The Social Consequences of a Prolonged Downturn
Drake Bennett has a thought-provoking piece in the Boston Globe about what a real depression would look like in the contemporary United States. The key thing to remember, as he points out, is that even substantial shrinkage in American GDP and a prolonged period of high unemployment wouldn’t actually bring back the specific conditions that existed in the 1930s — the United States in 2007 was a much richer country than the United States in 1929, so a big fall-off still leaves in a very different situation.
One particular thing that I think is worth drilling into, though, is the potentially large social implications of a prolonged downturn. People don’t think about this much, but there was a kind of false dawn of feminist progress in the 1920s. The teens were an important time of women’s suffrage activism and the 19th amendment came into law in 1920. In the twenties you had a lot of women participating the workforce, and various shifts in sexual mores. Then came the Depression, which threw huge numbers of people out of work and led to a big drop in the divorce rate as people were too economically insecure to split up. The New Dealers had a lot of maternalist ideas, and the policies they put in place in the 1930s were specifically designed to reconstruct the economy on around an ideal of stay-at-home moms. And that’s what you saw emerge when the country emerged form the Depression during and after the war.
Flash forward to 2008 and Americans work an unusually large number of hours per day and of days per year. And part of the story here is that a lot of the American economy is dedicated to facilitating long working hours for busy people — you have various forms of child care, prepared foods, paid housework, etc. One thing you could expect to see in a downturn would be families working fewer hours and having less money and, consequently, paying for fewer of these services and doing more of it themselves. That could, however, play out in a bunch of different ways. You could imagine a world in which the disemployment spreads around at random and you have an equal number of two-earner households in which the man loses his job or is forced into part-time work as you have two-earner households in which this happens to the woman. In that case, you can expect to see further evolution of gender norms in which newly unemployed or underemployed men wind up shouldering more of the burden for cooking, cleaning, and childcare as their newly-poorer households need to cut back on expenditures. Alternatively, you could see a scenario in which the reduction in total hours worked comes disproportionately in the form of women doing less paid work. Then you’d see existing imbalances in the amount of domestic labor exacerbated and existing, but fading, gender norms further re-enforced.
Of course hopefully we’ll avoid a prolonged downturn and none of this will come up.
57 Responses to “The Social Consequences of a Prolonged Downturn”
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November 18th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
The New Dealers had a lot of maternalist ideas, and the policies they put in place in the 1930s were specifically designed to reconstruct the economy on around an ideal of stay-at-home moms. And that’s what you saw emerge when the country emerged form the Depression during and after the war.
Um, Rosie the Riveter, anyone? In the long run, federal orders banning discrimination against women in the workplace during World War II were far more important to feminism than flappers. For every Clara Bow, you had two women in the countryside being saved by Billy Sunday.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I hold that capitalist economic structures, and the associated fabulous increases in wealth and freedom for the middle classes in developed countries that they have led to, have corrupted human virtue, led us to abandon our true natures, and injured relations between people and each other, the state, God, and the natural world. So I hope that the collapse of capitalism will be a very good thing, since it will sweep away all the more hideous ideas of the modern world. My hope for the future is that natural resource shortages will succeed in killing modernity before modernity succeeds in killing human virtue.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Did you take Stilgoe’s VES classes? This is a theme of his - that the social upheavals of the 20th century and the sexual modernization are as much a creation of the automobile as advances in birth control. And that the 60s would have happened in the 30s had not the Great Depression come along.
The question is how many good jobs can an economy support? And if there aren’t enough for both men and women there will be a big push for women to get out of the workplace.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I hold that capitalist economic structures, and the associated fabulous increases in wealth and freedom for the middle classes in developed countries that they have led to, have corrupted human virtue
See the current movie, Rachel Getting Married. I think one of the subtexts to the movie is that the super-abundance of America drives people nuts.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
You’re an immoral monster, Hector. So since capitalism produced a monster like you, I guess you have half a point about capitalism’s destruction of virtue.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
The American people handled the Depression extremely well. For example, high school graduation rates continued the sharp increase first seen in the 1920s. There was a feeling that kids shouldn’t be taking jobs from grown men, so kids were encouraged to get their high school diplomas, building the nation’s human capital. There was a lot of technological progress even if it couldn’t all be mass marketed yet.
