Astronaut loses tool bag, spacewalk to continue
HOUSTON (AP) — Flight controllers were revamping plans Wednesday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour's visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip.
The briefcase-sized tool bag drifted away from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Tuesday as she cleaned and lubed a gummed-up joint on a wing of solar panels on the space station. She and fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen were midway through the first of four spacewalks planned for the mission. The tool bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalker.
As Stefanyshyn-Piper cleaned up a large gob of grease that seeped from a gun used to lubricate the joint, the tool case somehow became untethered from a larger bag and floated away along with a pair of grease guns, wipes and a putty knife attached to it.
"What it boils down to is all it takes is one small mistake for a tether not to be hooked up quite correctly or to slip off, and that's what happened here," said lead spacewalk officer John Ray.
Stefanyshyn-Piper and Bowen finished the spacewalk in almost seven hours by sharing tools from Bowen's bag. Ray noted that Stefanyshyn-Piper showed "real character and great discipline" by continuing on. She was the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight.
"Despite my little hiccup, or major hiccup, I think we did a good job out there," Stefanyshyn-Piper said after returning to the space station.
Flight controllers are considering having the two spacewalkers share Bowen's pair of grease guns for the three remaining spacewalks on Thursday, Saturday and Monday. They could also use caulking guns meant for repairing the space shuttle. Another option is to have one spacewalker clean the joint while the other uses the grease gun to lubricate it.
For more than a year, the joint has been unable to automatically point the right-side solar wings toward the sun for maximum energy production.
Officials weren't worried the bag would hit the space station or the docked space shuttle because by late Tuesday it already was 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) in front of the orbiting complex, said flight director Ginger Kerrick.
"It is definitely moving away with every orbit," Kerrick said.
Inside the space station, crewmembers were so ahead of schedule in moving equipment delivered by Endeavour that shuttle flight planners were contemplating skipping an extra day at the outpost orbiting 220 miles (355 kilometers) above Earth.
The equipment includes a recycling system that converts urine into water, an extra bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms, an exercise machine and refrigerator that will allow space station residents to enjoy cold drinks for the first time. And the extra gear will allow the space station's crew to double to six next year.
The water recycling system was to be hooked up late Wednesday, and the first batch of urine would run through the system later in the week. Samples will be flown back to Earth for safety tests before astronauts use it.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2008-11-18-space-shuttle_N.htm
(If you go to the link they have some neat graphics and video also)
European Stocks Advance; Total, Shell, Alcatel Lead the Gains
By Adam Haigh
Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- European stocks rose as higher oil prices lifted energy producers and better-than-expected earnings from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Home Depot Inc. eased concern the recession will snuff out profits.
Total SA, Europe's third-largest energy producer, and BP Plc climbed more than 4 percent as crude gained. Alcatel-Lucent SA jumped 4.8 percent on Dassault Aviation's 1.56 billion-euro ($2 billion) offer for Alcatel's stake in Thales SA.
The Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index added 0.8 percent at 201.91 in London, reversing an earlier decline of as much as 2.2 percent. The gauge has lost 45 percent this year as writedowns and credit losses topped $965 billion in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
U.S. earnings are ``reassuring the market,'' said Arnaud Scarpaci, a fund manager at Agilis Gestion in Paris, which oversees $152 million. The market ``seems oversold,'' he said.
The Stoxx 600 is valued at 9 times reported earnings of the companies in the index, below the four-year average of 14 times profit. The gauge traded at 7.9 times earnings in Oct. 27, the lowest since at least January 2002.
National benchmark indexes increased in nine of the 18 markets in western Europe. The U.K.'s FTSE 100 rose 1.9 percent, and France's CAC 40 gained 1.1 percent. Germany's DAX added 0.5 percent.
Total climbed 4.6 percent to 40.76 euros. BP, Europe's second-biggest oil producer, added 4.1 percent to 507.5 pence, and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, the largest, gained 3.9 percent to 1,693 pence.
Oil Gains
Crude oil for December delivery rose 75 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $55.70 a barrel in New York.
Alcatel-Lucent jumped 4.8 percent to 1.90 euros. Dassault Aviation offered 1.56 billion euros ($2 billion) for Alcatel- Lucent's 20.8 percent stake in Thales SA.
