Timelines of the Great Depression

:hi: This is the info. from the year 1929 (link below):

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Organized labor declines throughout the decade. The United Mine Workers Union will see its membership fall from 500,000 in 1920 to 75,000 in 1928. The American Federation of Labor would fall from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.4 million in 1929.

"Technological unemployment" enters the nation's vocabulary; as many as 200,000 workers a year are replaced by automatic or semi-automatic machinery.

Over the decade, about 1,200 mergers will swallow up more than 6,000 previously independent companies; by 1929, only 200 corporations will control over half of all American industry.

By the end of the decade, the bottom 80 percent of all income-earners will be removed from the tax rolls completely. Taxes on the rich will fall throughout the decade.

By 1929, the richest 1 percent will own 40 percent of the nation's wealth. The bottom 93 percent will have experienced a 4 percent drop in real disposable per-capita income between 1923 and 1929.


Link: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Timeline.htm

Sounds pretty familiar to me, only worse right now (read the entire link if you have the chance). I think we are in BIG trouble to say the very least! Are we already there? In a depression or on the brink of one? Is this being kept secret?

Comments?

:dem:

I think it's worse, since a depression is temporary.

Last week we read that the US hasn't created a manufacturing job in management or labor in 5 years.

AOL reported this week that the HOT jobs in the US were Janitors and Nurses. Janitors? The HOT JOB?

But it's great for the consumer. Well, the consumer that has a secure income.

Too bad today there was a post on DU comparing the US to other countries that suggested nearly 40% of jobs in the US roll over every year. Some security.

be the Great Depression all over again. Only worse because of the population shift from rural to urban.

While the Automobile was common by 1914, the majority of families only started to have one in the 1920s and 1930s, and Automobiles did not become a "replacement" industry till about 1954. Till 1954 Automobiles were still in their "Boom" part of its Business cycle.

For you non-management types of there the "Business life Cycle" is a term used to describe how a Business or product goes from invention to obsolescence. Right after its invention, any new product goes through a "Boom" cycle where it is more important to increase the total market then to go after market Share. Thus in a boom part of the Life Cycle, you see a lot of small companies selling the product, but they main interest is to get people to buy the product for the first time and thus increase the overall size of the market. Other Characteristics of the Boom, is a lot of small business who all tend to be very aggressive.

This is followed by the "Mature" phase on the life-cycle, where the market is no longer expanding. People are NOT buying the product for the first time, but replacing existing products that is old, broke etc. The chief characteristics of this cycle is the only way to increase profit is to increase your market share at the expense of your rivals. The many small businesses of the Boom tend to become 3-4 large businesses in the Mature part of the product life cycle. Businesses in a Mature market tend to be very conservative, they are as much worried about LOSING business to their Competitors as to WINNING market share from their Competitors.

Finally you get to the end of the Life-Cycle. People are buying less and less of the product. If you are a marginal producer you pull out of the industry, if you are the dominate producer you gather all the other firms under your control and milk the product till no one buys your product anymore. Minimal investment given the decline in people buying the product. Other Characteristics is the businesses are looking to invest their money into something else while the dominant market holder takes over the whole market WHILE looking for other investments.

In Many ways the Great Depression can be seen as the when the US transformed from a Non-Automotive dominant system to a Automotive based Society. The real boom in Automobiles was in the 1920s through this continued in the 1930s but was transforming from a Boom Industry to Mature Industry. Combined with the related DELCINE in non-automotive transportation systems you had the recipe for the Great Depression. The Boom of the 1920s had been caused by the Raise of the Automobile but as the Boom ended and became a mature product the Automotive industry could NO longer push the over all economy to over come the Decline in the Horse Drawn industry. The US was the Society that most embraced the Automobile and thus we suffered the greatest hit of the Great Depression.

