Reportedly, Northeastern maintains a Great Depression-compatible counter

[solarbird]

According to Ambrose Pierce-Evans at The Telegraph, The Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS) in Boston (US spelling: Center for Labor Market Studies (Northeastern University, Boston), because if you google Centre for Labour Market Studies, even with Boston, you get a different economic group) keeps a count of unemployment using the pre-WWII measurement system, which makes comparisons to the Great Depression possible. That number rose to 18.2% in May, the most recent number noted. He also mentions - I forgot to include this in my last post - that hours per week have fallen to the lowest since the number started being recorded, to 33 hours per week.

Anyway, I suggest reading the article, because the deflationary wage cycle is pretty clear at this point, and he outlines how much of it is hidden via unpaid furloughs and so forth. One thing I did not put together, however, is this little comparison:

Some 342,000 homes were foreclosed in April, pushing a small army of children into a network of charity shelters. This compares to 273,000 homes lost in the entire year of 1932.

That's quite the cold splash of water, even given the large differences in population. Say, why don't we do that math? US population, 1932: 124,840,471. US today: 306,839,779 (est), 2.46 times as many people. Adjusting for that would make 1932's foreclosure rate yield 682,500 foreclosures per year. April 2009's rate yields, 4,104,000 per year. That's six times the rate of 1932. Also note that April was still in an era of partial foreclosure forbearance, and that's over now, so the rate is probably going to climb from that, not fall.

eta: rozasharn looked up data and did math in comments below! Adjusting for homeownership rates on top of population, her math shows we're at four times the foreclosure rate of 1932. Thanks, rozasharn, for being less lazy than me! ^_^

Comments

[dpawtows.livejournal.com]

Another adjusting factor would be the initial % of home ownership in 1932 vs now. Suburbs didn't really exist 30's.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with Daniel that "foreclosure rates" is a bad measure because the per-capita of home ownership in 1932 was also much lower; 1932 is in that peak period of urbanization after industrialization but prior to the post-WWII diaspora to the suburbs and the "American dream of home ownership."

I just looked and saw that the U6 is currently at 16.5%. Fantastic.

[solarbird]

However, it is a good measure of displacement, which was happening in droves in the early 1930s.

And the 1900s invented the suburb. The U. District? Much of it? A suburb. Queen Anne? Similar. Lake Forest Park? Suburb. Streetcar, rather than automobile - except for Lake Forest Park, which was automobile - but still. The term, even, is not a post-war invention.

[solarbird]

Actually, they did. The term long predates the war. However, it was an upper-middle-class phenomenon, and you are absolutely correct in terms of the lower percentage of home ownership. But that works both ways, because the peak in home "ownership" means that sales simply won't recover soon - you can't "fix" this by increasing home ownership rate.

I looked up the tables from the Census Bureau.

[rozasharn.livejournal.com]

I looked up the home-ownership tables from the Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html). The homeownership rate in 1930 was only 48%, versus 69% a couple years ago. I multiplied the population by the home-ownership percentage to get closer to the number of home-owning households. If you treat home-owning households as the basis of foreclosures, this April's annualized rate was 'only' four times as high as the 1932 rate of foreclosures.

Still, four times as high. It does look to me like they broke the economy worse this time around.

Re: I looked up the tables from the Census Bureau.

[solarbird]

Ah, thanks! I looked for them briefly but didn't find them immediately so.

[solarbird]

Also, see above; rozasharn looked it up. Including that, foreclosures in April annualised to 4x the rate of 1932.

Re: I looked up the tables from the Census Bureau.

[rozasharn.livejournal.com]

But you find all this other wonderful information!

And the homeownership rates were hard to find; a lot of the housing data only goes back to 1940.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Actually, the word suburb is much older than that. Random House (via dictionary.com) says 1350-1400, and the fact that it's a Latin word gives an even bigger hint. The concept of suburbs goes back at least to Roman times, when the upper class had country villas. What's new in the 20th and early 21st century suburbs is the middle class. Cheap oil and automobiles made what was previously an upper class luxury a goal supposedly attainable by the masses. I think what we're learning in many ways is that however attainable it might be right now in the long run it's not sustainable. We can't all be kings in our own quasi-rural mini-estates. That's not to say that home ownership for large numbers of people can't be sustained, just that there's a limit to the current dominance of detached single-family suburban homes.

That continues to be the biggest problem with the official response to the economy. The assumption is that somehow we can make the old illusion solid again. I don't think that's a good idea even if we could make it work for a while, and in the long run it won't be possible.