Earnings from Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest maker of personal computers, and Home Depot, the largest home-improvement retailer, signaled they are withstanding the economic slowdown. Banks led declines earlier today as concern the economic slowdown will trigger more losses, while Burberry Group Plc's forecast disappointed investors.
BNP Paribas SA dropped 5.1 percent to 40.81 euros. UBS AG, the Swiss bank that got a $59.2 billion aid package from the state and central bank, lost 3.5 percent to 13.27 francs.
The cost of protecting bank bonds from default rose to the highest in almost a month as prices of mortgage-linked securities tumble.
Burberry
Burberry, the London-based luxury goods company, slid 13 percent to 175 pence after saying pretax earnings may be at the ``mid to lower'' end of analysts' projections in the current fiscal year.
Earnings for the 1,829 companies in western Europe that reported results since Oct. 7 declined 9.9 percent on average, trailing expectations by 6 percent, Bloomberg data show.
Analysts now predict profit will slide 10 percent in 2008, compared with 11 percent growth forecast at the start of the year, the data show.
Carphone Warehouse Group Plc slumped 9.4 percent to 118 pence. Europe's largest mobile-phone retailer said it won't sell the TalkTalk Internet unit as it considers splitting into two listed companies.
ERG SpA, Italy's biggest exporter of oil products, slipped 4.6 percent to 11.26 euros. Morgan Stanley gave it an ``underweight'' recommendation and a price estimate of 10.40 euros on the shares.
Bilfinger Berger AG, Germany's second-largest construction company, led construction shares lower after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. added the stock to its ``conviction sell'' list, citing expectations for lower capital spending in chemicals and oil industries. The shares lost 4.9 percent to 30.61 euros.
Hochtief AG, Germany's biggest construction company, sank 2.8 percent to 27.66 euros.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a6LygoxbIcxc&refer=home
Here are a couple of articles that go along with the pirate post, i did this past Wednesday. The first one is about how as BadTimes set in the crime rate will increase. The story is from Scotland, but it will happen here also. The others are about the Pirate problems.
Inside Home Affairs: Heading for recession – and the crime wave that goes with it
Published Date: 19 November 2008
By Michael Howie
NOW that people increasingly feel they cannot afford that new HD TV or hi-fi, will they be more likely to steal it?
That is the question senior police officers are asking themselves as the economic downturn starts to bite in Scotland.
After several years of declining crime rates, there are some indications the tide may be turning as recession triggers an increase in shoplifting, housebreaking, fraud and other "dishonesty" offences.
Last week, a report from Lothian and Borders Police showed a 9 per cent increase in crimes of dishonesty, year on year, for the three months ending 30 September.
Tom Halpin, the force's acting chief constable, said he was "very alert to the possibility that the current financial climate could have had an effect on the level of crime".
A 9 per cent increase means more than 1,500 more crimes were committed in the force area in one quarter.
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, recently warned violent crime could grow by nearly a fifth – a prediction based on what happened during the 1991-2 recession.
The Home Office has singled out attacks on immigrants, who may be blamed for "stealing jobs", as a particular concern.
It appears, however, that a credit-crunch crime wave has yet to hit us.
The Scotsman has learned that, since April, crimes of dishonesty have fallen in at least four of Scotland's eight police force areas – Grampian, Fife, Central Scotland and Dumfries and Galloway.
However, most experts are in agreement: crime rates will increase as the recession deepens.
And one leading academic told me: "We are likely to see rates of imprisonment rise as unemployment rises.
"Courts tend to favour custodial sentences because unemployment people will have more free time and therefore be more inclined to commit further offences."
A rise in white-collar crime is also predicted, as tens of thousands of middle-class workers face redundancy.
The picture appears to be bleak indeed.
http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Heading-for-recession--and.4706853.jp
Off Africa's coast, pirates 'out of control'By Tom Vanden Brook, Jim Michaels and Peter Eisler, USA TODAY
They come out of the darkness in the waters off the coast of East Africa, zooming up in speedboats to the sides of massive cargo ships, armed with grappling hooks, AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.
