How It Will Be Different, How It Will Be The Same

The other day, helping my brother move out of his house and into a rental, I realized one way in which the next depression will be different from the last:

We will have more things. People with cell phones and X-boxes will still find themselves with "nothing". Though they swim in a sea of goods and utilize technology unimaginable just thirty years ago, they will have no income, no way to pay for all the things that they took for granted. People, for the first time in large groups, will notice that they bleed money that is drunk up by various vampire-like entities, such as credit card corporations and cable companies.

In many cases, money goes to things that we all could agree are not necessary. Those will be the easiset to do without. One doesn't need membership in a gym in order to survive. But what about electric bills, telephone bills, internet bills? Ten years ago, many would have said that the internet was not necessary to survive. But how many people conduct business via the internet? What will your boss say if you don't get his e-mails?

Will people find themselves skipping meals in order to pay their broadband bill? It sounds ridiculous, perhaps, but one has to survive in the economy where one exists.

This depression will be different than the last one, just as the last was different than previous hard times in the country. John Steinbeck has a wonderful passage in The Grapes of Wrath about road trips, the importance of good tires and how a breakdown could simply be the end of life for a poor family seeking work. Yet, fifty years previous to the Great Depression, no one would have thought automobile tires (not yet invented!) as necessary for survival.

This time around, we will not lack for shoes and clothes, as people do in the 1930's newspaper articles I have reproduced here. Clothing abounds in people's garages and closets. But hunger, ever the spectre that terrified our ancestors and which has only recently been pushed out of sight for those in the advanced nations, may reappear to haunt us again.