I doubt if we would use a downturn so productively.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
In the 1920-30s, a lot more people lived on farms or in small towns didn’t they? So if people lost jobs, there was stuff they could do at home to be productive, like grow veggies, raise chickens, etc.
Can people at home in the suburbs be as productive these days? Or will people be forced to take any kind of job (fast food, ditch digging, etc.).
I don’t know.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I think we’ve been in a slow-moving recession since Bush took over. We traveled abroad this summer, and the shocking discovery was how shoddy America has come to look compared to places like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. Rostok (formerly under the boot heel of Communism) was a particular surprise. I had expected Rostok to resemble the kind of grunge we’d seen in St. Petersburg since Rostok has high unemployment due to the collapse of its shipbuilding industry, but downturns apparently aren’t occasions for punitive economics in Germany. The rest of the world hasn’t been idle for the last 8 years, and we’ve just been treading water.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
We probably cannot avoid a prolonged downturn as the economic ticks bred by the generation or so of conservative political dominance have dug in so deep that they will take some time to remove. But what is really worrisome is that modern democratic stability seems to require a steady improvement in the living standards of a broad array of the electorate. This already hasn’t been the case since the 70s, and now things will get much worse before they get better.
We have done the right thing for now and put the Dems into power, but they actually have to exercise that power and use it, among other things, to cut the heads off of the bizzarely wealthy, those who did obscenely well as of late. If they are perceived to continue to flourish while the rest of the country slips into desperation and poverty, things will go very badly indeed.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
What if most of the reduction in employment came from all the super-full-time workers cutting back to 30-40 hour weeks? They’d have more leisure time and could save money on some of those expensive conveniences to cushion the financial loss, and fewer people would be completely unemployed and unable to support themselves.
But this won’t happen unless government takes a strong role in making it happen, because an employer would rather have two employees working 60 hour weeks than three working 40.
P.S. My first reaction to Hector was to tell him to go die of cholera or smallpox, but the modern society he hates has made that impossible. Also, what DTM said.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Re: Of course, I am one who finds it convincing that the rural poor have throughout history voted convincingly with their feet on this issue by moving to industrialized cities.
Ah, the ancient talking point about urbanization, “city air makes one free”. You don’t mention, of course, that those rural poor tended to migrate only after their lands had been taken from them by the rapacity of the rich and powerful. Modernization has rarely happened by popular consent- not in Henry VIII’s England, not in pre-revolutionary France, not in Stalin’s Russia, and not in South American countries during the mid-20th century. Not even here in America: our modern society, the first great test case of the Englightenment, was built on rivers and rivers of American-Indian blood.
Look, modern society clearly has its advantages, in the field of technology. I’m as big a fan of antibiotics, chemical fertilizer, and so forth as the next man. What I’m not so fond of is the damage that modernity has done to our sense of an organic, pre-existing natural and social order. Surely there has to be a way to combine what is good about modernity with what was good from the past.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
This generation of spoiled entitled brats, unaccustomed to hardship, would never survive a real depression.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
It’s worth pointing out that the Depression was also the death knell for Prohibition, and FDR openly campaigned as a proponent of repealing the 18th Amendment. The Depression also greatly weakened the political clout of Christian fundamentalism, which had flared up around the Scopes trial in 1924.
