Abstract
The Great Depression was a brutal time in American history. Unemployment soared, millions were impoverished, the economy had tanked, and over 9000 banks closed. Oppositional groups among the working class emerged. Communist groups also emerged and challenged the Capitalist paradigm, as did rising unionism. A common mantra during the period was “Fight—Don’t Starve” (Piven and Cloward 1977; Luce 2017; Smith 2002).
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- 1.
These free market ideas, in the modern era, can be traced to five foreign-born scholars: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker. Three of these thinkers were born in Vienna, a fourth (von Mises) was born in the Austrian city of Lemberg, and Schumpeter in Maravia.
What defined the writings of these five men were their experiences in Europe after WW1. The Left had failed in attaining its agenda and could not defend itself against the right wing, and resulted in the rise of Nazism. As a consequence they all came to believe that the best way to defend Liberalism was to keep government out of economic activities. Note that von Mises and Hayek had a significant impact on the economic ideology shaping the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, and its Free-Market doctrine.
In contrast, J. M. Keynes, also having the experience of living thru the aftermath of WW1 and the disintegration of his late Victorian Europe, had a different viewpoint as expressed in his writings. Keynes believed that “Uncertainty” played a significant role in the situation after WW1 and that best way of dealing with this Uncertainty was to have government steer the economy for the general good. (Note, this footnote is a summary from an excellent essay by the late Tony Judt (2009).
- 2.
Since 1865, near the end of the American Civil War, there were 21 Depressions or Recessions in the US. A Recession is defined by Robert Hall (2003) as a “…significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than two quarters which is 6 months, normally visible in real gross domestic product, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.”
- 3.
An important statistic regarding population growth is growth due to natural increase, which is—
$$ \mathrm{Natural}\kern0.5em \mathrm{Growth}\kern0.5em \mathrm{Rate}=\mathrm{Crude}\kern0.5em \mathrm{Birth}\kern0.5em \mathrm{Rate}\hbox{--} \mathrm{Crude}\kern0.5em \mathrm{Death}\kern0.5em \mathrm{Rate}. $$NGR for the years 1900 to 1980 are as follows:
Year
NGR
1900–1910
12.8
1910–20
11.5
1920–30
12.3
1930–40
7.2
1940–50
12.1
1950–60
15.3
1960–70
10.7
1970–80
6.5
- 4.
Note that my figures differ slightly from those published by the Migration Policy Institute. Their figures for 1930, 1940, and 1950 are as follows:
1930 = 14.2 million, 1940 = 11.6 million, and 1950 = 10.3 million. MPI’s website is: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/international-migration-statistics
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Verdugo, R.R. (2018). Demography of the Great Depression: Size and Composition 1930–1950. In: American Education and the Demography of the US Student Population, 1880 – 2014. Applied Demography Series, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89423-2_3
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