The Word into the Dark

 

The history of the World economy in this century is a tale of ups and downs, of good time and bad. Looking back, we can see a rough pattern of period of growth, when the trade increased, more goods were produced and people were better off, and between those ‘Booms’ we can see period of decline which we call recessions. But that pattern was interrupted in the 1930s by a particular several period of decline, when the world economy sagged into a condition much worse than a recession; when trade, production of goods, level of employment and standard of living sank to alarmingly low level.

In 1929 the American economy started to goo burst. By 1932 the economies of the most countries were to go bust too, the world was to plunge into what has since been called the “Great Depression” or the “World Slump”. it was a dark period in which many ordinary people throughout the world realized for the first time just how much their own lives and jobs had come to depend on economic relationship between countries and on the economic policies of the governments. They became newly aware of ‘economics’ as something which affected them; and economic terms began to come into everyday language.

Those people were bewildered and many of them were hurt. Some of them through they knew what or who lay behind it, and they lashed out with appalling consequences, for themselves as well as for their victims. Others suffered the Depression more or less quietly, seeing it as yet another disaster which ordinary human beings could do nothing to avert. They hoped and waited for better times to come. Yet they, like other people, felt that the effects of the Great Depression would be of the same magnitude as the effects of the Great War: that when it was over the world would never be quite the same again.