An article by Drake Bennett in yesterday's Boston Globe has some suggestions for what a 21st century New Great Depression would look like: Instead of people lining up at soup kitchens, Bennett says, people will be lining up at emergency rooms.
He's half right -- no doubt people without health insurance would be seeking medical care wherever they could get it. Of course, that scenario assumes the new Democratic president and Congress would be helpless to change the present health care crisis. Instead of emergency rooms, surely more community clinics would be a fast, cheaper solution.
But the "soup kitchens"? These days, there are far more food pantries, and the lines at them are already long. And I had to laugh at this sentence:
Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses.This is not a vision of economic apocalypse, but the intentionally simple, anti-consumerist, progressive culture of present-day Vermont. He might go farther: people would eat only food grown near their homes. Oh wait, that's already a movement.
Bennett is right about some things, like unemployed people getting fat on cheap junk food instead of starving like the people in photos from the Dust Bowl. But he seems just too pessimistic. The DIY, entrepreneurial culture of Generations X, Y, and Z would be too creative to sit at home passively absorbing television, as Bennett suggests. For one thing, the electric power distribution system might not be as dependable, and you know how much juice digital TVs take? Same with computers.
Instead, why not an exposion of literature, street art and -- it's not all good -- folk music? Decades of television, computers and video games have not taken away people's ability to entertain themselves and each other; they've just made it easier to avoid. Take them away and people will start being smart and funny again. We might see countless local iterations of shows like "A Prairie Home Companion" -- only funnier and more original. I fondly think, for example, of the "Esther's Follies" variety show in Austin which, like APHC, has become institutionalized and somewhat frozen, but back in the late 70s when it was starting out -- man, there was nothing better. In fact, hasn't Generation Y and Z already started to bring back the medium of burlesque?
What are some other things we might see?
20th century /// 21st century----------------------------------- --------------------------------------
Social-realist murals /// Satirical blogs
End of prohibition /// Widespread decriminalization of drugs
Dam building /// Dam deconstruction and ecological restoration
Taking in lodgers to make ends meet /// Turning dead malls into housing
Rise of fascism; Jews scapegoated /// Rise of fascism; any immigrants scapegoated
Yes, sadly, a new great depression might also see an appeal to the worst in human nature, as angry people seek a scapegoat and unethical politicians seek to manipulate them. Targets of scapegoating are plenty. In Third World countries, ethnic cleansing is already a common response to social and economic upheaval; I don't know why that wouldn't get worse. In the U.S., there are many ready targets, chief among them Latino immigrants. Right-wing foamers already want to build a wall across the country's southern border; what will they do when things really get tough? To combat incipient fascism, we'll need a better-educated population. And that's one thing I'm afraid we never have enough money for.
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Except this: countless local iterations of shows like "A Prairie Home Companion"
Dear god, no. Just give me a second to insert the icepick into my eardrums...
We have not yet begun to see the impact of this New Depression (and it is a Depression). The dominoes are falling faster and more frequently every day. It's not a stretch for my imagination to picture unemployment in the 20s and a Dow in the 5,000s before the worst is over.
I, for one, am considering fencing in my front yard to raise chickens and planting a high-yield garden, too.
I satirized Garrison Keillor's dilemma here a few months ago in my personal blog.
Would someone please stop the Idiots from killing us all with Fiat money? The case for a New Dollar
“Every nation has found fiat money to be its ruin.” Irving Fisher 1911
The author is not perfect, as he got suckered into the Iraq War because of an old friend who worked for Wolfowitz, although the author always correctly called for more troops as part of the solution.
In terms of the current mess, however, the author has been a visionary, not because of any particular personal brilliance, but because he suffers from an inability to digest Cool Aid of any sort.
Although it has caused numerous problems in the Stalinist bureaucracies that dominate modern academia, as opposed to the primarily Hitlerian bureaucracies of the private and governmental sectors, fortunately the author managed to remember lessons from history that the idiot bureaucrats in charge of the Federal Reserve System forgot a long time ago, namely that the idea that money and credit could be allowed to be created willy nilly by running presses of the ink or electronic variety has anywhere and everywhere been a disaster.
In the particular case at hand, what we are witnessing is increasing variance in economic aggregates because governmental command and control apparatai have interacted catastrophically badly with private cupidity to blow apart the price matrix necessary for efficiently allocating resources. Under the current course, the outcome almost surely, in a technical sense, will be a hyperpression, a wild oscillation in prices that blows apart the entire real economy, probably ending in war, civil war and revolution.
Having been at times accused of being excessively dramatic in other areas of my life, I assure the reader that the drama was usually due to my proclivity for encountering drama queens, and that I actually like a sedate existence, and have no particular desire to ride over the cliff with the idiocracy running the country at this juncture.
Unfortunately, the brute fact of the matter is that if the money supply is unbounded, which is the case by definition with a fiat money system, then any systematic policy error by the monetary authority must by the law of large numbers end by increasing the variance of the price matrix until the model resets in a cataclysmic general system failure and resetting of the entire economic, social and political order; that is what is going on.
We still have a chance to avoid the total sail off the cliff scenario by refloating the dollar backed preferably by long term cash flows generated by energy production in a de-leveraged economy, although I am not optimistic that this will happen unless the idiots in charge of the current order retire and/or are suddenly subjected to a tightly correlated natural selection event; better them than us, I say.
"What be vexin yer soul Tom?" His mother's wrinkled old kindly face looked up at him.
"I don't know mom. Maybe I'm like this here danged ol phone maybe I ain't got no signal of my own maybe I'm part of a great big network of people who just talk and talk all day long until one day the talk peters out and the signal just dies. Maybe I aint got my own soul. Casey says, a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but on'y a piece of a big-an' then-"
"Then what Tom?"
"Then it don't matter. Then I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere-wherever you look. Wherever there's a blog about how hungry people need food to eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cell phone video of a cop beatin up some poor feller, I'll be there. See! God I'm talking like Casey. Comes a thinking about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes like some tormenting devil put a permanent link to his My Space page right there into the center of my thick skull and I can't get it out."
"I don't understand." said ma.
"I don't either ma it's just some things I been thinking about. Lot's of things to think about now that I can't access the web."
But we have to start thinking of creative, new solutions....and the good part is that most solutions turn out to be amazingly simple, as in the inevitable why-didn't-anyone-think-of-that-before vein. Libraries may have to be run by volunteers as well as raise their own funds. Retired librarians and teachers could certainly be of help here. Volunteers in classrooms to help teachers with everything from tutoring to roll and lunch count, depending on experience with children and education, as school budgets cut Teacher Aide positions. Using every available plot of land to grow community gardens will not only provide fresh food, but bring the community together in positive ways in addition to teaching children about the earth, how to grow their own food, how to plan and organize, on and on. Neighborhood Watches could perform routine neighborhood policing rather than police officers. Small, rural towns will probably have to give up police departments they can no longer afford and depend on State Police, one of the original purposes of State police, anyway.......but I'll stop for now....thought-provoking, indeed!
my initial thoughts - it might look a lot like New Orleans in 2006. or even now. or even before Katrina.
I like the community coming together ideas, but I am afraid that the rich will find a way to keep getting richer, and the poor - well, to hell with them.
oh, my, I'm cynical tonight - so I'll just stop now.
Whatever happens - with great disaster comes great opportunity. All people need to do is not jump on the scapegoating and steer their communities in more positive directions.