Quickly, these modern-day pirates climb aboard their prey: cargo ships that contain food, machine parts and, most recently, oil or enough weaponry to supply a small army. Most of the time they meet no opposition — only frightened, unarmed crews who find themselves prisoners and held for ransoms that have exceeded $1 million.
Based in Somalia, these pirates are only a little like the images of the daring, swashbuckling thieves who have gallivanted through Hollywood movies or adventure stories that have been passed on for generations.
These pirates typically use the Global Positioning System to coordinate attacks along major shipping corridors in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. A report last month by Chatham House, a British think tank, said that once aboard, Somali pirates typically are focused on demanding a ransom from the ship's operators and chewing khat, a narcotic leaf that is a stimulant, that they bring with them.
Piracy off Somalia's coast has long been a symbol of that African nation's instability. Now attacks on shipping are soaring and becoming more brazen, heightening concerns about the safety of shipping from oil-rich areas in Africa and the Middle East at a time of global economic instability.
The potential for Somali renegades to send tremors through the world's economy was clear Saturday, when pirates captured their biggest prize to date: the Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker brimming with 2 million barrels of oil (estimated value: $100 million).
The Times of London reported Wednesday the Saudi government had confirmed that the ship's owner — Vela International Marine — was negotiating a possible ransom with pirates who boarded the oil tanker more than 450 nautical miles from the Kenyan port of Mombasa.
The pirates' raid of the Sirius Star — and hijackings Tuesday in the Gulf of Aden of a Thai ship with 16 crewmembers and an Iranian cargo vessel with a crew of 25 — are signs that attacks by loosely organized bands of Somali pirates are "a criminal enterprise which has gone completely out of control," says Capt. Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau, which tracks piracy.
U.S. and British analysts say the series of raids underscore worries that terrorists could dive into the same lawless seas off East Africa, capture booty to finance their operations or mount a spectacular attack with a seized ship.
"There is serious concern that terrorists see piracy as an opportunity for themselves," says Roger Middleton, an expert on piracy at Chatham House. "It can provide the means to generate enormous amounts of money, or to capture a boat with the more disturbing prospect of a huge oil tanker as a floating bomb."
In March, the Pentagon confirmed that U.S. forces attacked a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist in Somalia.
Pirates already are driving up the cost of shipping and insurance. Some shipping lines have begun avoiding the shipping corridors near Somalia and their shortcut to the West through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, which can add between five and 10 days to a trip from Asia to Europe, says David Ellis, president of Odfjell USA, a Norwegian-owned shipping company. Each extra day at sea, he says, costs about $30,000.
Environmental catastrophe looms if a supertanker is punctured during an attack or purposely sunk, Middleton says.
The Bush administration is trying to coordinate efforts to stop the pirates, although military officials say they can't stop all pirates because there are too many ships in a huge area to protect.
"We're working with other members of the Security Council right now to see if there are actions that we can do to more effectively fight against piracy and prevent it," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday.
Meantime, the pirates continue to operate with near impunity across broad swaths of the Indian Ocean. They often anchor their seized boats near the ungoverned Somali coast and wait for the ships' owners to pay increasingly lucrative ransoms.
This year, pirates have attacked at least 95 ships near Somalia, including 38 hijackings, Mukundan says. More than 740 crewmembers have been taken hostage. There has been one fatality, Middleton says, adding that he fears hijackings could become increasingly violent.
Last year saw fewer than 25 attacks. As recently as 2004, pirates made just five raids. During the last week alone, pirates attacked 11 ships off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden.
The pirates' targets usually are slow-moving cargo ships that can't match the mobility of the pirates' small, swift 15-foot skiffs powered by outboard engines. The pirates zip around the larger ships, locate a low deck and climb aboard with rope ladders. The shipping vessels' small crews — the huge supertanker had just 25 aboard — often are armed lightly, if at all, and are easily subdued by pirates with automatic weapons.
"Clearly, they are tactically proficient at what they do," says Cmdr. Jane Campbell, spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain, which patrols the region.
At first, the pirates worked in the waters close to shore. Now, they're ranging into open waters, expanding their range with so-called mother ships. These vessels, often fishing trawlers, can hold several skiffs and travel hundreds of miles offshore to menace shipping lanes.
For now, money appears to be the primary motive for piracy, Middleton says. A few years ago, ransoms in the tens of thousands of dollars were common. Last year, pirates gathered ransoms of a few hundred thousand dollars. In 2008, they have been topping $1 million. Ransom payments could total $30 million this year, Middleton says.
In one case, Middleton wrote, the ransom was paid in cash delivered by boat to the pirates on the captured ship. After splitting the cash, the pirates slipped away at night and evaded capture.
When coalition warships board pirate ships, they dispose of the weapons, but have to let the suspects go, Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of the 5th Fleet, told USA TODAY on Wednesday. "That is the single biggest shortfall that we have. We could have a huge effect if we could solve that problem."
Fighting back
The challenge of protecting more than 16,000 ships that move through the region is enormous. Ships from the 5th Fleet, NATO, Russia and other countries cruise the waters. But the pirates' hunting grounds are vast: more than 1 million square miles. That's an area roughly four times the size of Texas or the Red and Mediterranean seas combined.
"We can't be everywhere," Gortney says. "They can be fishermen and 10 minutes later they're on the vessel," he says. "Once they're onboard the vessel, we have a hostage situation."
In recent months, there has been some success in fending off pirates. Last month, pirates captured 31% of the ships they attacked compared with 53% in August, according to the 5th Fleet.
On Tuesday, for example, the Indian Navy encountered a suspected pirate mother ship in the Gulf of Aden towing two speedboats, an Indian government statement said. The suspected pirates, seen brandishing rocket-propelled grenade launchers, fired at the Indian ship.
The INS Tabar returned fire and sank the ship. The suspected pirates fled on the speedboats.
The International Maritime Organization has urged its members to use a recommended corridor in the sea that is patrolled by the U.S. Navy, NATO and ships from other countries.
An average of 15 military vessels operate in the Maritime Security Protection Area, which was established Aug. 22 to protect commercial ships in the Gulf of Aden. Participating nations include the United States, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, according to Royal Navy Cdr. Stephen Chaston, a NATO spokesman.
Another challenge: Ship operators often are reluctant to carry firearms on board, says Nick Knittel, vice president of Miami-based McRoberts Maritime Security. Weapons create bureaucratic problems, because shipmasters often must declare any firearms when entering a port, and the weapons typically are impounded by that country's authorities until the ship departs, he says.
Having weapons on board could make a situation more dangerous, says Knittel, a former Army captain with the 101st Airborne Division. Crewmembers could be wounded in a firefight, Knittel says, and pirates could capture the weapons and use them against the crew.
Many large cargo ships now feature satellite tracking devices that allow companies to monitor for any changes in course or speed — and contact authorities if there are signs of a pirate attack. Crews sometimes are trained to use fire hoses to fend off pirates, and many large cargo ships sailing high-risk routes light their decks with floodlights at night and assign crewmembers to watch for attackers.
Shipping companies also can hire armed guards to ride on ships, but in many cases "it's very expensive to have armed private security, like hiring over-the-seas mercenaries," Knittel says.
Even so, the surge in pirate attacks is prompting shipping companies to consider new ways to protect their crews and cargo.
Blackwater Worldwide, the private security firm that protected U.S. diplomats in Iraq, has offered its services and 183-foot ship, the McArthur, to any nation that wants to pay to protect its cargo. It's not clear what security measures had been taken on the Sirius Star.
Having security teams aboard cargo ships may help deter attacks, Gortney says. "Companies don't think twice about using security guards to protect their valuable facilities onshore. Protecting valuable ships and their crews at sea is no different."
Fixing Somalia
The ultimate solution to piracy: creating a stable government in Somalia, which is nominally under the control of a faction backed by neighboring Ethiopia. That, says Mukundan of the International Maritime Bureau, "could take decades."
Since the ouster of longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia has been under the influence of various ethnic and religious factions. U.S. troops landed there in 1992 to help restore order; in October 1993, a battle between Army Rangers and insurgents left 18 soldiers and hundreds of Somalis dead. That battle inspired the book and movie Black Hawk Down.
