Exercise 3: Why "Worsened Severity" and "Caused" Are Genuinely Different Claims — Possible Solution
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"Caused the Depression" would mean the Great Depression genuinely
would not have happened at all, or would have been avoided entirely,
were it not for the Smoot-Hawley tariff specifically - implying the
tariff was the essential, necessary trigger without which the whole
crisis simply wouldn't have occurred.

"Worsened the Depression's severity" is a real, more limited claim: it
means the Depression was already occurring (or was already going to
occur) for other, separate reasons, and the tariff made that
already-unfolding crisis genuinely worse than it would otherwise have
been - a real, meaningful contribution to the damage, but not the
actual root cause of the crisis existing in the first place.

The real historical record, as the chapter presents it, supports only
the second, more limited claim. Economists including Milton Friedman
considered the tariff "only a minor cause," and the real, documented
consensus is that the Depression "would likely have happened anyway,
but perhaps with less severity" - explicitly framing the tariff as an
aggravating factor layered on top of an already-developing crisis
driven by other real causes, not as the essential trigger that started
it.

This distinction matters because conflating the two claims would
overstate what the real evidence actually supports - crediting (or
blaming) a single policy with causing an entire economic catastrophe
that most economic historians believe had multiple deeper causes,
rather than accurately describing the tariff's real, documented role as
one real contributing factor that made an already-occurring crisis
worse.

ANSWER: "Caused the Depression" would mean the crisis wouldn't have
happened at all without the tariff; "worsened its severity" means the
Depression was already occurring for other reasons and the tariff made
it genuinely worse. The real historical record - including Friedman's
own assessment that it was "only a minor cause" and the consensus that
the Depression "would likely have happened anyway, but perhaps with
less severity" - supports only the more limited second claim.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This precisely distinguishes causation from aggravation and grounds the
distinction in the chapter's own cited real historical consensus,
rather than treating the two claims as interchangeable.