I'm not an historian, but I don't respect limits.

I think the need for more workers and soldier during WWII, combined with the much too blatant racism of the other side, meant that ethnic whites went from mostly ethnic to mostly white. After the war, this was reinforced because there was enough economic growth to keep increasing wages and profits.

During the Depression, my great-grandfather had worked his way up to shift manager or some equivalent at the steel mill, though he had a high school education and I guess may have started our on the management track, especially since he was a low-level officer in WWI. He insisted on making hiring/firing decisions based on quality and seniority rather than ethnicity, which got him a lot of hate from his fellow Irish workers and other Catholics (Poles and Italians, mostly) and some from the white Protestants, but his shift was one of the only ones where blacks kept working through the Depression. At least that's how the family story goes.

IANAH, but I see no reason to believe that unemployment (between 15 and 20, most of the time) was evenly or fairly distributed. Why would it have been?

My grandfathers were both employed throughout (although maternal gf was a college student from 29-33), grandmothers were SAHMs (although maternal gm was college student 28-32), but all their male siblings and bil were employed throughout. Then I guess that's not particularly surprising, since you'd only expect 2 out of 10 to be unemployed at any given time, even if it was distributed evenly.

My grandfathers and their siblings also kept working through the Depression, but they didn't really get the trappings of middle class (or indoor plumbing in one case) until after the war.

Maybe they had middle classness in a way I can't understand. Their houses (when I saw them later) that didn't strike me as alarmingly small or anything.

IANAH, but I see no reason to believe that unemployment (between 15 and 20, most of the time) was evenly or fairly distributed. Why would it have been?

Strawman? I don't think I was suggesting that it was? But even those employed might have living in poverty, even if the poverty of the unemployed was staggering.

It wasn't meant as a hostile comment. But I don't think a period of 80-85% employment is smushing everyone but the truly rich -- I think it's whacking already poorer segments of society really hard.

In other words, that class lines remained more or less intact throughout the Depression? I mean, that does make sense.

... I have this idea that aside from the very wealthy, everyone got mushed together during the depression itself - ...

IAANAH but I think this is kind of the opposite of what happened in the depression. The very top got shoved down as capital income got crushed but big class differences remained among the mass of the people such as between white collar and blue collar jobs and particularly between those with stable employment and those without.

Charles Mingus growing up in 30s Watts was very privileged compared to his peers because his father had a stable post office job.

I get the impression that who was hurt and who wasn't was unpredictable and unrationalizable enough to sell the country on the concept of social security, but nevertheless I doubt the Matthew 13:12 principle was seriously violated.

For the mass of people, yes, I think that's right. You'd have a small group that gets hit by capital income, and a very small group that has extreme downward mobility -- like jumping off a building downward mobility -- but I think that was really quite rare. (One of my 4 great grandfathers made his living as a commodities broker/speculator, and was completely wiped out. He was rich in the 20s -- not Gatsby rich, but far out of reach from where I'd ever imagine being. Far out from where he'd imagined being, I'd guess, as the son of a piano carpenter married to the daughter of a dry goods merchant.)

IIRC gilded age income inequality persisted through at least 1937, and then started a decline that accelerated through WWII and into the postwar period. So what you had wasn't really a collapse of class lines during the depression. Rather, highly progressive taxation combined with unionization combined with a war combined (after the war) with the postwar boom meant that there was both a limit on the wealth of the very wealthy and many opportunities for working people to acquire trappings of middle class life. But that didn't at all mean social class was lost or mushed together; it meant that working people were getting richer and more powerful and wealth based on capital getting taxed at high rates.

Also it seems to me that there is a probably connection between how distinct class lines seem and how much mobility there is between classes. I expect there was a lot of downward movement during the depression which may have tended to confuse class distinctions a little but I doubt they disappeared. And I have no idea how much of the downward mobility proved only temporary.

Or, put differently, unions plus war plus highly progressive taxation plus a broad-based economic boom aren't the same as a smushing of social class in the depression.

11

For the mass of people, yes, I think that's right. You'd have a small group that gets hit by capital income, and a very small group that has extreme downward mobility -- like jumping off a building downward mobility -- but I think that was really quite rare. ...

I think you had a lot of downward movement at all levels. People lost jobs and were unable to obtain equivalent employment.

12

IIRC gilded age income inequality persisted through at least 1937, and then started a decline that accelerated through WWII and into the postwar period. So what you had wasn't really a collapse of class lines during the depression. ...

If this graph is to be believed the top 1% started losing ground in 1929 not 1937 (with a second big drop during WWII). However I am a little suspicious of the graph's reliability as a big jump is shown in the late 1980s which I suspect is an artifact of some sort.

