what happens to our cities if there is a depression?

[Tex?Il?]

One or two articles should be taken with a grain of salt.

We are never going to be the booming, dominant economic giant we once were, but the economy will continue to go in cycles as it has always done.

We just have to prepare our country with a massive tourism industry. So that the growing middle class of Asia will want to spend their dollars here to see the America of old.

Just like when we took over Europe, as being the economic dominant region after world war II, when in the post war world the growing upper middle class of Americans wanted to see Europe. The Asians will come see us a tourist spot, as they become economically dominant.

I think it would be great America not being top dog. Let some other country have the big military responsible, with all the resentment of their wealth and progress directed towards them.

[bentstrider]

Originally Posted by Tex?Il?

One or two articles should be taken with a grain of salt.

We are never going to be the booming, dominant economic giant we once were, but the economy will continue to go in cycles as it has always done.

We just have to prepare our country with a massive tourism industry. So that the growing middle class of Asia will want to spend their dollars here to see the America of old.

Just like when we took over Europe, as being the economic dominant region after world war II, when in the post war world the growing upper middle class of Americans wanted to see Europe. The Asians will come see us a tourist spot, as they become economically dominant.

I think it would be great America not being top dog. Let some other country have the big military responsible, with all the resentment of their wealth and progress directed towards them.

Like someone said on this thread or another, the UK rescinded most of that responsibility and they haven't turned into a complete and utter S---hole.
Not to mention that the US during the 1800s seemed to be rather tolerable(maybe not race/ethnicity) to live in before it went full-tilt into global adventures.

Besides, there's also always the oceans and space left to explore and boast about!!

[davidals]

Yeah this new depression stuff has definitely been getting lotsa lip service as of late. I don't know if I trust who it's coming from thus far. I also still have living relatives who grew up or even were young adults during the depression, and they managed to survive. It took a degree of financial shrewdness, paranoia when called for (i.e., not continually), and a great degree of creativity in keeping you, yourself and your family amused.

We should not that the depression did not last forever, and both the financial shrewdness, the creative and ingenuitive resoursefulness, and the human relations (as people from all types of backgrounds got hit very, very hard and were thrown into unexpected situations during the peak of the bad times) lessons learned through the crisis really contributed massively to the skyrocketing creative, corporate, intellectual, (arguably) civil rights and scientific developments that we saw from roughly 1945 to 1965.

It should be noted that there were crashed and depressions in the 1800s that were devastating as well; one lasted 30 years.

We got through them all - collectively. Individually, there were plenty who did not make it, but most of us did, and once we got through it, we generally had new skills to throw into the economy overall.

A good point of comparison would be Argentina, which was The U.S.'s great western hemisphere rival in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There are constitutional differences between the two nations that are important, but both countries boasted seemingly infinite resources, a booming population, a rapidly expanding middle class, immigration from all over the world, lots of space, 10th wealthiest nation in the world, seemingly en route to becoming a great power.

The different responses to the Great Depression - which hit Argentina extremely hard - were the end of that rivalry. The US intervened aggressively, which has been debated, but Argentina's policy of an absolute hands-off, no government intervention, no nothing, just let the chips fall where they may was - in retrospect - a disaster they still haven't really come out of. There was social unrest, attraction to fringe movements like Fascism and Communism was stronger than in the US, which led to political turmoil, and the rise of Peronism, a populism that seemed to take the WORST political ideas from the right and the left, which bankrupted the country, paving the way for military takeovers, each of which was just a little bloodier than the first. After the return of real democracy, the country was a ghost of what it had been 50 years earlier, with one more crash to come (1999-2002). A fast growing and apparently healthy economy for now, an a genuinely sustainable, which are actually admirable states to be in, but look at what it took to get there, and look at what it did to their status.