The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 () is a 1984 history of the Great Depression by acclaimed historian Robert S. McElvaine. In this interpretive history, McElvaine discusses the causes and the results of the worst depression in American history, covering the time from 1929 to 1941. He examines the causes of this cataclysmic event, its impact upon the American people, and the political, governmental, and cultural responses to it. He comes down firmly in favor of the "demand-side" argument that maldistribution of income in the 1920s having left the bulk of potential consumers with too small a share of national income to buy all that mass production was putting on the market was the principal cause of the collapse. Building on his innovative use of letters written by "ordinary" Americans during the Depression that were collected in his first book, "Down and Out in the Great Depression", McElvaine takes readers into the experience of Depression victims to an extent never before achieved.
Causes of the Great Recession
According to M.S. Eccles, who was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by FDR and held that position until 1948, excessive debt levels were not a source cause of the Great Depression. Increasing debt levels were caused by a concentration of wealth during the 1920s, causing the middle and poorer classes, which saw a relative and/or actual decrease in wealth, to go increasingly into debt in an attempt to maintain or improve their living standards. According to Eccles this concentration of wealth was the source cause of the Great Depression. The ever-increasing debt levels eventually became unpayable, and therefore unsustainable, leading to debt defaults and the financial panics of the 1930s. The concentration of wealth in the modern era parallels that of the 1920s and has had similar effects. Some of the causes of wealth concentration in the modern era are lower tax rates for the rich, such as Warren Buffett paying taxes at a lower rate than the people working for him, policies such as propping up the stock market, which benefit the stock owning rich more than the middle or poorer classes who own little or no stock, and bailouts which funnel tax money collected largely from the middle class to bail out large corporations largely owned by the rich.