My family's narrative of the Great Depression is that it didn't mush classes together at all, even while everyone was miserable. First, tiny differences in comfort and security were even more visible and salient among people looking for work, like _London Labour and the London Poor_ on fast-forward. Second, if you weren't in debt when the crash happened, and you had some buffering from the cash economy (i.e., a family farm), your life got materially a little better because you could get labor for cheap, and even the possessions of debtors. The whole nineteenth century had spectacular boom-busts when not at war, so cautious people didn't make giant margin bets and put everything into stocks and so forth. "Three generations, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves." My ninety-seven-year-old current neighbors remember about the same; she says they had no idea they were poor, because they were farmers, so they were never hungry although they only had shoes in winter.

IAANAH but I think it's the New Deal (rescued the rural poor, made infrastructure public rather than private) and WWII (in which the feds fought some unions pretty damn hard to let black workers in) that mushed everyone together. Go socialism.

The worst cyclical poverty in the Bay Area echoes WWII shipyards -- Oakland, Richmond, Hunters Point, Sausalito* -- where the last-hired lived in terrible war housing and were stuck there when they became the first-fired.

* Sausalito bulldozed the poor neighborhoods after a fight carried out, IIRC, on the School Board. The Chinatown public library is *great* on local history.

My ninety-seven-year-old current neighbors ... were never hungry although they only had shoes in winter.
How's Big Jim doing these days?

I've forgotten my ...Steinbeck, at a guess? These weren't the displaced poor, they sound more like the last peasants in Minnesota. She's really interesting about what children gain and lose by not growing up on a self-reliant farm;. Though, being basically optimistic enough to live to 97, she points out it's a net improvement; not all her siblings lived to adulthood.

She's now outlived at least one of her own children and *grandchildren*. The mind boggles.

I bet Eric Rauchway could inform us about the Depression-related part of this question.

19: Chaplin.

The stories my parents and their friends told didn't have everyone smushed down into a seething revolutionary class. My mother's family was quite poor but still employed, out of the rain and snow, and not starving. That's well above soup kitchens and riding the rails.

On the other hand, my mother later did, every once in a great while, buy a loaf of cheap bread and just toss it in the garbage to remind herself she now could.

Though, being basically optimistic enough to live to 97, she points out it's a net improvement; not all her siblings lived to adulthood.

So very much a "that which does not kill you leaves you stronger" kind of a worldview.

On the other hand, my mother later did, every once in a great while, buy a loaf of cheap bread and just toss it in the garbage to remind herself she now could.

Things like this remind me just how intensely people were affected by the Great Depression. I have no interest in Greatest Generation twaddle, but on some level I suspect that Depression survivors played a bigger role in how the social order maintained itself post-WW2 than we realize. For one concrete example, lawmakers who lived through 1929 would never have repealed Glass-Steagall, but I mean more broadly than that.

My maternal grandmother was a classic example of "Great Depression survivor develops life long hoarding instinct". Canned goods, batteries, etc.

We lived in Southern California, and if the big earthquake had come along and knocked out everything for a few weeks, her house would have been the place to be. Plenty of everything you might need socked away.

My grandmother was very big on not wasting bread. If it got old, it became bread crumbs and those were frozen. She may have also been big on never wasting salt water taffy because she never bought any of it.

25: So long as canned goods and batteries didn't clunk on your head.

25: My mother was a life-long preparer. She had a month's supply of everything "just in case", she rotated the perishables, and so on. That served her well during hurricane seasons, she never evacuated for any of them, just rode them out in relative comfort.

24: The lessons I learned listening to the stories directly or from the top of the stairs were: "Do what you have to do", "Don't feel sorry for yourself", "Don't cry, deal with it" and lots more Old Grizzled Sarge-isms. It becomes reflexive and a good way to react when the shit hits the fan.

Oh. I forgot this: The Borrowed Years: 1938-1941 America On The Way To War
Richard M. Ketchum.

A good look at what was happening.

23: On the contrary, unless I'm misinterpreting you. She prefers the current system, although presumably no-one coming out of it is as tough as she was.

24 makes total sense to me ("Depression survivors played a bigger role in how the social order maintained itself post-WW2 than we realize").

Other thing about Depression survivors and hoarding: I don't think their thrift and hoarding would have been odd if compared to *their* grandparents. Stuff has been getting cheaper and more disposable for a hundred years, but the trend exploded after WWII. Before then, it was reasonable to have a scrap-bag and button jar and lumber room and culch pile because all that stuff was reusable -- or saleable -- and easier to repair and harder to replace than now. I want take-back laws, dammit.

