All of this reminds me of the modern version of the Great Depression. Economists have gotten smarter this time around and have covered up the unemployment rate and CPI, but it’s mostly the same.
Studs Terkel, probably the most famous interviewer / oral historian who’s ever lived, wrote a book containing hundreds of oral histories about the Depression. It sounds just like today:
Anecdote, not data: My father was born into the Great Depression. He said you couldn't buy thread - not because you didn't have money to buy it, but because all the thread factories had closed, and there was literally no thread to buy.
Data: The US unemployment rate peaked at 25%.
So, yeah, things were (much) worse during the Great Depression. I have no data on whether people were depressed then (though the final lines of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, his message to the country, were "Buck up" and then "Smile"). But I know that it left deep marks on people. When there just wasn't stuff, and there was no promise that there ever would be stuff, it affected people for decades after it was over.
>the jobless rate reached around 16 to 17 percent. It’s a jobs disaster, to be sure, but not the same scale as the Great Depression.
In many ways this is worse than the Great Depression. People are much more dependent on jobs today-in the thirties fewer people had mortgages they needed to pay and more lived in rural areas where food was more available (gardening or barter).
I think relating this so called downturn to the Depression is impossible for any of us (and media) to do. From the stories I heard from my grandparents and others, I'm not sure if the generation today would do so well in a true great depression.
I’m not jumping through hoops for those to lazy to find easily google-able and commonly known economic history. Any freshman economics books has the statistics too.
The 1937 recession almost cost FDR the election. The unemployment rate didn’t reach normal levels again until the US entered the war.
The point of the article, life goes on even in a depression, is indisputable. However, I was thinking about the differences then and now. One conclusion I reached was that an economic depression is like a giant step backwards in terms of opportunities to get ahead, standard of living, etc. So for the sake of argument, say a Great Depression knocks you back 15-20%. What I realized was that a crash in 1929 pushed a significant number of people into actual subsistence poverty (not the modern Marxist definition of 75% less than others). The US was just barely out of an agricultural based economy in 1929. Today a 15-20% setback puts us back, on average, to sometime in the '80s. So the consequences today are not as severe as they were in 29.
>The '30s here were not deeply structural or were they? That is, during the Depression, there was always the potential to climb back closer to full employment.
Yes and no, I mean knowing the outcome certainly makes it seem that way. We certainly didn't have the economic knowledge we do today. 10 years of working at the problem had modest results and then a second recession occurred. The war spending was really what got us out of it. We supplied, at a nice profit, war material to England and France for two years before we got involved.
Back then, they (Hoover admin) believed the economy would take care of itself and did nothing (sound familiar?) Finally, Hoover (who was considered a brilliant businessman at the time) decided to enact a protectionist import tariff on Canada which was met with a retaliatory tariff on our goods and that was akin to throwing gas on the fire. A funny anecdote: Congress didn't do much about the dust bowl in Texas/Oklahoma until a 10,000 foot dust cloud was blown all the way from Texas/Oklahoma region, across half the continent, settling in Washington DC.
>Imagine the difference between well-fed activist headed to the pub after a protest vs. millions of displaced with no hope and nothing to lose.
Yes, I envision this as well, and on a massive scale. With the current militarization of the police in even the smallest towns, I fear, based on history, the local and state government would crack down hard on the protesting, a la Chicago riots in 1968 or the union busting in the early 1900s. Based on how authoritarian and stubborn the US government has become, it won't be long before they get involved and throw what remaining constitutional protections we have out the window. This could go on for years. Propagandists will continue to pit poor against poor along racial lines as they have been since after Bacon's rebellion and as they do today. Violence will begat violence and it might come closer to a 1930s Soviet landscape than we care to imagine as our government will see the protesters as "threats to democracy," and the "anarchists" moniker of the 1900s will come back and need to "be dealt with harshly." It will look foreign where you have the wealth class, the political / enforcement class, and everyone else. Only the last class will be the vast majority of the population, and as you said, starving. Not only starving, but oppressed, harassed and imprisoned. I don't trust our current government culture to handle this gracefully or intelligently. The biggest difference between now and the 1930s is that in the 1930s, the population trusted the government to act in their (citizen's) best interests, to their best ability. I don't think we're anywhere near that today.
As an aside, the Civil War had the benefit of a country versus a country; blue uniforms vs. grey uniforms. With this, if it comes to that, it would devolve into gurilla uprisings, not unlike the Arab Spring with the outcome of either side winning looking pretty ugly. I saw a photo that hit me like a brick. During the protests in Oakland, I believe, a young protester was wearing an Arab head scarf fashioned into mask like you would see in an ISIS video (Shemagh). I hope that wasn't a foreshadow of things to come.
>Nobody actively tried to make look stupid or applied ad hominem attacks, it's an earnestness here that I admire Earnest gets worthwhile work done so keep it up.
Yes, I really enjoy a good, thoughtful, intellectual discussion on the internet. This was the best discussion I've had in a while. I prefer discussing via typing rather than speaking, because I have time to research my own assertions as well as other's. HN is truly a pearl in a sea of mud.
Studs Terkel, probably the most famous interviewer / oral historian who’s ever lived, wrote a book containing hundreds of oral histories about the Depression. It sounds just like today:
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression https://www.amazon.com/dp/1565846567/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Yh8K...
reply