Computers confuses the situation till you realized that you had THREE different Computer Life Cycles, the first was the main frame computers which produces all types of productivity improvements in the 1950s and 1960s. As the Main Frame Computer became a mature Market in the 1970s you had the bad economic situation of the 1970s. The Second Computer period was the Personal Computer invented about 1979 and taking off in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Most people who wanted computers (Except for the net) had them by the early 1990s and it became a Mature market as people purchased new computers for old computers as opposed to buying their first personal computers. The Third Phase in the Internet movement that started in the early 1990s and carried the economy till 2001 when most people who wanted to be on line were on line.

IF we go back in history to the Railroad, you had the same situation, a huge Boom in the 1850s and 1860s followed by a maturing of the Market in the 1870s (Which was the worse depression before the Great Depression of the 1930s).

If you look at the situation you will see a pattern. A new product is invented, it helps productivity immensity. The first people to embrace its use increase their profits which lead others to follow these pioneers to use the new product. Thus you had TWO source of economic improvements, by the people making the new product and the people USING the new product. This produces a Boom, the 1850s (Steam main line railroads), the 1880s (Short line Railroads), the 1920s (The Automobiles), the 1960s (Main Frame Computers), the 1980s (Personnel Computers) and the 1990s (the Internet).

This boom is followed by a Depression as the profits dry up as everyone is using the new technology so no one is making the excessive profits of the boom (and the companies that had NOT embraced the new technology during the boom, either go under to convert to the new Technology). This explains the Depressions of 1870s, the 1890s, the 1930s. This also explains the hard times of the 1970s, the real bad recession of the early 1990s and present economic malaise. Note the Depression does NOT happen AFTER the product becomes a mature Product, but as the product ends its Boom and starts to convert to the Mature part of the Product Life-Cycle.

Now these Depression/Hard Times/Panics/Recessions can be made worse if more than one major product is undergoing its life cycle change from Boom to Mature. For example, Lighting life-Cycle started with Drake's first oil well in 1859 and Boomed till non-electrical indoor Lighting became a mature product during the 1870s Depression. The Great Depression was made Worse as Electrical Lighting replaced the Dying Gas Lighting industry, but both of these product Life-Cycles where shadowed by the larger Railroad and later Automotive Depressions.

The same thing is happening now, you are seeing a transition to an internet based communication system replacing not only letters and Catalogs, but most non-fiction books (Manuals, reference books, databases etc). I do not see the transition to be complete till after this malaise is long over (For example the US Automotive industry only really entered its mature period in the 1950s NOT during the Great Depression). You will see innovation for a few more years (Some of the Best Automobiles NOT produced by the Big Three came into existence in the 1930s as the industry matured and Studebaker and Nash survived till the 1960s) but you will see more and more investments into "Bells and Whistles" as opposed to real improvements as the net enters into its Mature Phase (For example after WWII, US Cars really did not improve till the Japanese Auto Invasion of the 1970s, you had the introduction of Automatic Transmission, Larger Engines, Electric Wipers, Air Conditioning and even improving Lighting during the 1950s and 1960s but these were either Government Mandated or had been long available after-market and once proved in the after-market market, then and only then did the Big Three introduced the improvement).

Now Product Life-Cycle can vary over time and can become complicated. For example Broadcast Television was in its boom from the late 1940s till about 1970 when it became a Mature product (Almost everyone who wanted a TV had a TV by 1970). Cable was a boom Market in the 1960s and continued being a boom market in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Do to competition from Cable, Broadcast TV declined during the 1980s and slowly became part of the new medium of Cable Television. Thus in the 1970s you started seeing a lot of "Safe" TV programs, designed not to turn anyone off, except on Cable as Boom Mentally prevailed (And then this Boom Mentally expanded to Broadcast TV as the difference between Broadcast and Cable TV became more and more blurred). For example when "Friends" had its last show everyone bragged on how high its rating went and it was #1 for that week, then some wag said that such a rating would have caused the show to be CANCELED 20 years before do to LOW ratings. This shows you how much Cable and Broadcast TV have become one in the 1990s as Cable matured as almost everyone who wants Cable now has Cable and Cable is turing more and more to Safe programs not to turn people off watching their programs just like the Big Three Broadcasting have been doing since the early 1970s.

