Tag Archives: depression

10 Shots From an Incredible New Trove of Depression and World War II Photos

by Tabitha92B Posted on September 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Between 1935 and 1944, the Farm Security Agency-Office of War Information dispatched photographers to all ends of the United States to document life during hard times and wartime. Many of their photos, taken by now-legendary photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, have become iconic representations of America during the Depression and World War II. But most of the hundreds of thousands of negatives, collected in what became known as “The File,” were never seen by the public.

No longer. Yale University’s Photogrammar has just made more than 170,000 of the FSA-OWI photos easily accessible online. You can browse and search by photographer, location, date, or subject. Even a quick visit to the site turns up surprising, searing photos that feel like they should be in history books, on the cover of old LIFE magazines, or hanging in art galleries. Here are 10 that caught my eye as I looked through the massive collection—including one taken less than a block from the Mother Jones office in downtown San Francisco.

Riveter at a military aircraft factory. Fort Worth, Texas, 1942 Howard R. Hollem/FSA-OWI Collection

“Wife of Negro sharecropper.” Lee County, Mississippi, 1935 Arthur Rothstein/FSA-OWI Collection

“Backyard slum scene” with the US Capitol in the background. Washington, D.C., 1935 Carl Mydans/FSA-OWI Collection

Deserted mining town. Zinc, Arkansas, 1935 Ben Shahn/FSA-OWI Collection

“Longshoremen’s lunch hour.” San Francisco, California, 1937 Dorothea Lange/FSA-OWI Collection

Japanese-American women interned at the Tule Lake Relocation Center. Newell, California, 1942 Unknown photographer/FSA-OWI Collection

“A shore patrol man and military policeman at the Greyhound bus terminal.” Indianapolis, Indiana, 1943. Esther Bubley/FSA-OWI Collection

A third-grader plays Adolf Hitler in a school production. New York, New York, 1942. Marjory Collins/FSA-OWI Collection

Army tank driver. Ft. Knox, Kentucky, 1942. Alfred T. Palmer/FSA-OWI Collection

“Monday morning, December 8, 1941, after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” San Francisco, California, 1941 John Collier/FSA-OWI Collection

The same intersection today Dave Gilson/Mother Jones

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10 Shots From an Incredible New Trove of Depression and World War II Photos

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Is Rising Wealth Concentration Really an Inexorable Trend?

by CALKelseyngmd Posted on April 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jared Bernstein tries to explain today why Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has become such a cultural phenomenon. The answer, he says, is a growing sense that “something is structurally wrong with both the economy and the practice of economics”:

Between financial bubbles and busts, the macro-management seems inept and even once the economy starts growing again, the benefits accrue narrowly to the top. In part, it’s a sense that “the fix is in” when it comes to the distribution of growth.

….Against that backdrop, we get a long, carefully researched tome with literally centuries of data across numerous countries showing a pretty inexorable trend of income and wealth concentration and providing a cogent analysis of the mechanics behind those dynamics. At the same time, though Piketty clearly knows his economics, he is quick to dismiss a knee-jerk elevation of assumption-based economic analysis that has led so many policy makers astray in recent years. Moreover, he is not a known partisan who can quickly be compartmentalized and thus distractingly plugged into the existing debate that tends to generate more heat than light.

This puzzles me, because it’s precisely what Piketty doesn’t show. Instead, what he shows is this:

For 1800 years, returns on capital were far higher than growth rates, but wealth concentration didn’t budge over the long term.
In the 19th century, an era marked by relative peace and the explosive growth of the Industrial Revolution, wealth concentration increased steadily, peaking in the Gilded Era.
In the 20th century, following the devastation of the Great Depression and World War II, wealth concentration declined.
Starting around 1980, wealth concentration started increasing again.

Now, Piketty does present good evidence to suggest that the post-1980 trend of rising wealth concentration is likely to continue. With the increasing financialization of the global economy, he believes that returns to capital will stay high; that low inheritance taxes will allow great fortunes to perpetuate themselves; and that sluggish economic growth will limit middle-class earnings gains. This dynamic will take a while to play out fully, but a century from now the relentless forces of r > g will produce a super-rich class with a far, far greater share of global wealth than they have today.

