American policymakers have simply done less harm than their counterparts abroad. Not that our policy has been perfect. Austerity at the state and local level and not aggressive enough monetary policy have put too low a speed limit on our recovery. But at least we've avoided British-style austerity and Japanese-style tight money -- or both, like Europe.
If you want to feel even better about our subpar recovery, just look at how it compares to other recoveries from financial recoveries. As Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have famously demonstrated with eight centuries of data, these recoveries are almost always frustratingly slow. The chart below, from my colleague Derek Thompson, shows just how much better we're doing this time around compared to the other big crises of the past century.
