Read the article provided at the link below.

http://www.escape.com/~paulg53/politics/great_depression.shtml

You tell me. Does the society of 1929 look exactly like 1999 or not. With all the talk of the comparisons with `29, this is a must read to qualify the talk.

If anyone can identify whats differant in `99, please post your opinion.

I feel that Y2K will affect all our lives. I just believe that the "event" will affect confidence more than actually disrupting our way of lives. And its this "confidence" that, as in `29, keeps the air in this bubble.

Care to dispute this? ww

PS, could someone post a hot link for me? thanks.

-- wayne witcher (wwitcher@mvtel.net), August 28, 1999

Answers

CHECK IT OUT NOW
Ma in Causes of the Great Depression

-- Rockafeller Skank (rocky2k@x-networks.net), August 28, 1999.

bold off

-- Rockafeller Skank (rocky2k@x-networks.net), August 28, 1999.

Very good article. The parallels are uncanny. Substitute "high tech" and "Internet" for "automobile industry" and "radio industry" and Mr. Decker will basically have the article on the Depression he's writing 95% done.

-- a (a@a.a), August 28, 1999.

There are numerous similarities, and numerous differences, between 1929 and 1999. If you cannot perceive any differences, while you are posting on this forum using a technology that did not exist 60 years ago, I cannot have much hope for your grasping the range of issues involved in understanding such phenomena as causes of economic depressions.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), August 28, 1999.

" Paul Gordon PHD Quote.....If those in roles of public and private sector responsibility do not significantly increase their efforts to act to minimize the harmful and disastrous impacts of Y2K and the embedded systems crisis, Y2K may turn out to be the largest, best studied, most assessed, monitored, talked about, and planned for, and, yes, even best understood catastrophic event in the recorded history of humankind. It may teach the lesson that knowledge and understanding are worthless if we do not act in accordance with what we know and understand.

Hey~~Jerry feel comfortable with the contents of this quote? And if you do what purpose do you serve?

-- kevin (innxxs@yahoo.com), August 28, 1999.

That should have been Paula Gordon instead of Paul. Although the topic of this thread is Depression similarities. Your skepticism is wearing thin......!

-- kevin (innxxs@yahoo.com), August 28, 1999.

Interesting ... too bad it's so incomplete - and misleading:

the real causes are given better in :

The Great Depression and New Deal Monetary Policy; Garrett and Rothbard, CATO Institute, 1980

I'll only give a VERY brief outline here:

1) the cause of the Great Depression was the creation of 'fiat currency' by the US federal government to fund WWI.

2) 'funny money' (currency for which there is no corresponding backing in goods or services) goes from the government, first to large corporations through goverment funding of things like war effort, public works and the like

3) more dollars chasing fewer goods IS 'inflation'

4) who gets hold of those 'new' dollars first, benefits from them the most and keeps them the longest? - those who are already rich i.e. the owners of those corporations doing goverment contract work

5) what trickle-down there may be from the corporations to the masses is so small as to be virtually non-effective

All else the author has said above may be true, but it's the root cause that he seems to have left out.

So; - yes; the parallels between then and now do exist - as Seth Glickenhaus has said :

"for every trillion of new money printed by the government, the market goes up about a thousand points." [with all the corillary effects and results cited above...]

funny how a little bit of the truth can seem so impressive when the most important element of the truth is totally missing!

as Paul Harvey might say "and now, for the rest of the story!"

Thanks,

Perry

-- Perry Arnett (pjarnett@pdqnet.net), August 28, 1999.

Kevin,

a. not very b. various

Regarding the quote, it may be nice rhetoric, but there are various problems, particularly with the "if we do not act in accordance with what we know and understand" bit. Aside from the ambiguities of the two "we"s, there is the fundamental problem that each person often "knows" things that contradict each other. Then there is the entirely separate problem that what some people know and understand and act on is how to do nasty things, like start wars.

Rgarding my skepticism, it seems to be intact. Without it I'd have to believe Kosky! :-) More generally, most advances in learning were possible because of someone's skepticism about previously accepted fallacies.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), August 28, 1999.

Perry,

If I recall correctly, the FED continually made large additions to the money supply up until about when Ben Strong, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, kicked the bucket in late 1928. Much of the money did take a quick trip to large corporations as low interest loans from the commercial banks. The artifically low interest rates made some long term investments appear misleadingly feasible. However, it gets much to involved to be susceptible to adequate expanation in a few posts on a web forum, IMHO.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), August 28, 1999.

Ed Yourdon made some really interesting observations about this in a recent e-mail that is reprinted at http://www.gwu.edu/~y2K/keypeople/gordon/1999conference.htm.

To zero in on other differences, you might read Part 4 of my White Paper recently posted at http://www.gwu.edu/~y2K/keypeople/gordon. The appendix to Part 4 is an exchange between Congressman Kucinich and myself concerning the President's strategy on Y2K. (That exchange took place at the GW Y2K Conference soon to be available on a RealVideo website at http://www.y2kapproaches.com/real/pgordon.htm. Lots of other interesting offerings at that website already.)

-- Paula Gordon (pgordon@erols.com), August 29, 1999.

It appears that in Paula Gordon's links containing ~y2K, the K needs to be lower case, for example:

http://www.gwu.edu/~y2k/keypeople/gordon/1999conference.html

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), August 29, 1999.

Thanks! As you discovered the URL for my White Paper is http://www.gwu.edu/~y2k/keypeople/gordon.

Part 5 should be added shortly.

-- Paula Gordon (pgordon@erols.com), August 29, 1999.