Archive for the ‘Great Depression’ Category
A Series on Depression – Introduction
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What do you normally expect in a recession? A “Grapes of Wrath” style dust bowls and people in rusted wagons shuttling all across the highways? People waiting in the soup lines and families going out of heat in the winter? People near the end of the world? Well, those are not the only pictures we will see.
Look at 1930s movies – how often do you find signs of depressions in it? In fact, some of the best and grandest of movies came during that period in every genre ranging from slapstick comedy to horror movies, romantic comedies, epics and serious social movies. By 1935, 50% of Americans owned automobile, the first of freeways came in (1939 – Pennsylvania turnpike) and concept of motels exploded 3 fold in a few years, as more Americans began to take vacation inspite of depression. They had fun by inventing so many past-times like Monopoly, miniature golf, swing dance, and reinvented activities like Jigsaw puzzle etc. Society held together and people won their crisis with hope. How did that happen?
A Series on Depression – Prologue
We might be getting close to a depression or atleast a deep recession. But, do we know what a depression means and how bad it is? In the next few months my plan is to take you through historical depressions worldwide, their causes and effects. I’m not going to wear a pink glass and say everything that is happening is going for good. I want to be realist and give you both sides of the coin – something that the traditional media lacks. There are both positives and negatives, and we keep an objective mind we can overcome any crisis is what history teaches us.
What is the series going to contain?
If this is a depression, is it then the end of the world?
Most data points of the current era draw similarity with the great depression – the volatility of the stock market, the fall of the biggest financial institutions and plummeting industrial production can all be compared to only one other even in modern American history – The Great Depression. So, the past one year, I spent time in watching some of the movies that are related to depression that came in 1930s and afterwards. I would have assumed that 1930s movies would be too gloomy, given all what we have read and seen in the latter era. But, majority of of the 60+ famous movies I saw during that era were either normal or positive, but in any case didn’t have a semblance of the gloom even when they touched the wall street crash.
So, is it really the end of the world, if we get into another Great Depression?
