The Forgotten Man
It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. These are the people at the heart of Amity Shlaes's insightful and inspiring history of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century.In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. Some of those figures were well known, at least in their day—Andrew Mellon, the Greenspan of the era; Sam Insull of Chicago, hounded as a scapegoat. But there were also unknowns: the Schechters, a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal; Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the name of showing that small communities could help themselves; and Father Divine, a black charismatic who steered his thousands of followers through the Depression by preaching a Gospel of Plenty.Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors.
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What Hacker News says
- How can you reconcile cheap food being unavailable food? Doesn't make any sense.
I know what food insecurity is, hunger is, and famine. Characterizing the Dust Bowl as famine is hyperbole.
As for high school history books, sorry, but LOL. They're written by committees and mostly driven by popular politics.
A novel simply isn't good enough to be a cite. Here are some of the falsehoods from TGoW:
https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-abou...
Here's a cite for you: "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes. A history of the Depression, it does not mention "famine".
If you've got a cite from a real history book there was famine in the US in the 1930's, feel free to post it.
P.S. I have a copy of "AP United States History" from the "Research & Education Association, 639 pages. It has no mention of famine during the Dust Bowl.
- Look closely at FDRs policies and their effects they were a disaster.
Here's a good book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Man-History-Great-Depressio...
- This is the mainstream view.
The alternative view is that FDR made the Great Depression great, with arbitrary orders like NIRA and attacks on business. He ruled for four terms and the Depression coincidentally lifted after his death. Out of necessity business was given a freeer hand during the war, sort of like Lenin's NEP in the 1920s. With FDR's death that free hand continued. Read "The Forgotten Man" or John T. Flynn if interested in this point of view.
In key respects, Pearl Harbor was to FDR what 9/11 was to Bush. It shut down criticism and gave him two terms.By the middle of his second term, much criticism of Roosevelt centered on fears that he was heading toward a dictatorship, by attempting to seize control of the Supreme Court in the Court-packing incident of 1937, attempting to eliminate dissent within the Democratic party in the South during the 1938 elections, and by breaking the tradition established by George Washington of not seeking a third term when he again ran for re- election in 1940. As two historians explain, "In 1940, with the two-term issue as a weapon, anti-New Dealers... argued that the time had come to disarm the "dictator" and to dismantle the machinery."[1] These criticisms largely ended after the Attack on Pearl Harbor.Because victors write history, we need to be skeptical of presidents surrounded by war propaganda, whether Bush or Obama or FDR. Did a president lead us through war and depression? Or did he get us into war and turn an ordinary recession into a depression?
- I didn't see the problem with the city's action until I read Amity Shlaes's "The Forgotten Man" (http://www.amityshlaes.com/books.php) in which she describes the federal government's fight to displace private utilities with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The government used all the means it had to win: deception, force, subsidization, taxation, regulation, and targeted prosecutions. As a result, the valuable time of good businessmen was wasted, their investors lost money, and the public got less value.
If some politicians or bureaucrats want to compete with a private business, if they think they can do better, they should be free to try, but they should leave their government jobs and start their own company. It is unreasonable to expect a private business, which must persuade investors to give it money and which must persuade customers to buy their services, to be able to compete with government which raises its funds by force through taxation, limits competition by force through regulation, and then can give away its product for free because it does not have to give its financers a return. Other businesses are not the only entities harmed by government competition: taxpayers are harmed as well. Taxpayers are forced to make bad investments and forced to subsidize inefficient enterprises.
Put yourself in the place of each of the participants in this situation. First, imagine you're the government official who's going to run the new Internet service. You probably were not your high school's valedictorian. You probably were not voted "Most Likely to Succeed." You probably had average-to-below-average grades, went to average-to-below-average schools, and got a average-to-below-average job with your local government. You are definitely not CEO material. Suddenly you have the opportunity to oversee a multi-million dollar construction project and manage the ensuing multi-million dollar business. Suddenly you're a big-shot. Truly America is the land of opportunity!
Now put yourself in the place of the competing business manager in charge of providing the city with internet service. At the very least you have some business experience and you probably had to compete with other candidates to get your job. Furthermore, you are subject to periodic performance reviews and are compared with other managers with similar responsibilities within the company. You would like to expand service and revenue in the city, but you haven't been able to convince upper management or investors that further investment is worthwhile. Now you hear that your city regulator, the person with the power to fine you or even to shut you down, is planning to compete with you using a huge cash fund obtained by selling city bonds.
Now imagine you're a city homeowner, concerned about being able to make ends meet, concerned as well about retirement, feeling the need to increase investment in order to secure a comfortable pension. You're approached by a eager young man who wants you to buy stock in his new Internet provider company. The man has little or no management experience, no business experience, what little work experience he does have is in government-- a monopoly not known as a beehive of industry. You say, "No thanks, I'm not Paul Graham. I'm not comfortable risking my money on what seems to me to be a risky scheme. I'd rather invest my money in established businesses run by experienced professionals with a proven track-record, even if that means I might be missing out on some great returns." Then you realize that the young man is not asking for your investment, he's from the government and he's demanding your investment. Would you feel like you're getting a good deal?
- Not mentioned: Amity Shlaes (the author of the article) also wrote a book about the Great Depression, called "The Forgotten Man". It is no surprise she would write about Atlas Shrugged.
From the blurb about the book on her site:
"Franklin Roosevelt systematically established the modern political constituency, from unions to artists, to senior citizens. Roosevelt's solution was to spend for these groups, so extensively that federal spending that year outpaced state and local spending, for the first time ever in peacetime. The consequence was the Roosevelt landslide of 1936 --but also the modern entitlement trap. Roosevelt often spoke of the Forgotten Man, the man "at the bottom of the economic pyramid." Yet, Miss Shlaes shows, his New Deal created a new forgotten man, the man who subsidizes the funding of other constituencies -- and who haunts politics in all developed nations today."
- I have not read "The Forgotten Man", may read it in the future.
Actually I thought the article was trying for an easy to understand "hook" with the tax info, since it is unlikely that the top 1% of earners are the bulk of those buying the $7.99 (or whatever it is) paperback edition at the local Barnes and Noble.