So, the economic crisis of the 1930s was a mixed bag for the big culture war issues of the day. I would argue that any economic crisis tends to push cultural issues to the margins and focus political debate around bread and butter issues. Given the nature of the contemporary political coalitions, I don’t see how the economic crisis can benefit cultural conservatives in any way, shape, or form.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
One change I’ve noticed is people that would never be caught dead in a Walmart, Costco or other similar store suddenly find themselves, for the first time, shopping in their aisles. A large number of people that were marginally affluent yet now in a bit of a jam will probably become regular patrons of discount stores. If you find yourself in this dilemma try this:
http://thewvsr.com/TheWVSRgame.htm
November 18th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
This is interesting to me since I in fact am a stay at home dad. I blogged about it, if anyone’s interested. http://apshort.blogspot.com
November 18th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
What if most of the reduction in employment came from all the super-full-time workers cutting back to 30-40 hour weeks?
Chris, I suspect a large number of the people who claim to work more than 40 hours per week do not get paid by the hour. And if they reduce the amount of time (productivity) they deliver, they’ll likely be replaced by someone else who will gladly work super-full-time for the same salary.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Hector,
I think your problem is that the ideal world you envision, would only be ideal for you.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Hector: Renaissance Faire is not an accurate historical reconstruction, you silly pretend crusader.
If Matt wants to look at long term economic decline as a social phenomenon, he can look at the regional declines in the US and UK (the latter summed up by the whole ‘Thatcher’s Children’ thing).
What’s very different about now and the 1930s is the vulnerability of an expanded professional middle-class. Nan Mooney’s book is instructive in that regard: the people who were told to go to college and get a degree for a white-collar career are even more fucked than the groups usually affected by economic declines.
And I think that duBois is right: there’s been a sense of stagnation over the Bush years, and that’s probably going to continue at least until 2010.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Imprecise analogy. Once upon a time, women were getting out of the house because they could afford to. Increasingly, families have two wage earners because they can’t afford not to. If there are fewer jobs to go around, it’ll knock a lot of people out of the work force. It will bring in a further loss of optimism, which may have conservative implications simply in that people think less of the possibilities that human beings can have. But it won’t change the underlying insecurity that now has more men than in the 1920s wanting women to work.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
It’s a mixed bag. The 30s actually saw a huge upswing in tolerance of abortion, which meant that it was mostly legal in the practical sense. (The exception, as you can imagine, was for black abortion providers, who were still persecuted.) Recriminalization in the 40s and 50s was part of the backlash that got so severe in terms of dismemberment and death of women that it provoked the legalization of the 60s.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Of course, I am one who finds it convincing that the rural poor have throughout history voted convincingly with their feet on this issue by moving to industrialized cities.
To be fair, this usually turned out to be a bad deal: the death rate in cities during the industrial revolution was very high due to disease, and poor farmers who figure that selling their land and moving to the cities will result in better economic opportunities end up frequently disappointed.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
JohnH:
Yes and no. In a household where one parent earns much more than the other, it can often make economic sense for one parent to stay home, in part because it positively impact the job satisfaction and job performance of the still-working partner, and in part just because there is a lot of “quality of life” stuff that’s cheaper to provide yourself if you have the skills (cooking being the key example.)
Right now there are a large number of households where the woman earns a great deal more than the man but both work because a man staying home is, for cultural and social reasons, still a hard decision for most families to make.
There is some possibility, in my view, that economic distress (particularly low-earning men losing their jobs) may lead to an increase in stay-at-home fatherhood. That may be wishful thinking on my part, since it would vastly improve my social life.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
If we’re talking specifically about gender roles, then there are two historical phenomena to look out for. For men, it’s the indignity of unemployment, regardless of the sector. The guy who leaves home each morning after he’s been laid off because he doesn’t want to break the bad news is not the stuff of fiction. For women, it’s a general squeeze down the ladder of gendered positions: get laid off from an office job, end up in retail or food service or cleaning toilets.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
What I find hard to predict is how government and the financial industry would handled the housing mess that would result from massive unemployment. Would the gov’t build lots of low-cost housing to handle all the people who had lost their homes? Would mortgage-holders really want to foreclose and hold onto massive numbers of unoccupied, and expensive to maintain houses in suburban ghost towns? Would they foreclose, but then rent the houses back? Would government step in with a plan to keep people in their houses and keep communities together in the face of the unemployment and massive defaults? Would the government find ways of bring work and investment out to communities, or would it encourage people to migrate into urban slums to work shitty jobs or no jobs, the way they do in third world megacities around the world?
