Today I am going to talk about economics. Not that I am necessarily qualified to do so, I only took two classes in it. My maternal grandmother on the other hand, majored in economics and graduated with a degree in it, from Berkeley, in the 1930s
Can you imagine what that was like? Studying about money during the Great Depression? My grandmother knew about loss because her family lost their wealth during the big crash. Apparently her uncle’s large estate was taken by the state for lack of money for taxes and made into a park. At the college, her economic textbooks would been heavily updated from the end of the previous decade. “Well, that stock market turned out to be pretty volatile.” I never saw those texts firsthand, but I did catch a look at one of her yearbooks. I saw a photo of my grandmother in it with her sorority sisters. The 1935 edition was inspired by Fascism. One of the section headers included a quote from Hitler. At the time that mindset was seen as a source of economic growth in Europe, so many Americans hoped it could be the answer for us as well.
If you were wondering, no there were not many women working in economics in the thirties. When my grandmother graduated, nobody was hiring “lady” economists. She was instead offered a job as a secretary, but had to take a course in shorthand first. Anyway, she married my grandfather and the US went to war with Japan and Hitler’s Germany. My grandparents joined the effort and were stationed at a blimp hangar on the Pacific coast. The US shook off its financial slump and made a bunch of mid-century money. My grandparents worked super hard did all right for themselves, investing their life savings in Lehman Brothers.
Oh yeah about the economy, it’s tricky business and things can turn on a dime. I worked at an internet startup in 2006-2007 called Dow Jones Business English. It was at the height of the housing bubble that was rapidly turning into the housing crisis. Then my job went away because the banks I was reading and writing about also supplied money to the company I worked for. As for grandma, she was in her nineties when her life’s savings went away for the second time; RIP Lehman Bros.
My point is that what goes up like a hot air balloon can come down like the Hindenburg. People that seem to have all the answers can be really, really wrong. I have paid attention long enough to know that while you can ride the waves of economic growth, crashes are inevitable so be careful who you invest in and don’t make your whole life just about money.
The cover of the 1935 UC Berkeley yearbook looking sus.