23: On the contrary, unless I'm misinterpreting you. She prefers the current system, although presumably no-one coming out of it is as tough as she was.

24 makes total sense to me ("Depression survivors played a bigger role in how the social order maintained itself post-WW2 than we realize").

Other thing about Depression survivors and hoarding: I don't think their thrift and hoarding would have been odd if compared to *their* grandparents. Stuff has been getting cheaper and more disposable for a hundred years, but the trend exploded after WWII. Before then, it was reasonable to have a scrap-bag and button jar and lumber room and culch pile because all that stuff was reusable -- or saleable -- and easier to repair and harder to replace than now. I want take-back laws, dammit.

I thought I might run out of post.

People who lived through the Great Depression don't waste perfectly good words on double posts.

People who lived through the Great Depression get all the good out of an anecdote by using it over and over again.

What are take-back laws?

It was kind of weird when everybody switched from film to digital and realized that being economical with photos had gone totally out the window. There's such a glut of photos now, and it's easy to remember thinking "Okay, I've got 24 photos to last me through the next three days of vacation. That should be about right."

My mother was a life-long preparer. She had a month's supply of everything "just in case"

My parents as well -- both born during the Depression, hence trained by their parents in appropriate ways to consume, not consume, and so on (save old shoelaces, stock condensed milk, always have kerosene on hand for the lamps, etc.). On reflection, I learned a lot of those ways without quite realizing it ... not that I stock a month's worth of everything, but I tend to conserve supplies. You never know if you'll need those two mismatched socks.

31: Before then, it was reasonable to have a scrap-bag and button jar and lumber room

Wait, it's not now? Doesn't everyone have a button jar and a rag-bag?

What's a culch pile?

My Dad's father worked and contributed to the family income. I think his father might have been in farming.

My Mom's paternal grandfather had a law practice. Her paternal grandparents were rich and "retired."

31.3: Have I mentioned that I built a folding workbench using only recycled lumber?

If I understand the question in the OP, you could state it as "We had sharp class divisions before the Great Depression, then less so through the Depression and the Great Leveling, and now we do again. Have literally the same families maintained their relative positions through that period, despite looking more equal to each other in the 30s through the 70s? Is a typical story one where the Browns were much wealthier than the Smiths in 1920, their children went to the same schools and lived similar lives in the 50s, and now the Brown grandchildren are again much wealthier than the Smith grandchildren, making the apparent class mobility an illusion?"

I'm not sure that that is the question, but if it is, I don't think it's mostly the case. Obviously, very rich families have often been rich for multiple generations, but once you get a notch down into the professional/UMC classes, I don't think most people came from families that were well off before the Depression.

40 is somewhat right, except I was thinking about it from the POV of generational poverty instead of wealth. Like, the families that stayed extremely poor in the fifties - what mechanisms were keeping the opportunities away? What was going wrong - just that the depression had been that much worse for them, and the rising tide brought them up to "mere poverty"? Or what?

Like, was a poor class created in the 40s by those who were left behind for local reasons - not having a family breadwinner, etc - or were they connected by family lines to those who had been super poor before the Depression?

36: But when I got into photography, around 1952 or maybe even earlier, the advice was always "Shoot lots, film is cheap". Compared to any good gear, it was true until fairly recently.

41: I want to say that a lot of it that wasn't racial would have been regional -- the mountain south would have had poor people who didn't have access to modern schooling and jobs, for example.

43: But most people were just snapping a few candid shots on their vacation, right, and didn't pack 20 rolls. I would have packed maybe 3 rolls if I were going somewhere interesting for a week.

45: Also, cheap is different than free. With digital cameras, you can take 15 pictures of something you run across and delete the ones you don't like right away.

And I have the impression that those regionalisms kind of arose at that time? That before the 30s, there were widespread areas that lacked electricity/plumbing, and after the depression it really marked your area as poor.

39: Yes, but have you made a Roubo?

Mobes, buck up and post us a photo.

I was looking up an 1870 news story that's kind of along the same lines -- formerly wealthy man dies drunk on a roadside (column 4 page 1) -- but thought the other items might amuse. The help wanted ads catch the eye.

pdf.

Like, the families that stayed extremely poor in the fifties - what mechanisms were keeping the opportunities away?

was a poor class created in the 40s by those who were left behind for local reasons - not having a family breadwinner, etc

I think race and ethnicity have to come in to this. What about increasing urbanization (or, suburbanization)? Some people were kept out of nascent suburban housing, for example -- that's if they felt in a position to relocate in the first place. I seem to think that crackdowns on crime (along with urban planning, zoning, and pressure on all to assimilate or else) also had a place in, essentially, ghettoizing some. Not just blacks, and not just with respect to housing: what was education policy looking like?

