Beaver dams, yes. Hoover Dam, no.

Bad enough we had to see J. Edgar Hoover in a dress.

And so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another.

So imagine you have, say, a Hoover in your home and it has broken down. You need a spare part, but you realize that Hoover's been discontinued.

This is the first vacuum cleaner, the 1905 Skinner Vacuum, from the Hoover Company. And this one weighed 92 pounds and took two people to operate and cost a quarter of a car.

One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work sharing.

With the current presidential term lurching to such a calamitous close that the incumbent is probably worried about being remembered as George Herbert Hoover Walker Bush, the correlation between presidential party and economic outcome demands some kind of explanation.

It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P G keep brands separate, like Ariel and Pringles and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand.

That seems especially relevant in today s world, in which technology tempts us merely to scratch the surface of so many issues. He was a tremendous colleague at the Hoover Institution, a true and supportive friend, and admirably humble despite his incredible intellectual influence.

Austerity had failed repeatedly, from its early use under US President Herbert Hoover, which turned the stock market crash into the Great Depression, to the IMF programs imposed on East Asia and Latin America in recent decades. And yet when Greece got into trouble, it was tried again.

US President Herbert Hoover s administration did not initially respond to the depression by emphasizing the need for fiscal austerity. On the contrary, Hoover and other figures argued in a perfectly modern, Keynesian fashion that large scale public works programs were needed to pull the economy out of the trough.

In some parts of California and Texas, a portion of the water supply is provided to consumers for almost nothing delivered by a network of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts that were built decades ago. The Hoover Dam, for example, which created Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US, was built in 1936 during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal.

Moreover, today s Keynesians ignore the urgency behind the depression era concern with balanced budgets. When the Hoover administration did swing to fiscal tightening, it was responding to pressures from the capital and foreign exchange markets, which in turn were responding to the crises in Latin America and Central Europe, where public finances had been a major part of the problem.

We are once again learning the hard way that this kind of austerity, when applied in the teeth of a major financial crisis, leads only to depression. This insight should have been common knowledge it was, after all, a major lesson of the austerity policies of President Herbert Hoover in the United States and Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in Weimar Germany in the early 1930 s.