Abstract
Modern youth is prone to melancholy; like Rachel, it refuses to be comforted.… Economic forces … are by nature malevolent. Every labour-saving device has led to a decline of skill and to an increase of unemployment.… When prices rise, wages lag behind and the standard of living falls.… If prices fall, … this must result in a depression of trade and industry, a fall of wages and unemployment; so that once again the standard of life of the workers falls. (T.S. Ashton, 1951.)
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3 Prosperity 1922–9
1. André Siegfried, America Comes of Age (1927) p. 35.
2. Paul H. Douglas, Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926 (1930).
3. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker 1920–1933 (1960) p. 65.
4. Siegfried, America Comes of Age (1927). Juxtaposition of passages from ch. xi, ‘Labour and the Standard of Living’ and ch. XXVII, ‘European vs American Civilization’.
5. Charles N. Glaab, ‘Metropolis and Suburb: The Changing American City’, in Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America: the 1920s, ed. J. Braeman et al. (1968).
6. Bernard Fay, cited in Glaab, ibid.
7. Walter Lippmann, The Atlantic Monthly, 139 (Feb. 1927), cited in Politics of the Nineteen Twenties, ed. G. L. Shover (1970).
8. The problems are analysed in M. Leven and K. R. Wright, The Income Structure of the United States (Brookings Institution, 1938).
9. For a more pessimistic view, see Bernstein, The Lean Years. The figures quoted in the text are from Historical Statistics of the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960).
10. See Bernstein, The Lean Years, pp. 66 if.
11. M. Leven, H. G. Moulton and C. Warburton, America’s Capacity to Consume (Brookings Institution, 1934) p. 158.
12. Ibid. pp. 103’4. Estimates based on income-tax returns.
13. See Albert V. Romasco, The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation and The Depression (1965).
14. Bernstein, The Lean Years, p. 59.
15. For further analysis, see in particular Alfred D. Chandler, Strategy and Structure (1962).
16. E.g. F. L. Allen, Only Yesterday (1931); J. K. Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (1955).
17. Malcolm Falkus, ‘U.S. Economic Policy and the “Dollar Gap” of the 1920s’, Economic History Review (Nov. 1971).
18. E. R. Wicker, ‘Federal Reserve Monetary Policy 1922’33: A Reinterpretation’, Journal of Political Economy (1965), and Federal Reserve Monetary Policy, 1917–1933 (1966).
19. For a contemporary analysis of the problems of agriculture and the shortcomings of the proposals, see Rexford Tugwell, ‘Reflections on Farm Relief’, Political Science (Quarterly (Dec. 1928), reprinted in Politics of the Nineteen Twenties, ed. Shover.
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© 1985 Jim Potter
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Potter, J. (1985). Prosperity 1922–9. In: The American Economy Between the World Wars. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08318-3_4
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