This stuff is fascinating to me. Can someone put out a bat signal to Rauchway?

44, 47: Sounds right to me -- the poorest (white) families I know live in the regions the TVA didn't get to. Other distinction, before WWII, was that some farmland is bad, or worn out, or grows market crops but doesn't have good transport links; those were naturally poor regions.

parsimon, despite Moby's sterling example, I know lots of people who don't make and mend (and a lot more who are learning, but weren't brought up to it). Culch is indiscriminate stuff that might be useful in the future, as you might stack under the eaves of an outbuilding.

take-back laws require that the manufacturer of a good take it back for recycling if requested; I think they're originally Swiss; they're supposed to lead to design for efficient repair, reuse, or deconstruction and sorting. The US is trying some for electronics.

Have I mentioned that I built a folding workbench using only recycled lumber?

JPEG or it didn't happen.

52.2: Culch is indiscriminate stuff that might be useful in the future, as you might stack under the eaves of an outbuilding.

Oh. I don't have any of that in my household. {strolls away, whistles nonchalantly}

50: Oh, how times have not changed!

"The Rochester _Union_ has discovered another evidence in support of the frequent Democratic cry about Centralization...President Grant's Thanksgiving proclamation...Centralizing the powers and privileges of the Federal Government.''

'''Lady Burgoyne has received a costly gold locket...as a souvenir of her [Empress Eugenie's] memorable voyage to England in Sir John Burgoyne's yacht'''

''Dr. Duvall, who is in the Wisconsin State Prison for murdering his wife, has requested that he be appointed Chaplain of the institution.''

''In Norwich Conn. they started "Leather Weddings." The extent to which some people like to carry follies is apparently limitless.''

Or read the whole thing. Why were you reading it, CharleyCarp?

49, 53: See here.

56 was me.

''Agents wanted for Sexual Science''

-- but the rest of that item is unreadable. Agents wanted, in order, for Farmer's Helper, something about martyrs, Sexual Science, A Light of the World, Free Love and its Votaries, and Overland through Asia. Culture wars ahoy.

Ichabod E. Clark, the formerly prominent and estimable man found dead drunk by the road, was my grandfather's great grandfather.

He hadn't been either prominent or estimable, I don't think, for quite a number of years by 1870. In the 30s and 40s he had a store on the docks in New Bedford, catering to the whaling trade. By the 50s, when he appears at all in records, it's as a blacksmith, and he's basically invisible through the 60s.

At least two of his children were institutionalized for mental illness, so it's kind of natural to conjecture explanations.

VERY NICE!

Being named Ichabod seems like an excessive burden, too. Huh.

It is a nice workbench, Moby. Why folding? Where are you cunningly hiding it? (I have visions of dinner-guests trapped at a show-and-tell. Better than vacation slides, though.)

That's not very sensitive of you, heebie.

It's folding because I want it in the garage and I want to be able to get the car in the garage also.

55: Oh, how times have not changed!

Because I am, these days, the most ridiculous political junkie, I've been watching CSPAN's replaying of various political convention speeches. Jimmy Carter in 1976: wow, he's quite good. Ted Kennedy in 1980, that's interesting. Everybody in these historic DNC speeches mentions universal health care/insurance, and that was 30 years ago. For some reason that surprised me.

Doesn't everyone have a button jar and a rag-bag?

I have these things! But almost as a nostalgic habit, I think-- not for the same reasons as my grandmothers. I have a button jar to store the extra buttons that come with shirts and sweaters, and just because buttons are aesthetically pleasing. I don't know that I've ever used a button out of the button jar; I just collect them. The rag collection is mostly made of stuff that was too crappy to take to Goodwill: holey jeans, stained t-shirts. The rags mostly get used for cleaning bike parts.

||
NMM to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. As I understand it he frowned upon the practice anyway.
|>

buttons are aesthetically pleasing

Too true.

65: Right, I don't see how you can clean yucky messes without rags. As for buttons: when they fall off a shirt of sweater, I put them in the jar. I ... uh ... will sew them back on.

Buttons make a man proud.

So should the nym of 66, which I don't recognize.

Tiny Hermaphrodite has been around for a while, though I don't recall the Esq. Maybe it was always there.

We should recall that business took the opportunity to lay off workers and slash wages very gladly, and more than the economic situation warranted, much like today. (See Mellon, A.)

