A friend sent me this link and I almost posted it, and then a few days later I saw it on Mark Horne’s blog and decided to put it up here. The numbers are creepy any way you think about it, but I do wish there were another set of numbers alongside these. I believe things really are terrible but not necessarily as terrible terrible terrible as this argues.
The second set of numbers needs to be the GDP for the years in each of these periods, so that we know what we are comparing everything to. For example (to make up some numbers to make the point), if the one billion in the Great Depression were fifty percent of GDP and the trillions of debt we are dealing with is twenty percent of GDP, then our situation is not as bad as that one, even if our real numbers are far larger. If we have ten times as many people with cancer today as in 1909, one hundred years ago, if our population is 100 times bigger, the scary numbers are not quite as scary.