Via Sharon Astyk, here's a short piece by UK historian David Kynaston, author of the highly acclaimed recent "Austerity Britain," about what life was like under rationing (which lasted for long after WW2 ended. Kynaston shares what lessons we who are facing severe recession today can learn from the experience of Britain under the hardships of austerity. Excerpt:
Two fundamental, timeless lessons emerge from the whole experience. First, that most people will broadly accept straitened times if they are genuinely convinced of their necessity and that there is no alternative. Second, that social cohesiveness during such an unwelcome turn of events will rest to a large degree on the extent to which the pain is administered on an equitable, transparent basis. Even so, should the economic downturn prove severe, it is still likely to be a psychic shock for anyone under, say, the age of 40, for whom the austerity years are not even a folk memory. The process will be a huge challenge to the legitimacy of our democratic political system, though not inconceivably may do wonders to strengthen and reaffirm that rather frayed legitimacy.
Kynaston says that in going through diaries and documents of the day, he found that one overwhelming concern occupied ordinary people during austerity: the search for food. There is simply nothing in the experience of the overwhelming majority of Americans to match what he's talking about here.
(By the way, if the topic of the book interests you, do read Benjamin Schwarz's rave review from the Atlantic). Excerpt after the jump:
Kynaston's focus on women sheds light on his broadest theme: the chasm between the intellectuals, mandarins, and planners and those who were the object of their ministrations, "the much-invoked, less often consulted ... British people." Long before its electoral victory in 1945, the Labour Party had expanded its ranks beyond old trade unionists like Aneurin Bevan--who memorably declared to his working-class comrades that "we have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, now we are the builders" and who promised that "the first claims upon the national product ... shall be ... the women, the children, and the old people"--to include an ascendant, brainy, progressive bunch. Far more bent on cultural renewal than on economic or social egalitarianism, this new group actually believed, as Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison said in a phrase as quaint as it is chilling, that "part of our work in politics ... must be to improve human nature." It wanted a nation of joiners, and sought to build an active, informed, progressive-minded citizenry by means of a high-minded hodgepodge of discussion groups, amateur theatrical clubs, debating societies, and community dining halls ("very popular ... in Scandinavia," noted one Labour official by way of endorsement).The reformers were confronted with the most unpromising clay to work with. Emerging from Kynaston's minute examination of the everyday is the British people's profound social conservatism: its unshakable ability to tune out all earnest discussion of politics and world affairs and stick to talk about dog races, gardens, and hemlines; its strictly limited appetite for the communal ("'many women dislike the idea of nursery schools,' one observer noticed; 'they want to look after their own children'"); and its devotion to those twin entities that women defined and presided over, the home and the nuclear family.
At war's end, Britain faced a housing crisis. German bombs had destroyed or severely damaged 750,000 houses, and virtually no new ones had been built for six years. Kynaston shows that, far more than national health insurance or the nationalization of industry, "across the country, it was on the home that most people's hopes and concerns were really focused." In their diaries and letters as well as in survey after survey, people made clear their strong dislikes in housing ("nothing less than a mass aversion towards the whole idea of flats," Kynaston characterizes it) and their equally strong desire: a small suburban house with a garden. The planners and reformers would have none of it. Stridently communal, possessed of what Kynaston describes as an "almost visceral anti-suburban bias" and an accompanying conviction that "explicitly identified social virtue and cohesion in living cheek by jowl" in apartments and planned "New Towns" (innovations, Orwell noted, that would tend to break up the family), they wouldn't let the preferences of the public vitiate their glorious designs. As one of them, the economist P. Sargent Florence, declared, the predilections of "architects and planners" should trump "the inarticulate yearnings of the average working-class housewife." When addressing an unruly public meeting that opposed his "New Town" planning schemes designed to create "a new type of citizen," Lewis Silkin, the minister of town and country planning, put it more bluntly: "It's no good your jeering; it is going to be done." Ah, the People's Tribunes.
