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I can't believe we're worse off financially than during the great economic depression. Do we have numbers from back then? Are people today more apt to become

by mc32 3y ago

I can't believe we're worse off financially than during the great economic depression. Do we have numbers from back then? Are people today more apt to become depressed, are we conditioned to get more depressed, or is diagnosis better, or are we classifying and identifying more things as depression? Back then we had no social services, no soup kitchens, "food stamps" etc. There was no governmental help (other than job creation such as WPA). There may have been more social cohesion and more reliance on the (extended) family though.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Anecdote, not data: My father was born into the Great Depression. He said you couldn't buy thread - not because you didn't have money to buy it, but because all the thread factories had closed, and there was literally no thread to buy. Data: The US unemployment rate peaked at 25%. So, yeah, things were (much) worse during the Great Depression. I have no data on whether people were depressed then (though the final lines of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, his message to the country, were "Buck up" and then "Smile"). But I know that it left deep marks on people. When there just wasn't stuff, and there was no promise that there ever would be stuff, it affected people for decades after it was over.