Old trails of the New Deal

We often forget how important New Deal programs were for unemployed workers then, and what a legacy they left for us today.

One of those programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which cut ski trails in New England (such as Nose Dive, above, which can still be enjoyed on Mt. Mansfield in Vermont):

From 1933 until 1942, the C.C.C. deployed almost 3 million unemployed men between the ages of 18 and 25 across the nation to plant trees, hew trails and build roads, bridges and park structures. Workers lived in camps run by the Army, were clothed and fed, and received $30 a month. Communities across the country benefited from new state parks and infrastructure.

The program also helped catalyze the nascent ski industry in the United States. Many New England ski resorts were built around trails first cut by the C.C.C. “In the scope of what the C.C.C. did, it was a real drop in the bucket,” said Jeff Leich, director of the New England Ski Museum. “And yet you think about Cannon, Wildcat, Stowe and what that’s meant for the economy of the region.” The winter tourism industry they helped spawn remains an important source of revenue throughout Vermont, New Hampshire and the Berkshires.

I’m now going to have to go in search of some of those trails.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Depression economics

According to the New York Times, the United Auto Workers union has agree to a two-tier deal, thus cutting the wages of hundreds of workers at a General Motors assembly plant.

G.M. will pay 60 percent of the plant’s 1,550 workers the going wage of about $28 an hour, and the remainder of the workers about half as much — or $14 an hour. While the U.A.W. had previously agreed to lower wages for new hires, some of the second-tier workers at the Orion plant could be among current G.M. employees called back from layoff.

The UAW giveback is one of the effects of the reserve armies of the unemployed and underemployed in the current post-recovery depression.

United states of urban and suburban poverty

We’ve known for some time that poverty in the United States has been getting wider and deeper.

That view is confirmed by two new reports from Brookings:

• The Great Recession and Poverty in Metropolitan America
• Strained Suburbs: The Social Service Challenges of Rising Suburban Poverty

The reports challenge the existing common sense:

Research exploring issues of poverty typically has focused on central-city neighborhoods, where poverty and joblessness have been most concentrated. As a result, place-based U.S. antipoverty policies focus primarily on ameliorating concentrated poverty in inner-city (and, in some cases, rural) areas. Suburbs, by con­trast, are seen as destinations of opportunity for quality schools, safe neighborhoods, or good jobs.

What the new research reveals is that, while the rates of poverty in cities is higher than that in the suburbs, more people are suffering poverty in suburban areas than in urban centers.

In 1999, large U.S. cities and their suburbs had roughly equal numbers of poor residents, but by 2008 the number of suburban poor exceeded the poor in central cities by 1.5 million. Although poverty rates remain higher in central cities than in suburbs (18.2 per­cent versus 9.5 percent in 2008), poverty rates have increased at a quicker pace in suburban areas.

According to Scott Allard, the current depression has had the effect of swelling the ranks of both the working poor and those seeking out social services for the first time.

“Forty-five percent of providers report substantial increases in the number of clients coming from households where one or both adults are working but cannot earn enough to make ends meet,” Allard said.The researchers also found that a major impact of the ­Great Recession has been an increase in the number of people coming, for the first time, to seek help from social service agencies. “Almost three-quarters of suburban nonprofits are seeing more clients with no previous connection to safety net programs,” Allard said.

Perhaps mainstream economists should spend less time engaging in anticommunist diatribes to demonstrate the superiority of the “market organization of economic life” and recognize the actual failures of the capitalist organization of economic life in the United States.

Crisis and (anti)depression

Today’s Washington Post reports one “bright spot” in the current crisis: sales of antidepressants are up.

Helplessness, pessimism and persistent sadness—the main symptoms of depression—didn’t seem to abate as the economy crumbled. About 164 million antidepressant prescriptions were written in 2008, 4 million more than in 2007.

As it turns out, the business of depression is particularly lucrative. Whereas other costly conditions, such as heart conditions or cancer, tend to strike late in life, most people experience depression when they’re much younger, usually between the ages of 15 and 30. Besides setting in early, depressive episodes tend to recur.

Antidepressants are big business for BigPharma. They’re also big business for advertising agencies:

In the first quarter of 2009, as automotive ads—long the top advertising category in the Unites States—plummeted by 28 percent, according to Nielsen rankings, pharmaceutical companies’ ad spending was more consistent. It still dropped, but only by 11 percent. Drugmakers were the third-biggest spender of ad money in that period. Without those purchases, some media outlets already floundering in the thinned-out ad market would have been much worse off. Because most depression sufferers are women, female-targeted lifestyle magazines get a particular boost from companies pushing antidepressants.

The problem, of course, is that capitalist crises create depressed workers, which leads to “missed workdays and lost productivity.” And antidepressants are supposed to get them back to work and increase their productivity. Capitalism’s solution for a capitalist problem!