No, it has not always been there.

On stockpiling.

I don't see how you can clean yucky messes without rags.

Paper towels. Actually, Home Depot sells 2 relevant products: Box O' Rags, consisting of ~100 lightweight cotton rags that are, judging by the volume in which they're sold, intended to be disposable; and Heavyweight Paper Towels, which I know to be used in body shops (where standard paper towels won't cut it and rags would become hopelessly greasy pretty quickly), but which I suspect are used by a fair number of homeowners as rag substitutes.

It makes me quite pleased when one of our kids spills something and runs to the rag bin, wipes up the spill, then tosses the rag into the hamper on the basement landing. I think the spills would annoy me if they were using up paper towels, but instead they're just every-so-slightly hastening the next load of kitchen linens, and being good members of the household.

Well, congrats on your bar passage, Tiny!

31: 23: On the contrary, unless I'm misinterpreting you. She prefers the current system, although presumably no-one coming out of it is as tough as she was.

I think that you did misinterpret. My point was that the Depression-toughened were good stewards of the (for want of a better term) welfare state, because they understood the alternative. By contrast, most Tea Partiers are young enough to have known only comfort, and associate the welfare state (including labor and safety regulation) with handouts to the undeserving. Hence the hilarious "USG out of Medicare" signs - if gov't is always and everywhere interfering and/or helping the undeserving, then ipso facto it cannot be involved in Medicare, which helps someone deserving (me).

But I think the original mistake - that gov't is always bad - is one to which Depression survivors are less prone. I knew a WW2 vet who was a lifelong Republican, but he always gave FDR credit, because he saw how much good he did. Obviously plenty of Republicans withstood that particular lesson, but I think that the universal popularity, except among Bircher types, of the welfare state in the '50s comes back to having an electorate almost exclusively consisting of those who had firsthand Depression memories.

75 gets it exactly right.

As does 71. Reminds me of an early GYWO in which the characters are complaining about Bush saying, "Let's roll," and suggesting that it was actually a coded message to business owners, who would soon be "rolling" on American labor at SE Asian wages.

75:
Gods no, I just decided I can be an Esq. on the Internets, I am really a failed philosophy major.

Congratulations on pretending to pass the bar!

Also, (as i have mentioned) I don't live in the States.

Then your pretense is all the more impressive! Congrats!

re: 43/46, etc.

The 'wisdom' among people who continue to shoot film, is that you get a higher percentage of 'keepers' with film, partly because of the difference in mentality. I've no idea if it's true. It's something people tell themselves, anyway, true or no.

What is true is that for people who are buying serious or semi-serious cameras it's probably _still_ not true that digital is cheaper than film. People replace their dSLR every three or four years, or more often even. Whereas the person buying a high-ish end film camera might keep it for decades. The depreciation and cost of new digital kit buys a LOT of film.

Danke Heebie, Nasenfluss.

I've no idea if it's true.

In general, I mean. It's true for me, but because of the decreasing cost of film cameras, I have never owned a digital camera in the same performance bracket [i.e. right near the top end] as my film cameras.

I would have thought that lenses is what made great cameras so expensive, and that that wouldn't matter whether it was a digital or film. All the other bells and whistles (besides how much data you're storing) would be equivalent between the two, right?

re: 85

Well, the lenses are a big part of the expense, but not all of it. The difference now is that people may keep the same lenses for a long(ish) time, but they replace the bodies much more often. Because sensor technology changes, and because autofocus technology improves, and because they feel they have to keep up with the Joneses. When sensor technology changed in the past, you just bought some rolls of it to put in your existing camera.

I recently had to explain to Iris why the local pharmacy advertises 1-Hr. Photo on its exterior.

My recollection from film days is that it wasn't the film cost per se, it was the developing cost. And I'm wondering if this would be part of the reason for the disparity between amateurs/snapshoters and pros/hobbyists: a pro makes her own contact sheet and then only prints the good ones, whereas an amateur is stuck with developing 100 pictures to get a dozen good ones, which can really add up. So instead you economize at the front end, hoping that what pics you take turn out reasonably well.

re: 87.last

Probably. Also, the ordinary user buying a not-particularly expensive digital camera probably keeps it for a while, as they've been 'good enough' for small prints, and web/facebook images for years. So the economics definitely favour the shift for them.

The guy with the $2000 dSLR, in the medium term, perhaps not so much.

76: Still confused. Neighbor would not rather that more of her children died young in order that the rest of them vote for the Great Society. I don't see a lot of daylight between thinking that that was a good outcome and the neoStraussian (?) view that we need a precariate so people will stay married. The Tea Party remains educable until they're dead.

