1920s US Economy: Uneven Fortune, Low Wages, and Political Anxiety - Essay Sample

Introduction

In this video, Professor Alexis Mccrossen from Southern Methodist University is lecturing her students about the major depressions and the abundance of the earlier generations of the 1920s. She claims that the uneven distribution of fortune and low wages slowed American consumers from growing and keeping the pace with the ever increasing levels of economic productivity. She also goes ahead and explain about the anxieties for government political resolve and President Roosevelt's emergent deal plans in her 76 minute class duration. In another week, they spent it while deliberating how the Americans adjusted to abundance between the 1890s and the 1920s. Regardless of the determinations of advertisers, retailers, producers and others, the supply of goods continued to exceed the demand. This was not attributed to everybody, but all the 106 Americans had all they required, it is because they did not have sufficient purchasing ability. They did not have sustainable income or wages to buy all the kind of stuff they needed. Americans not only were the ones trying to find a solution but they were in partnership with other trading allies around the world

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This section of Americans during that time did not have adequate disposable income to purchase all the items that was being produced in their fields and the all other amazing things that their factories were manufacturing and so by the end of the 1920s, the American economy busted. Professor goes ahead to explain how the stock market crushed in 1929 and the whole world was affected with the bust too. A global economic depression set in and it lasted between 1929 through 1942.What was popularly referred to as the great depression could be also seen as a calamity of abundance (Abundance and University). In the story am about to tell you, which I guess you have heard before at one place or another, I will focus our attention on the two bottom bubbles; uneven circulation and abundance and uneven distribution and production of wealth created by manufacturing and agricultural productivity as we have discussed about this, a plentiful age arrived in the 1970s and there was a shift from scarcity into plenty until we begun reading Susan Strasser's satisfaction guaranteed entitled a 'Crisis Distribution'. At this time, a lot was being made and a lot more was being grown that not only made the logistics of getting these goods to the market but finding new markets became important and a serious concern. What we need to ask ourselves some of the things they did to resolve this issue of overproduction, or finding new markets, product distinction with name brand packaging.

To identify and find new markets, neither foreign nor domestic markets could consume everything that was being made and grown in the USA. Foreigners and Americans just did not have adequate purchasing power to purchase everything that was for trade. So the First World War was basically rolls around and it hindered reckoning with the difficulty of overproduction, during much of the 1920s there was a small increase in the purchasing power which staved off reckoning with the issue of abundance. Approaching the end of 1920s the abundance crisis exploded, and during this time, generating more demand was becoming difficult. All the kind of attempts was that of advertisers adding some kind of worth to their products but it got to a point where it became really hard to explore new markets as there was no new demand that could be created (Abundance and University).

Professor reminds the students that Americans held 40% of the riches of the whole world. The United States was officially the richest country on earth during that age. During this time, their Gross Domestic Product increased by 40% in a span of 9 years between 1920 and 1929. This was attributed to the fact that manufacturing and agricultural productivity almost doubled in under 10 years. Similarly, the number of telephones increased twofold from 10 million to 20 million, the number of automobiles tripled, the number of radios enlarged from 60,000 to 10 million and the number of electric refrigerators increased 160 times more within the 9 year span. This increment of assets within the American boarders signify that in the same way, the wealth, prosperity and the consumer price index of the people grew. For those who do not understand consumer price index usually abbreviated CPI, I will remind you. CPI is something you have read on the newspapers or probably heard in the news. It is defined as a measure of what a market hamper of basic commodities might look like and is taken as a measure of the cost of living today. The market prices of basic commodities increased dramatically to as much as 60% and then later in the post war period, closely after the war, there was a big drop which could be possibly attributed to the post war recession (Abundance and University).

Conclusion

In conclusion of his class on that day, Professor Alexis Mccrossen tried to draw his class to the attention that some of the efforts made in the early 1930s to safeguard consumers. The efforts are being made to empower these consumers and provide them with something normally referred to as adequate income or a living wage so they become fully fledged consumers. The government therefore decided that in in order to grow people's confidence in their banking system even when they experience money delays, it would ensure their deposits are guaranteed and even if the bank failed, they we would still have access to their bank deposits up to a certain minimum amount (Abundance and University).

Works Cited

Abundance, and the Great Depression, and Southern University. "Abundance, Wages, and The Great Depression." C-SPAN.org. N.p., 2019. Web. 19 Oct. 2019.