The United States backed the ouster of the government led by the fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union in 2006.
It's a "stateless society," says Stephen Morrison, an Africa expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Until you get some semblance of order and governance within Somalia, you're going to see these kinds of developments — piracy, the insertion of radical Islamist movements … and you're going to see humanitarian catastrophe."http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-11-19-pirates_N.htm
Russia sends in the navy to fight pirates Reuters | Friday, 21 November 2008 Russia will keep a warship off the coast of East Africa to patrol against Somali pirates.
This month one of its destroyers, the Neustrashimy (Fearless), scared off pirates trying to capture ships in the Gulf of Aden.
"After the Neustrashimy, ships from other fleets of the Russian navy will head to the region," Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky told the RIA Novosti news agency. Military forces across the world are trying to protect cargo ships using the sea corridor around the Horn of Africa linking Europe and Asia – one of the busiest trade routes in the world. On Saturday, pirates captured a Saudi Arabian tanker carrying a cargo of oil valued at around US$100 million.
The aging Russian navy wants to improve its image after a series of deadly accidents.
This month 20 people died on a Russian submarine when fire extinguishing equipment went off, releasing a toxic gas which asphyxiated them.
It was the worst Russian naval accident since an explosion on a submarine killed 118 sailors in 2000.
Depression 2009: What would it look like?
Lines at the ER, a television boom, emptying suburbs. A catastrophic economic downturn would feel nothing like the last one.
(Greg Klee/Globe Staff Illustration)
By Drake Bennett
November 16, 2008
OVER THE PAST few months, Americans have been hearing the word "depression" with unfamiliar and alarming regularity. The financial crisis tearing through Wall Street is routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression, and the recession into which we are sinking looks deep enough, financial commentators warn, that a few poor policy decisions could put us in a depression of our own.
It's a frightening possibility, but also in many ways an abstraction. The country has gone so long without a depression that it's hard to know what it would be like to live through one.
Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like. Open a history book and the images will be familiar: mobs at banks and lines at soup kitchens, stockbrokers in suits selling apples on the street, families piled with all their belongings into jalopies. Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses. A desperate government mobilizes legions of the unemployed to build bridges and airports, to blaze trails in national forests, to put on traveling plays and paint social-realist murals.
Today, however, whatever a depression would look like, that's not it. We are separated from the 1930s by decades of profound economic, technological, and political change, and a modern landscape of scarcity would reflect that.
What, then, would we see instead? And how would we even know a depression had started? It's not a topic that professional observers of the economy study much. And there's no single answer, because there's no one way a depression might unfold. But it's nonetheless an important question to consider - there's no way to make informed decisions about the present without understanding, in some detail, the worst-case scenario about the future.
By looking at what we know about how society and commerce would slow down, and how people respond, it's possible to envision what we might face. Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we'd see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn't be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there's more work - or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones.
And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it's getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation's unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.
The odds are, most economists say, we will yet avoid a full-blown depression - the world's policy makers, they argue, have learned enough not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. Still, in a country that has known little but economic growth for 50 years, it matters to think about what life would look like without it.
There is, in fact, no agreed-upon definition of what a depression is. Economists are unanimous that the Great Depression was the worst economic downturn the industrial world has ever seen, and that we haven't had a depression since, but beyond that there is not a consensus. Recessions have an official definition from the National Bureau of Economic Research, but the bureau pointedly declines to define a depression.
What sets a depression apart, most economists would agree, are duration and the scale of joblessness. To be worthy of the name, a depression needs to be more than a few years long - far longer than the eight-month average of our recent recessions - and it needs to put a lot of people out of work. The Great Depression lasted a decade by some measures, and at its worst, one in four American workers was out of a job. (By comparison, unemployment now is at a 14-year high of 6.5 percent.)
In a modern depression, the swelling ranks of the unemployed would likely change the landscape of the country, uprooting people who would rather stay where they are and trapping people who want to move. In the 1930s, this took the visible form of waves of displaced tenant farmers washing into California, but it also had another, subtler effect: it froze the movement of the middle class. The suburbanization that was to define the post-World-War-II years had in fact started in the 1920s, only to be brought sharply to a halt when the economy collapsed.