Theoretically.

Now, the view that humans will never escape the boom-bust cycles, because the only thing that makes us sensible is suffering to great for sensible people to allow, that I could get behind. Like ibn Khaldun, but less poetic.

Hey, ttaM, any UK-general views on changes in class mobility?

Hey, ttaM, any UK-general views on changes in class mobility?

There isn't much. That is all, basically.

There's obviously quite a lot of sociological/economic research on class mobility, which I'm less familiar with than some here, I expect. But the US and the UK both have very low levels of class-mobility compared to some other first-world countries.

http://www.oecd.org/tax/publicfinanceandfiscalpolicy/45002641.pdf

86: Yes, that's right. And fast & accurate AF performance has become more important as the Boomer's eyes deteriorate. Notice how watches are getting bigger and bigger too.

re: 91

Yeah, and it's [AF] where compacts lag so much. I have a very good digital compact [good enough that I'm selling my ageing dSLR as the compact produces higher quality images] but when I tried to take some photos of relatives skating a few months back, I was crying out for a manual focus camera with no shutter lag.

82

The 'wisdom' among people who continue to shoot film, is that you get a higher percentage of 'keepers' with film, partly because of the difference in mentality. I've no idea if it's true. It's something people tell themselves, anyway, true or no.

Well of course you have a higher percentage of keepers with film but you have more keepers with digital because you take so many more photos.

40

I'm not sure that that is the question, but if it is, I don't think it's mostly the case. Obviously, very rich families have often been rich for multiple generations, but once you get a notch down into the professional/UMC classes, I don't think most people came from families that were well off before the Depression.

I would like to see some figures on this. I was a bit surprised at how many of my ancestors seemed to be in about the same position as me (roughly somewhere in the middle of the top 20%). Of course there are numerous ways my impression could be wrong or misleading.

once you get a notch down into the professional/UMC classes, I don't think most people came from families that were well off before the Depression.

Yeah, I wonder about this as well. I have a weird impression that between the world wars, most people were either hardscrabble or rolling in dough (the roaring 20s, right?) -- this impression comes mostly from film and television, which is likely faulty. It's as though there was no middle class ... and indeed, policy reforms post-Depression created the sort of robust middle class we're now familiar with. Still, it didn't spring out of nowhere.

You haven't been truly board until somebody tells you their life story, their child visitation issues, complains about their taxes going to minority group members so they can buy nice rims, and explains how much money they have refused to take for their car.

When life makes you board, make a workbench.

complains about their taxes going to minority group members

I heard quite enough about that from our former landlord a couple of weeks ago. Along with a bunch of stuff about how he works goddamn hard, dammit.

Was he mostly upset that he didn't have as nice of rims as he could have if his taxes weren't wasted?

I remain firmly convincedy that racism is wrong and that any rims that keep your tires round are just fine.

That's funny, I believe my taxes mostly went to the Mars rover. Which does have pretty awesome rims.

He was making signs with his hands like the ones the people make in music videos. I would have got him a beer but I think he would have never left if I did.

Did he tell you how to whistle?

No. Should I have asked?

No.

I got home and watched the first five seconds of the video in the next post, so I get it now.

That must be the only bar in the world that serves both broccoli and a salad with dinner plus has seven big screen TVs for sports.

89: Oh good Lord, I wasn't saying that the Depression was a Good Thing because it led to a lot of support for the welfare state. I was just suggesting that the reason that the welfare state was stable and had consensus for a lot of decades, and is now in a parlous state, has to do with the votes and voices of Americans who remembered what the pre-welfare state was like - and their now-dwindling numbers.

and their now-dwindling numbers.

Go to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle and you'll see plenty of them still hanging on.

108: Comity! Though I still can't get 108 out of your previous posts.

108: Comity! Though I still can't get 108 out of your previous posts.

I actually suspect that for people working at the very high end the increase in photos taken is not as great as it is at the other end. (Still an increase, but they are already working in a hundreds-at-a-time mode.)

re: 93

I don't think that's a generalisation you can really make. I think there's two factors that (for the general public) have resulted from the shift to digital:

i) You can shoot more (because until you choose to print, more shots are essentially free), and

ii) You can see what you are getting, as the feedback is near instant.

[There's a third, too, in that quality at the bottomish end if higher.]

