I never claim to be an economist, just an armchair economist, but this is what I\u2019m thinking about (in a thoroughly unresearched fashion \u2014 this is more of an agenda than anything, and I want to get ideas written down without internet searches):<\/p>\n
Right now, we\u2019re in the middle of an economic transformation, and can\u2019t really see our way to the outcome, or the right way to get to the best outcome. \u00a0Yes, our lackluster recovery from the past recession has been hampered by such things as Obamacare and massive regulation, but the bigger picture is a set of changes connected to globalization (including immigration) and automation. \u00a0Some guy named Pickety (yes, I\u2019ve misspelled the name) has a book out which claims that the way out is massive wealth taxes, apparently. \u00a0Other people claim that everything would be just fine if we only raised the minimum wage, or maybe had the government pay everyone\u2019s college tuition bills. <\/p>\n
But what I\u2019m thinking about is the fact that this was not the first economic transformation we, as a country, experienced. \u00a0I\u2019m not talking about the Industrial Revolution broadly speaking. I\u2019m thinking about the fact that, in 1900 or so, we had dirt-caked children living in slums and working in factories. \u00a0In the 1950s, at least in popular perception, anyone who wished, solely by dint of hard work, could get a job out of high school perfectly suited for supporting a family in reasonable fashion. \u00a0Yes, there were still sharecroppers in the south, and hardscrabble Appalachian miners (think October Sky), but it was a rather different situation.<\/p>\n
What happened?<\/p>\n
Well, partly we banned child labor in the early 1900s, and instituted a 40-hour-week (that is, with overtime legislation) and a minimum wage during the Depression. \u00a0But banning child labor wouldn\u2019t, in itself, improve the economic prospects of families who, after all, sent their children to the sweatshops due to economic necessity.<\/p>\n
And, of course, during that 50-year period we experienced an economic depression and two world wars. \u00a0So I think my first step is to see what the library has to offer in terms of histories of the early part of the century \u2014 what was the economy, and the situation of the poor like, on the eve of the Depression? <\/p>\n
In any event, in 1924 the country severely curtailed immigration. And in the postwar period, we had a substantial competitive advantage over other countries because they were mostly blown to smithereens. \u00a0Recall that the Marshall Plan didn\u2019t start until 1948; until then the Germans basically starved. \u00a0(Besides which, the French, at least, dismantled a fair portion of the remaining portion of their industrial capacity as reparations \u2014 which paled in comparison to the scale at which the Soviets dismantled East Germany\u2019s factories, took its coal, etc.) \u00a0And the Marshall Plan itself consisted of loans, not just cash money \u2014 and it seems to me (have to look this up) that the British were repaying loans to the U.S. in the postwar period as well. <\/p>\n
Oh, and I\u2019ve been meaning to read more about the Great Depression. \u00a0Sure, I\u2019ve read in the past about the political and social history aspect, but not the economics of it. \u00a0Did Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal save the country? \u00a0If so, why is the conventional wisdom that we didn\u2019t recover from the Depression until the war? \u00a0As was it really as simple as \u201cthe war functioned as a massive stimulus spending\u201d \u2014 in the way that Krugman and others on the left now say that the problem with the 2009 stimulus was that it simply wasn\u2019t massive enough? \u00a0I\u2019m skeptical.<\/p>\n
So ultimately this post is about nothing more substantive than \u201care there lessons from last century\u2019s economic transformation?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I never claim to be an economist, just an armchair economist, but this is what I\u2019m thinking about (in a thoroughly unresearched fashion \u2014 this is more of an agenda than anything, and I want to get ideas written down without internet searches): Right now, we\u2019re in the middle of an economic transformation, and can\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n