Now, Piketty may be right about this. I think the case he makes is a strong one. Nevertheless, the lesson I took from the book is that wealth concentration is highly variable. It bounces up and down over the centuries, increasing in certain places and eras, and then dissipating via war, famine, dissolute sons, lavish spending, expropriation, dispersion among heirs, disruptive technologies, and so forth. Right now, wealth concentration has been rising for a few decades, and that’s something worth grappling with for all the reasons Piketty lays out.

And yet, I can’t help thinking that on the time scales Piketty writes about, a few decades is a historical blip. There’s simply no “inexorable trend” visible in his data. Instead, there’s a highly speculative projection that the short-term trend of the past 30 years will continue for another century.

It might, but I wish more people would pay attention to just how speculative this is. Perhaps you think that war and expropriation and famine are no longer big threats to concentrated wealth. Perhaps dissolute sons all now have professional money managers and are less likely to squander huge family fortunes. Maybe middle-class wage growth is doomed to stagnate in a world dominated more and more by a highly-educated class managing complex technologies. Maybe disruptive technologies have gotten to the point where they benefit only the 1 percent, shifting wealth from one faction to another but never trickling down to the middle class. (I happen to find this scenario extremely likely, believing as I do that automation is likely to increase returns to capital and depress middle-class wage growth.)

I understand that I’m playing devil’s advocate here, especially since growing income inequality is a topic I write about frequently and I personally find it likely that Piketty is basically right. But I also recognize that his projections—of growth, of returns to capital, and of the persistence of dynastic wealth—are highly speculative. The past 30 years are hardly unique in human history, and previous waves of wealth concentration have not, in fact, lasted forever. I guess I wish that more people would at least acknowledge this. I feel like we should all be spending more time extending and refining Piketty’s results instead of simply assuming that he’s made a slam dunk case for the future of the economy.

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Is Rising Wealth Concentration Really an Inexorable Trend?

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My Kinda Sorta Non-Review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”

by LYZPhiltyouwwfc Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m having a hard time finishing Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Is this because it’s a long, dense tome? Not really, though that doesn’t help. Is it because he has nothing interesting to say? Not at all. Capital presents a very provocative thesis. Nevertheless, I started it once, put it down, finally picked it up again, and still haven’t finished it.

So what’s the problem? It’s pretty simple: Piketty’s provocative thesis is extremely elementary and he makes it right in the introduction. Here it is in a nutshell:

Over the long run, ordinary labor income grows at about the same rate as the broader economy. That’s about 2-3 percent per year these days. Capital, however, tends to produce real returns of 4-5 percent. This means that over the course of, say, 50 years, labor income will increase about 3x while capital stocks will increase about 9x. That in turn means that income from capital will also increase 9x. And since rich people have by far the bulk of all capital income, income inequality inevitably grows forever unless something stops it.

The shorthand for this is r > g. That is, r (the return on capital) is historically greater than g (economic growth), which means that rich people with capital will always see their incomes grow faster than ordinary wage slaves. The rest of the book is a lengthy succession of charts and tables demonstrating that, historically, r really is greater than g. Since I was pretty easily persuaded of this, I had a hard time slogging through all the details.

In any case, the historical data isn’t really why anyone other than specialists cares about this book. After all, the world has been ticking along for centuries, and somehow the rich have not, in fact, accumulated 99.9 percent of the world’s income despite more than a thousand years of r being greater than g. Why? The simple answer, I gather, is war. This is the great leveler. The rich get richer for a while, but then they lose it all during periods of war, and the cycle starts all over. That’s what happened in the 20th century: The rich were obscenely wealthy early on, and then came World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. That wiped out lots of wealth, and the postwar rebuilding era was one of those rare eras when r was actually greater than g. (See chart on right.) So labor did relatively well for a few decades. This ended in the 80s, when the old historical pattern reasserted itself.