I don't think either of those are a major factor in professional or serious-amateur photography. As Keir points out (and as Biohazard said above with the quote about film being cheap), professionals always shot a lot. Film was never a high percentage of the cost of working. The cost of processing and proofing even a large volume of film isn't that high compared to other costs -- studio hire, models, lighting, assistants, and so on. Plus, there isn't the 'stochastic' element for the professional or knowledgeable amateur. They _know what they are doing_. They aren't relying on randomness to throw up a good shot.

As for the second, I suspect that's key for the person who isn't taking photographs as an end in themselves. It's great to see if you got a good shot, and know you can try again if you didn't. For the professional, to the extent that they needed to see in advance what they were getting, they always could. That's what Polaroid/proofing backs were for. But also see, _they know what they are doing_ above.

Both of those factors: volume, and instant feedback, often are a big deal for people not doing it for a living, of course.* If you are relying on shooting a lot (because you aren't actively setting up shots, and don't particularly know what you are doing) and then editing down to just the good ones, then yeah, great.

In the area of (professional) photography** I'm involved in at work, volumes haven't really changed at all, nor have the percentage of 'keepers' with the shift to digital. What has changed (for the better) is the colour accuracy of the end result.

* what has emerged with digital is a new class of ignorant professional or semi-professional. Often people doing it as a side-business or hobby that they are trying to 'monetize'. There are people shooting weddings and the like who genuinely don't know what they are doing. Auto-everything, shoot loads and hope you get enough good ones.
** which is essentially specialist product/reproduction photography.

'is higher', I mean.

I'm hoping to use cameras with the IR filters replaced for some research, and since the method is `rubber-band the button down and hang them from a kite', and I know nothing about photography, I'm so, so, grateful for the shooting-loads technique.

Gemmunz.

One thing is that for a lot of high-end work, the stuff you need to see, you need to see at a lot higher quality than on the lcd on the camera. (Which is why you'd ideally be checking off a computer screen on the shoot as much as possible.)

I think the big advantage for professionals is in more inherently uncontrollable settings. But even then, lots of traditional, film, photography involved taking more photos in a structured, methodical way designed to increase chances one worked. (Things like bracketing exposures etc.)

re: 116.last

Yeah. Bracketing exposures, using metering techniques particularly suited to the task at hand, using particular film development techniques (e.g. compensating developers, or push developers or whatever), and so on.

re: 116.first

At work we [collective we, not me personally] work tethered, to very large screens as very precise focus [beyond what can be ensured by auto-focus*] is crucial.

* we use autofocus lenses and bodies some of the time, but a lot of the time it's large format manual focus bodies with digital backs on them.

I know a photography lecturer who still insists that the students in his two-week intro photography module take no more than 48 shots one week, and 48 the next.

(I.e. no deletions etc.)

re: 118

Yeah. The photographers I work with were trained largely in the late 80s and early to mid 90s. A time by which autofocus motor-drive bodies were ubiquitous, and medium format or 35mm SLRs the standard 'pro' camera of choice. They were still required to spend the first few months (perhaps longer, I forget) shooting nothing but large format film in a view camera. Which is a slightly more extreme version of the same process.

I think party photography changed hugely with digital photos. (Apropos of nothing, but that's probably a super interesting area of work, I think.)

Yeah, it's also true that standards have gone up heaps. I've goty two catalogues from the 70's on my desk, (Caro & Tucker, both at the Serpentine) and they have some dreadful photos in them, that I really doubt would ever go out these days.

re: 120.last

Yes, although I don't think it's really led to much improvement at the higher end. Your modern day Avedons, or Penns, or whoever. Not that there's any real reason to expect that it would. There's good work being done now, just as there was good work being done in the past. I expect there's a certain minimum threshold that stuff has to pass now, though, which is higher than it was in the past, yeah.

Yeah, it's a floor, I think. (And, mind you, those Serpentine catalogues are pretty hilarious. One of them reproduces an install shot of a Matisse upside down, which am pretty sure was not really good practice even then.)

the US and the UK both have very low levels of class-mobility compared to some other first-world countries.

Class in the sense of economic status, that is. I'm not sure how social class mobility in the UK compares to other countries - for example, I know that France still has a very definite sense of whether you're haut-bourgeois or petit-bourgeois or whatever, and that's pretty orthogonal to how much money you are earning.

The GI Bill did a lot for social mobility in the US. Those who were drafted and survived the War got a leg up in the post-War boom: an advantage they've passed on to their children.

France also has relatively low economic mobility (though it beats the US and UK), as does Italy. The Nordics, northern Europe and Canada all do way better than either the UK or France.

See http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008/2/economic%20mobility%20sawhill/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.PDF

The thing about social mobility is that people come down as well as up.

