Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs

Amy Bix's fine book, carefully researched and gracefully written, surveys the extent of everyday hardship during the Great Depression. She concentrates on the debates over technological unemployment in the United States, debates that were "entwined with particular musings about the meaning of American history, the western frontier, and a sense of national destiny" (p. 8). She convincingly describes the lives and emotions of employed and unemployed Americans. She also summarizes some of the social research conducted during the depression years. This summary gives focus to her passionate denunciation of widening income gaps, hardships entailed in upgrading workers' skills, the precariousness of employment, and a perceived lack of purpose in work as well as in leisure--in short, the deficiencies of the era of prosperity that followed the depression, deficiencies [End Page 583] that were evident in, and were in fact caused by, many of the same forces that acted to overcome the depression

Denunciation · Depression (economics) · Destiny (ISS module) · Economic growth · Economics · Frontier · Great Depression · Political science · Politics · Prosperity · Sociology · Unemployment · Employment and Welfare Studies · Engineering · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics