The Great Depression

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gellman ◽  
Margaret Rung
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Adequate Food ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
And Gender

From the late 1920s through the 1930s, countries on every inhabited continent suffered through a dramatic and wrenching economic contraction termed the Great Depression, an economic collapse that has come to represent the nadir of modern economic history. With national unemployment reaching well into double digits for over a decade, productivity levels falling by half, prices severely depressed, and millions of Americans without adequate food, shelter or clothing, the United States experienced some of the Great Depression’s severest consequences. The crisis left deep physical, psychological, political, social, and cultural impressions on the national landscape. It encouraged political reform and reaction, renewed labor activism, spurred migration, unleashed grass-roots movements, inspired cultural experimentation, and challenged family structures and gender roles.

On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

The author's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. This book presents four decades of the author's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. The book's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: the interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on the author's pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. The book's second half turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. The book concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.

Book Reviews

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 540-541
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Coordination Failure ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The University

Matthew Jaremski of Colgate University reviews “The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today”, by Nicholas Crafts and Peter Fearon. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Fourteen papers present an introduction to the Great Depression as it affected the advanced countries in the 1930s. Papers discuss depression and recovery in the 1930s—an overview; the 1930s—understanding the lessons; Europe's Great Depression—coordination failure after the First World War; reparations, deficits, and debt default—the Great Depression in Germany; disintegration of the international economy between the wars; the political lessons of Depression-era banking reform; the banking panics in the United States in the 1930s—some lessons for today; can contractionary fiscal policy be expansionary?— consolidation, sustainability, and fiscal policy impact in Britain in the 1930s; U.S. monetary and fiscal policy in the 1930s; what was new about the New Deal?; labor markets in recession and recovery—the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s; economic growth and recovery in the United States—1919–41; ““blood and treasure''—exiting the Great Depression and lessons for today; and fetters of gold and paper. Crafts is Professor of Economic History and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council Research Centre, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, at the University of Warwick. Fearon is Emeritus Professor of Modern Economic History at the University of Leicester.”

What Do We Really Know about Protection before the Great Depression: Evidence from Italy

2015 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 993-1029 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Federico ◽  
Michelangelo Vasta
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Trade Policy ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Welfare Losses ◽  
The Impact

The impact of protection on economic growth has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection as the ratio of custom revenues to import value, which biases results if demand for imports is not perfectly inelastic. In this article, we show that the measure of protection matters. We estimate the James Anderson and Peter Neary (2005) Trade Restrictiveness Index for Italy from unification to the Great Depression. We suggest a different interpretation of some key moments of Italian trade policy and we show that the aggregate welfare losses were small in the long run and mostly related to protection on sugar in the 1880s and 1890s. We document that using different measures of protection affects results of the causal relation between trade policy on economic growth in Italy and in the United States. Accordingly, we argue that a systematic re-estimating of protection in the economic history of trade policy is needed.

General-Equilibrium Models in Economic History

1971 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic History ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Secondary Material ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Characteristic

In this paper, I will discuss three classic problems in economic history. I label them “classic” because they are problems of general interest that share the central characteristic of classic problems: an extensive literature has not led to general agreement. They are taken from the literature on the history of the United States because of the wealth of data and secondary material on this country's history, but they all have their analogues or reflections in European history. They are the problems of labor scarcity in America, the depression of the 1930's (which Americans call the Great Depression), and the deflation of the late nineteenth century (which the British call the Great Depression).

scholarly journals RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE OF THE US WORKFORCE

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-43
Author(s):  
Kshama Mumbai
Keyword(s):  
Minimum Wage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Legislative Action ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Federal Minimum Wage ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Wage Floor

“The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike”, prompted the first minimum wage law in the United States in 1912. Various states followed suit over the next two decades, and in 1938, at the height of the Great Depression, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a federal minimum wage (FLSA).The basic incentive behind the introduction of the Act was to reduce income inequality.A rise in minimum wage acts as a form of relocation of wealth from higher-income people to lower-income people. In principle, Congress amends the FLSA on a regular basis to raise the federal minimum wage to levels necessary for even the lowest-paying workforces in the economy.It also aims to help low-wage workers benefit from overall economywide advances in living standards. However, this has historically not always been the case. In 1968, The Poor People’s 1 Campaign started because of not raising the minimum wage to sufficient levels . The explicit purpose of the federal minimum wage is to help increase consumer purchasing power which stimulates the economy and to keep America's workforces out of poverty.However,the law failed to include the automatic cost of living adjustments and led to inflation eroding the real value of the minimum wage over time. There is a dire need for legislative action to raise the nation’s wage floor, more so than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic.Unless consumer's purchasing power is increased,it will be difficult to come out of this recession.Further,the minimum wage is a direct concern for poverty levels and gender / racial inequality.This paper aims to analyze previous work on the issue and provide further recommendations for the same.

War and the Next Lesson

Money ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Monetary Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Great Depression

This chapter examines the lessons of World War II with respect to money and monetary policy. World War I exposed the fragility of the monetary structure that had gold as its foundation, the great boom of the 1920s showed how futile monetary policy was as an instrument of restraint, and the Great Depression highlighted the ineffectuality of monetary policy for rescuing the country from a slump—for breaking out of the underemployment equilibrium once this had been fully and firmly established. On the part of John Maynard Keynes, the lesson was that only fiscal policy ensured not just that money was available to be borrowed but that it would be borrowed and would be spent. The chapter considers the experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States with a lesson of World War II: that general measures for restraining demand do not prevent inflation in an economy that is operating at or near capacity.

Our Daily Bread: ‘Cooperation’, ‘Independence’ and Politics in Mid-1930s Cinema

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Neve
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cooperative Activity ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.

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