ARTWORK: Alice Dunkley
The Post-COVID Economy By Marlow Meares For the first time in most university students’ lifetimes, Australia is in recession. But this is not an ordinary recession. It is a recession that I think will change our society for the better. When we hear of the current state of the economy, the phrase “this is the worst recession since the Great Depression” is often used. So, what happened in the Great Depression and what did the economy look like after it? Unemployment in 1929 reached up to 30 percent. The government of the United States responded to the depression in a way that is unimaginable now. Based upon the
economic thinking of the time, the government pursued cuts of 20 percent to spending and 10 percent to wages in the name of ‘balancing the budget’. This was well intended but only worsened the economic environment. Whilst the Great Depression was occurring, a Cambridge mathematician-turned-economist known as John Maynard Keynes wrote of a Keynes’ theory was not adopted in the Great Depression, but ten years later when another crisis shook the globe, World War II, his theories were welcomed by policy makers across the world. new way of approaching economic crises.
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