The latest unemployment figures — worse than expected, again — suggest that the economy remains in the woods. Recovery depends on bringing the new coronavirus under control, yet each day brings record numbers of new cases. Little wonder people are making anxious analogies to the Great Depression.
If these comparisons have merit, we may be in for some lasting changes. It’s conventional wisdom that the Great Depression created a generation of penny-pinchers, but it wrought more subtle transformations as well — in the way people cooked and in how they spent their leisure time. The evidence from the 1930s suggests that life hacks made during hard times have a funny way of outliving the crises that beget them. Something similar may be underway today.
Consider, for example, what happened to the nation’s culinary habits in the wake of the Depression: Wasting food became a deadly sin, and leftovers that might previously have ended up in the garbage or down the drain found their way into new dishes.