November 18th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I realize the post was talking about gender in the 1920’s. However, one can easily be talking about race. Race riots and ethnic cleansing by white people are a typical occurence during deep recessions.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Only 25% of American households consist of 2 adults with minor children. For the rest, there is no option to stay home and not earn income.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
The teens were an important time of women’s suffrage activism and the 19th amendment came into law in 1920. In the twenties you had a lot of women participating the workforce, and various shifts in sexual mores.
In general, the sufferagettes and the flappers were on opposite sides of social issues. The former were *very* moralistic and gave us stuff like prohibition, the latter of course flouted such laws.
And as other’s have said, from the dawn of the industrial revolution to the 1950’s, having a woman *not* work outside the home was in general a prerogative of only the rich and the upper middle class.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Typically, the freedom that means most to Miss Marcotte is the freedom to kill her children. One shouldn’t be surprised. Movements that invoke some kind of unlimited ‘freedom’, unconstrained by any natural or moral order- whether it be the freedom of Manifest Destiny, the freedom of the Boers, or the freedom of capitalists- always involves someone who pays the cost, in blood.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
I think there is a lot of “fluff” in how we spend our money. The amount of eating out that families do is the tip of the iceberg. You can easily get by with $40K of vehicles (Dodge caravan/Escort wagon) instead of $80K (Cadillac Escalade/Toyota Avalon). The $40K difference = one kids college education if invested properly. Super video max cable TV package? I get basic cable for free with my high speed internet and digital phone package. I can check out hundreds of movies for free from my local library. The amount of clothes and shoes that people think they need is obscene. I grew up with three pairs of shoes; work boots, school/church shoes and gym shoes (Chuck Taylors). I think we are all busting our asses for a lot of stuff that ends up in the basement, attic or a garage sale. Consumerism is a sickness. Unfortunately, a large part of our economy is tied to everyone going out and spending all their money.
I bought a bunch of food for our local assistance center last week and was amazed at how cheap you can get by. I could by spaghetti and meat sauce for 6 for $1.60. Spaghetti would get old fast but baked sweet potatoes, baked chicken, rice from a rice cooker etc. could stretch out a budget. I haven’t even mentioned the college staple of Ramen fleshed out with Spam. My wife grew up on rice and beans and turned out ok.
A family of four living in a 4,000 square foot MacMansion has a lot of room for assorted relatives to move in and help pay rent. Not my preferred solution but it is better than letting your relatives sleep under a bridge.
November 18th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
One thing lacking from that article was was any sense of what publci policy changes a new Depression would induce, and they would surely be major ones. For one thing government-funded universal healthcare would become politically irrestible and would even be rushed into operation as hospitals and doctors started going bankrupt due to lack of payment from legions of uninsured.
But as for getting women out of the workforce, I don’t see that. There are too many single (and divorced women) and too many women who are the braedwinnesr in their families now– and large scale job loss would increase those numbers. We might try to institute earlier retirement and more colleg for more people, but the former at least might be difficult given Social Security’s budgetary constraints.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Wow — it must be a dull day if everyone’s engaging Hector. Really, people — anyone who believes in that silly fantasy of “an organic, pre-existing natural and social order” isn’t reachable.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Or you could see what has happened in my household: male partner laid off, freelances part-time; I work full-time (from home) and do the lion’s share of the housework.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Actually was is typical during recessions - at least very deep ones - are often violent actions toward those perceived to have been successful during or before the social downturn. Rwanda, Cambodia, even the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany are some of the most obvious examples
December 16th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
They are a quaint, 19th-century invention, originally designed to get someone from point A to point B. Today there are much faster, far less labor-intensive modes of transportation. And yet hopeful children still beg for them for Christmas,
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