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It turns upside down Thorstein Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption undertaken solely to prove one’s superiority.
In the 1930s and 1940s, most of the ads using the phrase American Dream promoted intellectual products: books, plays, sermons. But as time wore on, and as the epidemic strengthened, the phrase took on a different dimension. The American Dream turned into owning a home, with the underlying sense that owning a home implies patriotism and commitment to the community.
The American Dream has been used to justify government actions supporting the housing bubble that eventually collapsed during the world financial crisis of 2007–9.
Since 1973, 265 bills and resolutions introduced in the US Congress have included the words “American Dream.”
Controlled experiments have shown that marketing of consumer products may be enhanced by appeals to patriotism.47
The world solidly abandoned the gold standard in 1971. Since then, countries have used fiat money—that is, money not backed by anything.
The United States effectively went onto the gold standard, attaching the US dollar exclusively to gold, with the Coinage Act of 1873 signed by President Ulysses S. Grant. (The Gold Standard Act of 1900 further clarified the standard.)
Prior to 1873, the United States had been under a bimetallic standard (in effect, without calling it that), and the Coinage Act of 1834 specified the ratio of silver to gold at sixteen to one.
The 1873 act was followed in the next two decades by persistent deflation (that is, falling consumer prices). Some observers labeled the 1873 Coinage Act “a crime” because the deflation impoverished debtors, especially farmers who bought their farms with a mortgage, by lowering the price at which they could sell their crops and raising the real value of their debts.
Also, people who’d made major purchases were dismayed to see that they could have bought them for less if only they’d waited.
Under the gold standard as defined in the United States, a contract specifying payment of one dollar was a contract to deliver 1/20.67 of an ounce of gold. Under a bimetallic standard with a 16-to-1 ratio, the contract would have been interpreted as an agreement to deliver either this amount of gold or 16 times as many ounces of silver.
Thus the bimetallism proposal would have allowed debtors to cut their debts roughly in half by choosing to repay them in silver rather than gold.
People seem to have a natural respect for ideas that they perceive as coming from the wisdom of the past and that reflect true or important values.
Eastern intellectuals favored the gold standard, while westerners, who were more likely to be farmers, favored bimetallism.
Most people in the 1890s never tried to do that, and they might have been rebuffed if they did, because banks satisfied their obligations when they gave depositors paper dollars. So, even in the 1890s, the gold standard was a tantalizing mystery.
The implication was that the Silverites, typically rural and ignorant farming people, did not read history.
Panic is in its nature unreasoning;
They were used to going to the commercial banks but not to the subtreasury offices where they could demand gold in exchange for notes.
The word gold appears 419 times in the King James version of the Bible.
Plutocracy,
The confusion came because there were both gold and silver coins in circulation that were freely accepted as of equivalent value even though the gold content of a gold coin was worth in the metals market about twice the market value of a silver dollar.
Also, there were paper dollars, the silver certificates, that had inscribed on them, “one silver dollar” and “payable to the bearer on demand.” Isn’t that a silver standard? In fact, however, if one brought 100 silver dollars or $100 worth of silver certificates to a US subtreasury office, then they would freely give 100 gold dollar coins in exchange.
Practically no one paid any attention then to the type of currency they received or spent. In fact, most people didn’t even know how to convert their cash into gold if they wanted to.
Why did the call for a bimetallic standard become so vehement in the last decade of the nineteenth century? One reason is obvious: the idea was promoted that debtors would see their burden cut in half if they could pay in silver at 16 to 1.
vestige,
Sullivan quotes Talleyrand, Napoleon’s chief diplomat, that “the business of statesmanship is to invent new terms for institutions which under their old names have become odious to the public.”31
By the 1930s, the new word devaluation had massively replaced the negative-sounding debasement and inflation. Devaluation refers to a constructive action of enlightened governments, while debasement and inflation connote a moral failing.
On the advice of eminent economists such as Keynes, the United Kingdom had suspended the gold standard in 1931. The final end of the gold standard occurred in 1971 in the United States under President Richard Nixon, with the switch to a floating dollar. The public accepted the end of the gold standard, and economic dislocations were few.
Concerns that inventions of new machines that are powered by water, wind, horse, or steam, or that use human power more efficiently, might replace workers and cause massive unemployment have an extremely long history.
Hero of Alexandria in the first century BCE wrote a book, Automata, describing how to make a programmable tripod of Hephaestus, as well as a coin-operated vending machine and other remarkable devices.
Luddite continued to appear regularly in newspapers in following years and today remains a synonym for a person who resists technological progress.
penitentiaries.
The steam-power of seven tons of coal is sufficient to make 33,000 miles of cotton thread in ten hours, while, without machinery, this would equal the hand labor of 70,000 women!
if the change is accompanied by some hardship, so is every step in the progress of the human race.8
By the 1920s, there was much talk about “efficiency experts” whose “time and motion studies” treated workers as if they were machines. The experts’ goals were to eliminate any unnecessary motions, thereby saving time and labor cost.
fear of robots was not strong in most of the 1920s, when the word robot was coined. The big wave of fear had to wait until the 1930s. Historian Amy Sue Bix (2000) offers a theory to explain why the 1920s were fearless: the kinds of innovations that received popular acclaim in the 1920s didn’t obviously replace jobs. If asked to describe new technology, people in most of the 1920s would perhaps think first of the Model T Ford, whose sales had burgeoned to 1.5 million cars a year by the early part of the decade. Radio stations, which first appeared around 1920, provided an exciting new form of
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Fear of robots.
Henry George described the overproduction theory in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, during the depression of the 1870s, concluding it was an “absurdity.”26
underconsumption suddenly became a problem in the 1930s because of the nation’s newfound ability to produce more than it needed.
The massive unemployment set off serious social problems. For example, in the United States it caused the forced deportation (then called repatriation) of a million workers of Mexican origin. The goal was to free up jobs for “real” Americans.
Immigratipn was an issue even on 1930s
The dial telephone, which required no contact with an operator, was not invented during the Great Depression; in fact, the first patent for a dial telephone dates to 1892. The transition from the non-dial telephone to the dial telephone took many decades. However, during the Great Depression, there rose a narrative focus on the loss of telephone operators’ jobs, and the transition to dial telephones was troubled by moral qualms that by adopting the dial phone one was complicit in destroying a job.
Whenever a man is replaced by a machine a consumer is lost; for the man is deprived of the means of paying for what he consumes. The greater the number of Robots employed, the less is the demand for what they produce for men cannot consume what they cannot pay for.
The human psychology of it is simple and understandable to everybody. A man who is not sure of his job will not spend his money.
Albert Einstein, the world’s most celebrated physicist, believed this narrative in 1933, at the very bottom of the Great Depression, saying the Great Depression was the result of technical progress:
One article in the Los Angeles Times in early 1931, about a year into the Great Depression, said that robots then were already the “equivalent of 80 million hand-workers in the United States alone,” while the male labor force was only 40 million.36
Misrepresentatipn.
By 1932, the bottom of the stock market decline, the US stock market had lost over 80% of its 1929 value in less than three years.
technocracy, a society that is commanded by technicians,
technocrat, one of these now-powerful technicians.
The technocracy movement created its own jargon and proposed a new kind of money, electric dollars.
Electronic money.
the rate of energy conversion of the modern machine is many thousand times that of man.
Many historians point to massive unemployment in Germany to explain the accession to power of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in the election of 1933, the worst year of the Depression. But rarely mentioned today is the fact that a Nazi Party official promised that year to make it illegal in Germany to replace men with machines.
Reason why Nazis may have been elected.