Today, a depression could reverse that process altogether. In a deep and sustained downturn, home prices would likely sink further and not rise, dimming the appeal of homeownership, a large part of suburbia's draw. Renting an apartment - perhaps in a city, where commuting costs are lower - might be more tempting. And although city crime might increase, the sense of safety that attracted city-dwellers to the suburbs might suffer, too, in a downturn. Many suburban areas have already seen upticks in crime in recent years, which would only get worse as tax-poor towns spent less money on policing and public services.
"You could have a sort of desurburbanization phenomenon," suggests Michael Bernstein, a historian of the Depression and the provost of Tulane University.
The migrations kicked off by a depression wouldn't be in one direction, but a tangle of demographic crosscurrents: young families moving back to their hometowns to live with the grandparents when they can no longer afford to live on their own, parents moving in with their adult children when their postretirement fixed incomes can no longer support them. Some parts of the country, especially the Rust Belt, could see a wholesale depopulation as the last remnants of the American heavy-manufacturing base die out.
"There will be some cities like Detroit that in a real depression could just become ghost towns," says Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard economist and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research committee that declares recessions. (Frankel does not, he emphasizes, think we are headed for a depression.)
At the household level, the look of want is different today than during the last prolonged downturn. The government helps the unemployed and the poor with programs that didn't exist when the Great Depression hit - unemployment insurance, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security for seniors. Beyond that, two of the basics of existence - food and clothing - are a lot cheaper today, thanks to industrial agriculture and overseas labor. The average middle-class man in the late 1920s, according to the writer and cultural critic Virginia Postrel, could afford just six outfits, and his wife nine - by comparison, the average woman today has seven pairs of jeans alone. So we're less likely to see one of the iconic images of the Great Depression: Formerly middle-class workers in threadbare clothes lining up for free food.
If we look closely, however, we might see more former lawyers wearing knockoffs, doing their back-to-school shopping at Target or Wal-Mart rather than Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch. Lean times might kill off much of the taboo around buying hand-me-downs, and with modern distribution networks - and a push from the reduce-reuse-recycle mind-set of environmentalism - we might see the development of nationwide used-clothing chains.
In general, novelty would lose some of its luster. It's not simply that we'd buy less, we'd look for different qualities in what we buy. New technology would grow less seductive, basic reliability more important. We'd see more products like Nextel phones and the Panasonic Toughbook laptop, which trade on their sturdiness, and fewer like the iPhone - beautiful, cleverly designed, but not known for durability. The neighborhood appliance shop could reappear in a new form - unlicensed, with hacked cellphones and rebuilt computers.
And while very few would starve, a depression would change how we eat. Food costs remain far below what they were for a family in the 1920s and 1930s, but they have been rising in recent years, and many people already on the edge of poverty would be unable to feed themselves on their own in a harsh economic climate - soup kitchens are already seeing an uptick in attendance. At the high end of the market, specialty and organic foods - which drove the success of chains like Whole Foods - would seem pointlessly expensive; the booming organic food movement could suffer as people start to see specially grown produce as more of a luxury than a moral choice. New England's surviving farmers would be particularly hard-hit, as demand for their seasonal, relatively high-cost products dried up.
According to Marion Nestle, a food and public health professor at New York University, people low on cash and with more time on their hands will cook more rather than go out. They may also, Nestle suggests, try their hands at growing and even raising more of their own food, if they have any way of doing so. Among the green lawns of suburbia, kitchen gardens would spring up. And it might go well beyond just growing your own tomatoes: early last month, the English bookstore chain Waterstone's reported a 200 percent increase in the sales of books on keeping chickens.
At the same time, the cheapest option for many is decidedly less rustic: meals like packaged macaroni and cheese and drive-through fast food. And we're likely to see a move in that direction, as well, toward cheaper, easier calories. If so, lean times could have the odd effect of making the population fatter, as more Americans eat like today's poor.
To understand where a depression would hit hardest, however, look at the biggest-ticket items on people's budgets.
Housing, health insurance, transportation, and child care are the top expenses for American families, according to Elizabeth Warren, a bankruptcy law specialist at Harvard Law School; along with taxes, these take up two-thirds of income, on average. And when those are squeezed, that could mean everything from more crowded subways to a proliferation of cheap, unlicensed day-care centers.