To a surprising extent Kynaston's entire, intricate portrait of British society can be summed up in Orwell's sweeping generalization: in a famous passage in The Lion and the Unicorn defining the English character (not quoted in Austerity Britain), Orwell wrote of a
characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is ... the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters ... All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official--the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea'. The liberty of the individual is still believed in ... It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker.
If there are villains in this book, they're the progressives--Nosey Parkers with power--but Kynaston's treatment of them is cheeky rather than hostile. And while the solid virtues of the working class emerge from his account, so do the parochialism and racial intolerance endemic to it. Indeed, his judgment is implicit but clear: Austerity Britain was a better place for being a worse place. Kynaston doesn't shrink from an understanding that's deeply unsettling to those who like their history, their politics, and their worldviews neat (which is to say nearly all of us): the better grew out of the worse, the worse out of the better.
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It's nice to think that in hard economic times people will pull together and do what they can for each other. But "social cohesion" isn't the only possibility. Let me sour the mood a bit with an alternate vision.
When the farm credit crisis hit full steam in the mid-1980's, the economies of towns all through the Great Plains collapsed. There were counties where male unemployment reached 40-50%. Populations shrank as people fled for the cities to find work. Small businesses went under because the local farmers couldn't afford their products and services. Oil states like Oklahoma and Texas got a double-hit as oil fell below $15 a barrel.
There was no "pulling together" beyond the occasional rare gesture. Alcoholism went way up. So did crime. Fights broke out anywhere young males congregated. My family of six crowded into a tiny house with no telephone or air conditioning (a big deal in Texas). We sometimes went up to a month without electricity because it was unaffordable. It was much much worse for many others. Many, like me, eventually left.
Cities don't always get off the hook either. Read up on Detroit. It has been in serious decline for two decades, yet you don't find much in the way of civic virtue and community groups who have been able to slow that decline.
My point is that the character and experience of the people involved matter. The people who suffered through the 1980's farm collapse and the 1990's disintegration of Detroit were not the same post-WWII generation that dealt with Austerity Britain. They were largely post-modern. More specifically, they were post-Me Decade. I understand the need for hope in the face of hard times. But you need to consider the possibility that life will get much worse, and that the people around you will not handle it well. Then you'll have to just muddle through. We all will.
Any austerity, if there will actually be any, will only be for those who lack the ability to find a way to make money off the situation. Just because life may get worse for some, does not mean it will get worse for others.
Lord, save us from "do-gooders," especially those with state power. This is going to be the failing of an Obama government if he tries to govern from the left, or allows himself to be unduly influenced by the goo-goo ideologues in his own party. I hope he reads this book and takes it as a warning.
Good grief!! This little hiccup in the economy isn't going to lead to anything like what happened in Britain after WWII or even in the U.S. during the Great Depression. What might happen is that people won't be able to buy wiis or video games, they might have to buy a used car or a smaller car, and they might have to drop HBO. This is probably a good practice for everyone to try. Many of my peers in their twenties and thirties have been living beyond their means and don't even have a budget!! I know that as soon as I got my first apartment, I started counting every single penny that I spent. This allows me to stay within a reasonable budget and still save quite a bit of my paycheck.
My point is that the character and experience of the people involved matter...you need to consider the possibility that life will get much worse, and that the people around you will not handle it well
Exactly. The same sort of principal applies to whether we will be able to feed ourselves when agri-business has collapsed. Sure, they had Victory Gardens during WWII, but these grew out of a culture that still had an idea of how to grow food. Likewise, the solidarity that got them through the hard times of war was rooted in a collective memory of previous deprivations.
Any austerity, if there will actually be any, will only be for those who lack the ability to find a way to make money off the situation.
You've repeatedly made this point elsewhere. I should warn you though, selling used cars aren't going to be the way for you to 'make that big pile of money' anymore.
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