I go into this for our present economic problem is tied in with the transition to a prue internet based information Superhighway. Books (Except for causal reading) will soon disappear. Reference books price will drop like a rock for the cost of publishing them will cease (Once composed on line and no additional cost to produce additional copies for people who need them). Now the problem of how to pay for the material in Reference books will remain but once gathered and formed into a reference Manuel, the cost of ending it out to the public will be minimal.

... hard to argue with. Thanks for posting that.

contribute to a grim job situation, and a market boom can certainly contribute to good times, but market decline is not what makes for a depression. It has to be helped along by idiotic fiscal policy by the government allowing for concentration of wealth among the few and the subsequent choking off of the market economy as the pool of consumers with enough cash to fuel the next technology boom dries up.

Consider the radio revolution. That wasn't enough to pull the country out of the Great Depression. Consider the maturation of the television market and the subsequent loss of all facilities to produce televisions. That didn't cause more than a slight recession, and the television boom was far greater than the computer boom has been.

Recessions may becaused by market saturation/decline cycles. However, it takes the loss of the consumer class to trigger a real depression, and that is what is in place right now.

results. That doesn't mean that nothing can be done to stop it. This is just the pattern the ruling class has used to shear the flock every 20 years or so.

This notation really lept out, "The business of America is business", if I didn't know it was from 1923 I could have sworn I heard, * cabal say this over and over.

<snip>
1923
President Warren Harding dies in office; his administration was easily one of the most corrupt in American history. Calvin Coolidge, who is squeaky clean by comparison, becomes president. Coolidge is no less committed to laissez-faire and a non-interventionist government. He announces to the American people: "The business of America is business"
<snip>

It is indeed eerie, I think it's going to be even more devastating to the entire American physche when (not members of DU, shout out)realize that all of the data numbers-{unemployment, national debt, state of our military, state of national security, Spying on US citizens, racism, homophobia,etc} coming out of the * cabal are erroneous and false and this country is in really, really bad shape.

When that realization hits, I am really worried what is going to happen to the country, I hope that the USA will be resiliant as it has in our storied past but...

I am going to bookmark this, this is great historical information

:hi:

Harding's administration was not exactly the most corrupt administration in the history of the USA is what I believe. I suggest we are witnessing THE most corrupt administration ever now. It is damn right criminal in fact IMO; far beyond "corrupt".

I've had this link bookmarked for YEARS; I could see the reality of this coming again years ago. And, it is now happening all over again. The similarities are profoundly similar indeed.

Glad you found this link useful.

CountAllVotes

:kick:

It took a (second) World War to pull the US (and the world) out of the "Great Depression" . . . we're "in a war" now, and it's set to drain us even more . . .

because FDR had finally gotten it right by the late 30s and the country was well on its way to regaining what it had lost prior to 1929, its consumer market.

What you have to remember is that the stock market crash then was like the housing crash now: it represented where ordinary people had put their faith and had incurred debt just to see those paper profits keep rising. Now the stock market has been shored up by tax cuts to the rich but the housing market has not, and that's where the hyperinflation and debt loads are.

WWII, if anything, created paper profit for defense contractors and jobs that paid a living wage for women, but it didn't pull this country out of the depression. That is a right wing fiction since they despise giving FDR credit for anything.

No war will help the depression we may be heading into, because war will continue to add to the crushing burden of national debt and there is no way this country will be able to borrow enough on top of war spending to spend us out of another depression, which is basically what FDR did when he put people back to work and recreated the consumer market from the bottom up.

Negative savings rates are truly unsustainable.

Roosevelt tries to stack the Supreme Court with liberal judges, the public was outraged. You can easily see yellow journalism was alive and well then as it is now.

I have bookmarked this, will go through it all later, excellent post..

there are so many parallels between then and now, but I'm also afraid this is much worse.

I have met many through the yrs who have lived during the depression, what has baffled me is how successful the RW has been able to market the masses, when these history lessons were so easily available.