Depression vs Recession
The Great Recession of 2009, which in economic terms lasted two quarters but for many people stretched out quite a bit longer, was billed as the worst economic event since the Great Depression. This provides us with an opportunity to examine the two events, their respective time periods, and what sort of similarities and differences we can determined between them. The 1920s were known as the roaring twenties, and were considered a boom time. The period after the First World War saw significant shifts in American life, in terms of standard of living and how people lived. The 20s saw a significant shift towards urbanization, fueled by job opportunities that were emerging in white collar sectors. The term urban is juxtaposed…show more content… The removal of banking restrictions in 1999 led within just a few years of the same kind of fast money and deceptive banking practices that created both wealth in the 20s and Depression in the 30s (Rickards, 2012).There were also significant societal shifts. First, the Internet had a transformative effect on the way our society communicates in particular, spawning entire new industries the way that the automobile did. This created a lot of jobs, a lot of economic speculation and it brought about social liberalization as well. A new moneyed class was created, not just from the Internet but from changes overseas where more people were gaining incredible levels of wealth and immigrating. But the new technology has given rise to many new applications of knowledge, and much more knowledge available much more easily to people as well (Berger, 2013). One difference between the two generations is that in the 1920s there was a genuine sense that anybody with ambition could become wealthy, as with Dexter Green. Fitzgerald embodied this sentiment where social climbing was important, but wealth was just something you could randomly achieve – the wealth-building was never an important element in his characters.
The 2000s saw a different view of the American Dream. With America losing jobs to overseas instead of being the beneficiary of overseas demand, the American Dream in the 2000s, for those not in the Internet business, was tied to real estate. It was the pursuit of that dream via real estate that gave us a housing bubble, not unlike the stock market bubble in the 1920s, which was the embodiment of the pursuit of easy money through investments, something that had become available to everyday