This brings us to the question we really care about: Now that we’ve reverted to a more ordinary r > g world, will this continue? I started skipping through the book to find Piketty’s answer, and I was disappointed at what I found. After some preliminary throat clearing to get clear on some details (the nature of private savings, what components should be counted in capital accounts, etc.), we get….nothing.

Basically, Piketty says that historically r has been greater than g, and there’s no reason to think this won’t be true in the future. That’s really about it. Oh, he addresses some technical issues, like the fact that a glut of capital should reduce the return on capital, but basically that’s his argument. In the past r has almost always been greater than g, and we’d be foolish to think that’s likely to change.

Don’t get me wrong: Piketty may be right. Hell, he probably is right. But while the details are of keen interest to specialists and practitioners, the gist of his argument is simply that the future will probably look like the past. That’s certainly plausible, but I’m frankly having a hard time plowing through a ton of background material in support of such a simple thesis.

I’m not sure why I’m fessing up to all this. I’m really doing nothing except admitting that I’m not sure what everyone else sees that I don’t. As a data-gathering exercise, this book is unquestionably a tour de force, and I’m truly not trying to slight Piketty’s seminal achievement here. But as a layman’s guide to the future (and it’s explicitly written for a lay audience), Capital has little to say except that current trends will probably continue. It might be unreasonable to expect more, since obviously no one can predict the future, but I guess I expected more anyway. Is r > g really a monocausal explanation for the evolution of the entire world economy? Is it possible that r might decline for structural reasons in the future? Or that g might increase thanks to automation? Or that other factors might come into play? That seems at least worth addressing in some depth.

In any case, this is Piketty’s story. Capital grows faster than labor income. Rich people have most of the capital. Therefore rich people get richer faster than ordinary wage earners and income inequality inexorably rises. If we don’t like that, we’ll have to do something about it. Piketty thinks the only answer is a global wealth tax, which he admits is a political nonstarter. Dean Baker has some other ideas here. Or maybe war will once again take care of things. Or maybe the rise of smart robots will make things even worse than Piketty ever imagined. I guess we’ll all know in another 50 years or so.

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My Kinda Sorta Non-Review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”

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Look What’s Behind the Recent Slowdown in Global Warming

by Lionel4334 Posted on November 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Climate deniers like to point to the so-called global warming “hiatus” as evidence that humans aren’t changing the climate. But according a new study, exactly the opposite is true: The recent slowdown in global temperature increases is partially the result of one of the few successful international crackdowns on greenhouse gases.

Back in 1988, more than 40 countries, including the US, signed the Montreal Protocol, an agreement to phase out the use of ozone-depleting gases like chlorofluorocarbons (today the Protocol has nearly 200 signatories). According to the EPA, CFC emissions are down 90 percent since the Protocol, a drop that the agency calls “one of the largest reductions to date in global greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s a blessing for the ozone layer, but also for the climate. CFCs are a potent heat-trapping gas, and a new analysis published today in Nature Geoscience finds that slashing them has been a major driver of the much-discussed slowdown in global warming.

Without the Protocol, environmental economist Francisco Estrada of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México reports, global temperatures today would be about a tenth of a degree Celsius higher than they are. That’s roughly an eighth of the total warming documented since 1880.

Estrada and his co-authors compared global temperature and greenhouse gas emissions records over the last century and found that breaks in the steady upward march of both coincided closely. At times when emissions leveled off or dropped, like during the Great Depression, the trend was mirrored in temperatures; likewise for when emissions climbed.

“With these breaks, what’s interesting is that when they’re common that’s pretty indicative of causation,” said Pierre Perron, a Boston University economist who developed the custom-built statistical tests used in the study.

The findings put a new spin on investigation into the cause of the recent “hiatus.” Scientists have suggested that several temporary natural phenomena, including the deep ocean sucking up more heat, are responsible for this slowdown. Estrada says his findings show that a recent reduction in heat-trapping CFCs as a result of the Montreal Protocol has also played an important role.

“Paradoxically, the recent decrease in warming, presented by global warming skeptics as proof that humankind cannot affect the climate system, is shown to have a direct human origin,” Estrada writes in the study.

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Look What’s Behind the Recent Slowdown in Global Warming

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