Drake Bennett

Drake Bennett – Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com
E-mail drbennett@globe.com

 
… What sets a depression apart, most economists would agree, are duration and the scale of joblessness. To be worthy of the name, a depression needs to be more than a few years long – far longer than the eight-month average of our recent recessions – and it needs to put a lot of people out of work…
“You could have a sort of desurburbanization phenomenon,” suggests Michael Bernstein, a historian of the Depression and the provost of Tulane University.

… The migrations kicked off by a depression wouldn’t be in one direction, but a tangle of demographic crosscurrents: young families moving back to their hometowns to live with the grandparents when they can no longer afford to live on their own, parents moving in with their adult children when their postretirement fixed incomes can no longer support them…

… If we look closely, however, we might see more former lawyers wearing knockoffs, doing their back-to-school shopping at Target or Wal-Mart rather than Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch…   

… And while very few would starve, a depression would change how we eat…
… In a modern depression, the swelling ranks of the unemployed would likely change the landscape of the country, uprooting people who would rather stay where they are and trapping people who want to move…

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