to figure out what is going on.
There?s both the build-up, starting in 1941…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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