Economics, like most academic disciplines, is in part theoretical. One can, therefore, be a superb economist, but find one's theories don't play out perfectly in actual experience.
Hoover actually had many good ideas about how to battle the Depression, but he didn't think big enough: major change didn't happen until Franklin Roosevelt swept into office in 1933. Hoover, however, did initiate some government spending programs, and in late 1931, he proposed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which Congress supported starting in early 1932 and FDR later greatly expanded. However, all of this was too little too late.
Hoover was hampered by his belief in laissez-faire economics and his tendency to want to balance standing back and letting Adam Smith's "invisible hand" right the collapsed economic system and allowing the federal government to intervene. In an ordinary recession, ordinary methods might have worked, but the Great Depression was an extraordinary collapse in which normal mechanisms to right the system were inadequate.
Hoover did not have the faith in Keynesian economics—which advocated for governments spending their way out of recessions—that was needed to restart the economy. He was more old-fashioned in his thinking and wedded to the idea that business leaders and state governments, not the federal government, should be the main drivers of social welfare and economic rebooting. It would take a more progressive president to implement the sweeping economic changes that were needed to revitalize and safeguard the U.S. economy.
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