Reply #1: By what measures did the economy expand [View All]

in those years?

I'm listening to the John Kenneth Galbraith book on the crash of 1929 and he says that industrial production dropped during the first four years until in 1933 it was at only 10 or 12 percent of capacity. Starting at that low point, a series of 8 percent increases would still only bring it back to where it was at the outset.

For much of the Great Depression unemployment was officially at 25%, and even as late as 1940 it was at 20%. And a lot of people who might have been in the workforce simply weren't. True story: my husband's parents got married in 1932. They eloped, and didn't tell anyone about it, and went back to their separate lives. She was a school teacher and would have lost her job because married women couldn't hold a teaching job then. He was an intern, and likewise interns weren't allowed to be married. So those two people kept their jobs, but how many married women would have continued teaching? And so on.