It has come to my attention that The Great Depression was a long time ago. A long, long, long time ago and I don't mean it has been a lot of years since it started, or ended.
How long ago was it? Women has been voting for less than ten years when it started. There were only 120 million Americans when it started and 24% of African Americans, as well as 6% of all Americans, couldn't read the newspapers with the latest news because they were illiterate.
When The Great Depression started, the telegraph was the fastest way to get information from point A to point B, telephone service was still relatively rare and very expensive. There was no television, movies were silent, and radio was the top of the entertainment charts. Most major cities had three, four or five newspapers and they were printed every morning, and every afternoon as well.
When The Great Depression heated up, homes were not air-conditioned. Outhouses outnumbered inhouses. Electricity was still rare, especially in Hawaii and Alaska for a lot of reasons, like they weren't states yet.
Major league sports were in their infancy, the NHL was less than a decade old and was just the original six. Boston had two major league baseball teams and the Braves were better though Babe Ruth had just pitched the Red Sox to the World Series a few years before.
When The Great Depression started, Kings still ruled Europe and Emperors were man-gods in Asia. Commercial aviation really wasn't even starting yet, and trains were how you got coast to coast, eventually.
No one had heard of Adolf Hitler, or Stalin and John F Kennedy was a young boy in Brookline, Mass.
For the obvious, there are no cell phones, faxes, computers, internet, blackberries, ipods, hybrid cars, but then again, there weren't any of those save computers twenty years ago.
When The Great Depression started, America was a relatively poor, agrarian country. People were hard-working true, we had helped win World War I, but it wasn't the country, the culture or the land we know today.
I just point this out because economists, a breed who love numbers, but are less willing or less able perhaps, to understand people, are looking back at something that happened a long time ago in a place very different from today, for clues about what to do now, with economy and stimulus plans and government intervention.
Is it possible that what was the path then, is the path now? Something tells me no. Something tells me that the world is so different, history is valuable but not as a guide. Something tells me that this is not more of the same but is something very different.
It's a new world. We need new thinking. Dusting off the playbook from The Great Depression is like building a modern ship with the plans of the Titanic, which had sunk just a few years before everything went south by the way.