Now to make a lot of that acceptable to your standard politician, and indeed to your modal voter who bothers to turn out, you need one of two conditions: either a staggeringly high rate of growth in the economy as a whole, which has been largely absent in the last 20-30 years because although the headline numbers looked very pretty before 2006, they actually reflected the insane enrichment of the 1% while the rest of us virtually flatlined; or a high degree of general confidence in the safety net, which successive governments in the UK and US have been undermining since forever. Therein lies the distinction with Scandinavia, where it remains closer to intact.

Canada and Australia are interesting stories; very high intergenerational economic mobility but without a particularly Nordic (except in comparison to the US) welfare state.

121: There certainly is a greater emphasis on something called "IQ" for image quality no matter how fucking banal the picture. The dpreview comments are loaded with nattering on about some lens defect visible only to someone looking at individual pixels in a picture of the same old damned flower people have been shooting since film began.

Wedding photographers are shooting more 'cause their clients expect many more shots, and I suspect there's a bit more experimentation going on (I played with splashes for a couple of days 'cause it was "free" and I could see the results immediately) but as ttaM said, the people who really knew what they were doing still do.

My grandfather was an architect in Chicago, who had spent years building up his own practice. Then the Depression came along, and a whole bunch of his clients suddenly couldn't pay. He had to close his business, and got a job selling linoleum instead. One of the colleges he had been designing buildings for let him and his family live in married student housing for free for a year or two in lieu of the fee they could no longer afford to pay him. Of the four adults in that household (my grandmother's sister and her husband moved in with them), he was the only one who still had an income of any sort. He later moved around the country in search of work. I know he spent some time working in the Oklahoma oil fields. Finally, a friend of his working for a corporation in New York got him a job there, starting (I think) as a janitor, but from which he later moved into a more professional position. So his arc was middle-class to middle-class, with the help of some of the social capital he had built up, but with some definite detours along the way.

His experience taught me some lessons about surviving tough economic times, that came in handy when I lost my job a few years ago during the Great Recession. Basically, don't worry too much about what you used to do or who you used to be, but keep asking yourself "what are people willing to pay me money to do right now?," and then go do that, if you can.

Wait, is "Dave W." different than "Dave [with a last initial W] the Unfogged Commenter"?

I believe the latter is not from the US.

131: Yes, I believe the latter actually goes by "David" (rather than "Dave").

I think the former is also not from the US. I think he is from Obama's birthplace.

If everyone would just obey me unquestioningly, we wouldn't have problems.

132 -- There's a David with some connection to Obama's high school, but he uses a different letter.

Knocking around on other topics, I see that 35 years ago today, I went to a Linda Ronstadt concert. She was in uniform. You poor poor pitiful deprived folks.

134. That was a good thread.

I had such a crush on Linda Ronstadt when she did her first album of standards. Her version of "I've Got A Crush On You" (especially as filmed for PBS) was just adorable. So I adored her.

135, 137: the sanctity of off-blog infatuation (cry, cry, masturbate, cry).

131: As far as I know, I am the only "Dave W., the Unfogged Commenter." Google searches for 'site:unfogged.com "Dave W."' and 'site:unfogged.com DaveW' seem to be all my comments. (I seem to have migrated from the DaveW spelling towards the Dave W. version over time.) You can tell for sure by checking the associated email address - if it's the sebastian9 one, that's me. There is another Dave W. how comments over at Unqualified Offerings, so I'm now going by dewtell over there to avoid confusion, but I don't think he's ever commented here.

||

For anyone who grew up in the '90s and read The Babysitters Club stories...an endearingly lovely reminiscence in comic form.

||>

For anyone who grew up in the '90s and read The Babysitters Club stories...an endearingly lovely reminiscence in comic form.

Aw, yay. Thumbs up!

139 -- I was confusing you and David W/eman who now (I think?) goes by "David the Unfogged Commenter."

If people would just use names like Kickass McHugeTits, we wouldn't have this problem.

134: hah, that thread. I lay claim to coining Bave's pseud based on that thread but he claims Arthegall beat me to it.

Sanctity of parsimonious communication!

You deprived losers should hear about how essear got his pseud.

When I came up with my pseud I thought up at least 3 different false stories to tell about where it came from. I've forgotten them.

134: Since my first Unfogged meetup predates that thread (not to mention a bunch of commenting here), I think my use of "Dave W." is safely grandfathered.

If people would just use names like Kickass McHugeTits, we wouldn't have this problem.

Somebody who posts under the name of a British chain of car parts stores should take their own advice.

Wry Cooper is still available for either naming need.