This book examines the nature and the causes of the 1929
depression, tracing its background and the broad conditions from
which the depression emerged. As an infl uence on economic
activity, Robbins sees World War I, and the political changes that
followed it, as a series of shifts in the fundamental conditions of
demand and supply, to which economic activity had to adapt. Th e
needs of the war had called a huge apparatus of mechanical
equipment into being, which the resumption of peace rendered in
large part superfl uous. The war also disrupted world markets, and
its settlement created conditions that aggravated this disruption.
Th us, the struggle that was to end nationalist friction in fact
gave nationalism new scope.
The depression of 1929 and beyond dwarfed all preceding economic
disruptions, both in magnitude and in intensity. In 1929 the index
of security prices in the United States was in the neighborhood of
200-210; in 1932 it had fallen to 30-40. Commodity prices in
general fell by 30 to 40 percent, and in some commodity markets the
drop was even more catastrophic. Production in the chief
manufacturing countries of the world from 30 to 50 percent, and the
value of world trade in 1932 was a third of what it was three years
before. Worldwide, something like 30 million people were
unemployed.
There have been many economic downturns in modern economic
history, but never anything to compare with the years of the Great
Depression. Few books have conveyed that period with greater
clarity and precision than this masterpiece by Lionel Robbins.
Murray Weidenbaum's masterful new introduction adds to its
contemporary value.
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