Robert S. McElvaine: Their Party Crashed. Ours May Too.
[Robert S. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College, is the author of "The Great Depression" and, most recently, "Grand Theft Jesus: The Highjacking of Religion in America."]
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." Mark Twain was supposed to have said that, but even if he didn't, there's no denying that we're seeing proof of the adage in today's financial crisis.
Consider this statement: "The extraordinary rate of default on residential mortgages forced banks and life insurance companies to 'practically stop making mortgage loans. . . .' " Sounds like 2008, doesn't it? It is in fact a comment from Ben S. Bernanke, current chairman of the Federal Reserve board. But when he wrote those words in 1983, he was talking about the Great Depression.
We've been hearing a lot of comparisons to the Great Depression lately, because today's crisis rhymes with that one to an extraordinary degree. At the most basic level, the cause of the current crisis is simple: Economists, business leaders and policymakers have all been ignoring the lessons learned from that early 20th-century calamity.
I've written extensively about the Great Depression, and in my view, the collapse of the "un-real" estate market of recent years was as predictable as the collapse of the Great Bull Market of the late 1920s. Even though some politicians insist otherwise, the fundamentals of our economy are not strong, just as they weren't in 1929. And the principal reason is that, just as they were in the period leading up to the Great Depression, economic fundamentalists have been in charge.
It's one of the fascinating coincidences of history that Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776, the year of the United States's birth. America then was seen as an unspoiled paradise, a "New Eden" where humans could return to what they imagined was a "state of nature." There was talk of an "American Adam" who roamed freely in this land where the "natural economy" of the free market that Smith postulated could operate, well, freely.
Almost from the start, many Americans have operated on the assumption that this American Adam's surname was Smith, and have taken the market as their economic god. The great irony, though, is that a new type of economy was being born in Great Britain at the same time. And industrialism would remove men and women from a state of nature more completely than ever before.
By the 1920s, the industrial economy was mass-producing at a rapid rate, which meant that its survival required the rise of mass consumption. Trying to play by the rules of Adam Smith's pin factory at a time when Henry Ford's massive River Rouge complex was closer to the true nature of the economy was a prescription for disaster. Such huge economic actors don't behave according to the "natural" laws of the simple economy of Smith's day; under modern circumstances, a more visible hand is needed to guide the market onto a course that benefits all. Yet both economists and political leaders of the time maintained their faith in market-god fundamentalism.
The task facing business in the 1920s was replacing the work ethic with a consumption ethic. If the American people were to be made into insatiable consumers, traditional values would have to be undermined and reversed. The means of accomplishing this? Advertising. The Mad Men of the '20s made over the traditional wisdom of "Waste not, want not" into the essential message of the consumption economy: "Waste and want." Bruce Barton of Barton, Durstine & Osborn, for instance, famously portrayed Jesus as the ultimate advertiser and businessman in his 1925 bestseller, "The Man Nobody Knows."
But wanting isn't enough. If the masses are going to be able to buy what they've been persuaded to want, they have to receive a sufficient share of total income to do so. Yet the opposite happened in the '20s. President Calvin Coolidge and his Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, drastically reduced taxes on the highest incomes. Meanwhile, anti-union policies produced less income for worker-consumers. The share of total national income going to the very richest grew enormously, peaking in 1928, just months before the economy began to contract in the summer of 1929. The top 10 percent of American earners then were getting 46 percent of total income.
Providing large tax cuts for the richest was precisely the wrong policy. To stimulate consumption, taxes should have been cut at lower income levels. Cutting taxes on higher incomes stimulated speculation instead. Sound familiar?...
Read entire article at WaPo
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." Mark Twain was supposed to have said that, but even if he didn't, there's no denying that we're seeing proof of the adage in today's financial crisis.
Consider this statement: "The extraordinary rate of default on residential mortgages forced banks and life insurance companies to 'practically stop making mortgage loans. . . .' " Sounds like 2008, doesn't it? It is in fact a comment from Ben S. Bernanke, current chairman of the Federal Reserve board. But when he wrote those words in 1983, he was talking about the Great Depression.
We've been hearing a lot of comparisons to the Great Depression lately, because today's crisis rhymes with that one to an extraordinary degree. At the most basic level, the cause of the current crisis is simple: Economists, business leaders and policymakers have all been ignoring the lessons learned from that early 20th-century calamity.
I've written extensively about the Great Depression, and in my view, the collapse of the "un-real" estate market of recent years was as predictable as the collapse of the Great Bull Market of the late 1920s. Even though some politicians insist otherwise, the fundamentals of our economy are not strong, just as they weren't in 1929. And the principal reason is that, just as they were in the period leading up to the Great Depression, economic fundamentalists have been in charge.
It's one of the fascinating coincidences of history that Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776, the year of the United States's birth. America then was seen as an unspoiled paradise, a "New Eden" where humans could return to what they imagined was a "state of nature." There was talk of an "American Adam" who roamed freely in this land where the "natural economy" of the free market that Smith postulated could operate, well, freely.
Almost from the start, many Americans have operated on the assumption that this American Adam's surname was Smith, and have taken the market as their economic god. The great irony, though, is that a new type of economy was being born in Great Britain at the same time. And industrialism would remove men and women from a state of nature more completely than ever before.
By the 1920s, the industrial economy was mass-producing at a rapid rate, which meant that its survival required the rise of mass consumption. Trying to play by the rules of Adam Smith's pin factory at a time when Henry Ford's massive River Rouge complex was closer to the true nature of the economy was a prescription for disaster. Such huge economic actors don't behave according to the "natural" laws of the simple economy of Smith's day; under modern circumstances, a more visible hand is needed to guide the market onto a course that benefits all. Yet both economists and political leaders of the time maintained their faith in market-god fundamentalism.
The task facing business in the 1920s was replacing the work ethic with a consumption ethic. If the American people were to be made into insatiable consumers, traditional values would have to be undermined and reversed. The means of accomplishing this? Advertising. The Mad Men of the '20s made over the traditional wisdom of "Waste not, want not" into the essential message of the consumption economy: "Waste and want." Bruce Barton of Barton, Durstine & Osborn, for instance, famously portrayed Jesus as the ultimate advertiser and businessman in his 1925 bestseller, "The Man Nobody Knows."
But wanting isn't enough. If the masses are going to be able to buy what they've been persuaded to want, they have to receive a sufficient share of total income to do so. Yet the opposite happened in the '20s. President Calvin Coolidge and his Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, drastically reduced taxes on the highest incomes. Meanwhile, anti-union policies produced less income for worker-consumers. The share of total national income going to the very richest grew enormously, peaking in 1928, just months before the economy began to contract in the summer of 1929. The top 10 percent of American earners then were getting 46 percent of total income.
Providing large tax cuts for the richest was precisely the wrong policy. To stimulate consumption, taxes should have been cut at lower income levels. Cutting taxes on higher incomes stimulated speculation instead. Sound familiar?...