While most historians believe that the New Deal helped resolve the Great Depression, economists are less certain, with a substantial minority believing that it actually worsened the depression. A 1995 survey of economic historians asked whether "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." Of those in economics departments 27% agreed, 22% agreed 'with provisos' (what provisos the survey does not state) and 51% disagreed. Of those in history departments, 27% agreed and 73% disagreed. The minority view is represented by UCLA economists by Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian who argue that the "New Deal labor and industrial policies did not lift the economy out of the Depression as President Roosevelt and his economic planners had hoped," but that the "New Deal policies are an important contributing factor to the persistence of the Great Depression." They claim that the New Deal "cartelization policies are a key factor behind the weak recovery." They say that the "abandonment of these policies coincided with the strong economic recovery of the 1940s." Cole and Ohanian claimed that FDR's policies prolonged the Depression by 7 years.
Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder argue that the "Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impact of New Deal programs." They suggest that without Social Security, work relief, unemployment insurance, mandatory minimum wages, and without government-granted privileges for labor unions, business would have hired more workers and the unemployment rate during the New Deal years would have been 6.7% instead of 17.2%. As an example, during the depression there were extreme food shortages and widespread famine. To solve this, the government enacted legislation in the form of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. This sought to increase the prices of food, to benefit farmers, by reducing supply. It did this by destroying over 10 million acres (40,000 km2) of crops, slaughtering 6 million pigs, and leaving fruit in the fields to rot. The result was even more widespread famine.