Word: 1930s
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Right Man, Right Time By one of those strange Sully Sullenberger collisions of preparation and crisis - the sort that put Depression expert Ben Bernanke in at the Fed at the moment of a flameout of 1930s magnitude - Larry Summers made his reputation as an employment theorist. Summers is the nephew of two Nobel economists and was regarded as the smartest undergrad anyone knew, but as he surveyed his research options 30 years ago, he settled on the then relatively unsexy specialty of labor. The subject tickled his sense of skepticism. "The view that was taking hold at that time...
...Hysteresis, Summers explained, could come from all sorts of shocks like this. And that may be what is playing out in the U.S. If you look at the three great job busts of the past 100 years - the 1930s, the early 1980s and today - you find an important difference. The Reagan recession ended with workers returning to jobs that were the same as or similar to the ones they had lost. But 1930s joblessness was structural. The jobs people lost - largely in agriculture - never came back. Workers had to move to the industrial sector, a transition helped by the demands...
Cash for Clunker Careers What to do? If your goal is to create jobs, you have two choices - and one painful fact - to confront. The painful fact is that the 1930s option, to have the government directly employ millions of people in labor fronts, is not an option today. "There's no way to create real jobs using this approach," says Harvard professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the 1930s, you could throw 10,000 people with shovels at dam or road projects. Today the work of 10,000 shovels is done by a few machines...
...trust insists on keeping numerical control, which is unheard of today when you have to get bigger and you have to grow," says an observer. "It's a 1930s mentality...
...uniform of choice for Americans well-to-do enough to decamp from their city digs to warmer climes for months at a time: light summer clothing provided a pleasing contrast to drabber urban life. "If you look at any photograph of any city in America in the 1930s, you'll see people in dark clothes," says Scheips, many scurrying to their jobs. By contrast, he adds, the white linen suits and Panama hats at snooty resorts were "a look of leisure...