I don't think assessing data during the Great Depression is meaningful. It's in the same way that I wouldn't look at data from the ever-recurring crashes/bubble

I don't think assessing data during the Great Depression is meaningful. It's in the same way that I wouldn't look at data from the ever-recurring crashes/bubbles in modern times to critique things, outside of the frequency of those events themselves. But, that said, your overall point is perfectly reasonable, but does something the other poster also did in that you're taking present times and retroactively applying it, when that's not really accurate. For instance this [1] is from the 1910 census. There were about 3.95 million farms operated by owners and about 66% of them were owned with no mortgage. Page 8 / table 7. And that was at a record high for the time owing to the increasing trend of becoming a debt riddled society. Go back not that much further in history and near to 100% of farmers owned their farmers, free and clear. Modern times incentivizes going deep into debt, past times disincentivized it. I think it's becoming fairly clear that a debt driven society is unsustainable, largely because it requires infinite exponential growth to sustain itself. We swapped to a completely free floating currency only in 1971, after defaulting on our debt obligations under Bretton Woods. And that's also when the digitization expansion started taking off, which drove decades of unimaginable growth, making that infinite exponential growth seem briefly viable. But now that growth phase is slowing. We need either LLMs or space to trigger another exponential growth phase. If they don't, then there's going to be rough seas ahead. [1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/bulletins/agriculture/384-agriculture-tenure-mortgage-indebtedness-color-nativity-of-farmers-size-of-farms.pdf https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/...