To make you extra thankful today, an excellent summary of what a depression today would look like: The lines wouldn’t be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there’s more work – or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones. … The flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation’s unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available. …
It may be that this picture of an upcoming Depression_2 will be right in many ways, but that doesn't mean it is how things will be perceived. The media seems to be determined to present the economic slowdown using the narratives of the past. I can hardly open a paper these days without finding a story about a food bank running out, or a free meal offer being overrun with former members of the middle class. Maybe it's something of an artifact of the holidays, but if we think of these reports as the "first draft of history" then maybe this slowdown will be perceived not so differently from the Great Depression, if things gets bad enough.
I thought that the recovery was generally attributed to the massive government spending and regulation of industry brought on by WWII.Sure, America was brought out of the depression by massive government spending... by Britain.
Thanks, Robin. Would you say that there's anything like a mainstream consensus view among experts on how we got out of the Great Depression? Or are we non-experts in the position of having to contradict a significant number of experts if we want to give more credence to any one view?
>We might see more former lawyers wearing knockoffs, doing their back-to-school shopping at Target or Wal-Mart rather than Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch
Gee, sounds awful.
Also, I give you my official permission to delete sentences from a document without replacing them with ellipses.
So we'd get that 50% cut in medicine, Whole Foods and Forever 21 would go belly up, and we'd stash Grampa on the hide-a-bed instead of the retirement home?
Doesn't sound so bad to me. Guess I'll have to dig in to Global Catastrophic Risk, which finally came into the library, to get my gloom and doom on.
Is it really possible to describe how we got out of the original Great Depression with such a narrative? I thought that the recovery was generally attributed to the massive government spending and regulation of industry brought on by WWII.
What an awful, bleak picture. I am no economist, but every economic downturn I have seen has been gotten out of the same way, by lowering taxes and deregulating business. It's no mystery.
It may be that this picture of an upcoming Depression_2 will be right in many ways, but that doesn't mean it is how things will be perceived. The media seems to be determined to present the economic slowdown using the narratives of the past. I can hardly open a paper these days without finding a story about a food bank running out, or a free meal offer being overrun with former members of the middle class. Maybe it's something of an artifact of the holidays, but if we think of these reports as the "first draft of history" then maybe this slowdown will be perceived not so differently from the Great Depression, if things gets bad enough.
I thought that the recovery was generally attributed to the massive government spending and regulation of industry brought on by WWII.Sure, America was brought out of the depression by massive government spending... by Britain.
Thanks, Robin. Would you say that there's anything like a mainstream consensus view among experts on how we got out of the Great Depression? Or are we non-experts in the position of having to contradict a significant number of experts if we want to give more credence to any one view?
>We might see more former lawyers wearing knockoffs, doing their back-to-school shopping at Target or Wal-Mart rather than Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch
Gee, sounds awful.
Also, I give you my official permission to delete sentences from a document without replacing them with ellipses.
burger, yes, it is good to be in a rich society.
Ian and Tyrrell, Marginal Revolution has had lots of posts lately on causes of entry and exit for the Great Depression.
So we'd get that 50% cut in medicine, Whole Foods and Forever 21 would go belly up, and we'd stash Grampa on the hide-a-bed instead of the retirement home?
Doesn't sound so bad to me. Guess I'll have to dig in to Global Catastrophic Risk, which finally came into the library, to get my gloom and doom on.
Is it really possible to describe how we got out of the original Great Depression with such a narrative? I thought that the recovery was generally attributed to the massive government spending and regulation of industry brought on by WWII.
What an awful, bleak picture. I am no economist, but every economic downturn I have seen has been gotten out of the same way, by lowering taxes and deregulating business. It's no mystery.