Everyone that is arguing with the author here is proabably doing so on their own computer via access to the internet which they have probably paid for. My father lived through the Great Depression. They had no running water, heated one room in the house with only a wood stove, and often went to bed hungry. We were by no means wealthy, but he taught me to be thankful for what little we had. Even when we were forced to move into public housing and take food stamps, he never thought of us as poor. He was thankful for the safety net that allowed us to survive. Maybe the problem today is that we don't know the difference between necessities and luxuries.
SPONSORED BY:
- 1
- 2
More Grapes, Less Wrath
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
But nowhere is there the massive dislocation of populations or wholesale social collapse of the 1930s. Unemployment is 8.5 percent in the United States, and as much as 13 percent for some parts of the country, but that's nothing compared with the more than 25 percent rate of the '30s. The consequences of joblessness are also less severe. During the Depression, the losers were laborers and farmers and agricultural workers who had little to start out with. There was no Social Security, no dole, no emergency medical system for the impoverished—not even a flawed one. There were no safety nets to catch the falling middle class. Losing a job and a home meant losing everything. Government had little to offer, and offered little.
It is, of course, possible that if the crisis deepens, the world could see broader levels of hunger, chaos and political turmoil. But for now there is no Mao, no Hitler visible anywhere, even on the distant political horizon. The rising affluence of the past two decades has created a middle class that is more resilient in financial storms, especially in emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil. Yes, those countries do still have hundreds of millions of deeply poor rural inhabitants whose lives are not much different today than they were 70 years ago. But, having had little to lose, and having never been integrated into the global financial system, they are not suffering more than usual from the current financial crisis. Their lives may be grim, but the cold fact is that their lives have always been grim.
On the flip side, some economic activity isn't captured by the panoply of data that shapes our sense of what is going on in the world. Cash transactions, undocumented immigrant workers, the "black economy" of metropolises everywhere, and even some service transactions, are all but invisible in GDP and trade statistics. That may be one reason why daily life has more ballast than the data suggests.
For now, the world is living in a fugue state. The wide gap between rhetoric and reality for all the major economies shows few signs of narrowing, and those perceptions can make matters worse. Yet someone is buying the tens of millions of iPhones and Nintendo consoles that were sold in the past six months, not to mention the basketball, baseball and football tickets, or at least the HD packages that beam those games into living rooms.
In the end, this period may be remembered as a severe economic recession accompanied by a great psychological depression. Perhaps what the world needs, even more than a master banker, is a global therapist, someone to minister to the collective psyche, or at least divert its focus away from the relentless stream of excessively bad news. Nothing adds to collective depression more than Great Depression analogies, and we've all heard way too many of them.
© 2009
- 1
- 2
Discuss