Health insurance premiums have risen to onerous levels in recent years, and in a long period of unemployment - or underemployment - they would quickly become unmanageable for many people. Dropping health insurance would be an immediate way for families to save hundreds of dollars per month. People without health insurance tend to skip routine dental and medical checkups, and instead deal with health problems only when they become acute - meaning they get their healthcare through hospital emergency rooms.
That means even longer waits at ERs, which are even now overtaxed in many places, and a growing financial drain on hospitals that already struggle to pay for the care they give uninsured people. And if, as is likely, this coincided with cuts in money for hospitals coming from cash-strapped state and local governments, there's a very real possibility that many hospitals would have to close, only further increasing the burden on those that remain open. In their place people could rely more on federally-funded health centers, or the growing number of drugstore clinics, like the MinuteClinics in CVS branches, for vaccines, physicals, strep throat tests, and other basic medical care. And as the costs of traditional medicine climbed out reach for families, the appeal of alternative medicine would in all likelihood grow.
Higher education, another big expense, would probably take a hit as well. Students unable to afford private universities would opt for public universities, students unable to afford four-year colleges would opt for community colleges, and students unable to afford community college wouldn't go at all. With fewer applicants, admissions standards would drop, with spots that once would have been filled by more qualified, poorer students going instead to wealthier applicants who before would not have made the cut. Some universities would simply shrink. In Boston, a city almost uniquely dependent on higher education, the results - fewer students renting apartments, going to restaurants and bars, opening bank accounts, buying books, taking taxis - would be particularly acute.
A depression would last too long for unemployed college graduates to ride out the downturn in business or law school, so people would have to change career plans entirely. One place that could see an uptick in applications and interest is government work: Its relative stability, combined with a suspicion of free-market ideology that would accompany a truly disastrous downturn, could attract more people and even help the public sector shake off its image as a redoubt for the mediocre and the unambitious.
In many ways, though, today's depression would not look like the last one because it would not look like much at all. As Warren wrote in an e-mail, "The New Depression would be largely invisible because people would experience loss privately, not publicly."
In the public imagination, the Depression was a galvanizing time, the crucible in which the Greatest Generation came of age and came together. That is, at best, only partly true. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has found that, for many, the Depression was isolating: Kiwanis clubs, PTAs, and other social groups lost around half their members from 1930 to 1935. And other studies on economic hardship suggest that it tends to sap people's civic engagement, often permanently.
"When people become unemployed in the Great Depression, they hunker down, they pull in from everybody." Putnam says.
That effect, Putnam believes, would only be more pronounced today. The Depression was, famously, a boom time for movies - people flocked to cheap double features to escape the dreariness of their everyday poverty. Today, however, movies are no longer cheap. Nor is a day at the ballpark.
Much of a modern depression would unfold in the domestic sphere: people driving less, shopping less, and eating in their houses more. They would watch television at home; unemployed parents would watch over their own kids instead of taking them to day care. With online banking, it would even be possible to have a bank run in which no one leaves the comfort of their home.
There would be darker effects, as well. Depression, unsurprisingly, is higher in economically distressed households; so is domestic violence. Suicide rates go up in tough times, marriage rates and birthrates go down. And while divorce rates usually rise in recessions, they dropped during the Great Depression, in part because unhappy couples found they simply couldn't afford separation.
In precarious times, hunkering down can become not simply a defense mechanism, but a worldview. Grant McCracken, an anthropologist affiliated with MIT who studies consumer behavior, calls this distinction "surging" vs. "dwelling" - the difference, as he wrote recently on his blog, between believing that the world "teems with new features, new things, new opportunities, new excitement" and thinking that life's pleasures come from counting one's blessings and appreciating and holding onto what one already has. Economic uncertainty, he argues, drives us toward the latter.
As a nation, we have grown very accustomed to the momentum that surging imparts. And while a depression remains far from inevitable, it's as close as it has been in a lifetime. We might want to get a sense for what dwelling feels like.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/16/depression_2009_what_would_it_look_like/
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