Great Depression, American 'Holodomor'?

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

U.S. history contains a serious crime against its own people – the Great American Holodomor of 1932/33, which cost the lives of millions

"Where are the 7,394,000 people who disappeared from the US' governments statistics reports of the 1930s?"


RT: Such outstanding historical moments are usually reflected in literature, films, and, of course, journalist reports and research articles. The American depression is definitely one of those remarkable periods. Is there any proof of your theory in an article of a newspaper of that time?

B.B.: They did write about it, of course, but in a style similar to that used in our newspapers about the 1990s. They criticised the government, parties fought each other, someone criticised local authorities, someone insisted on their programmes, others on the opposite. As a whole, however, the bigger picture of the epoch will be seen only in a while. As for sources, they can be used for reference about those real events that were happening there.
Of course, journalists may be interested in a fact about a tractor that pulled down a farm. There are many facts of this kind – Steinbeck eloquently tells a lot about such things. But as to what happened to that farm later, the fact being that ten people left but only eight came back, is seldom told – both then and now. It’s not something of big interest to journalists.
For instance, who died in your family in the past two years?
You must bear in mind that those who died are in the lowest stratum of the American society – either had been poor, or became poor and failed to get out of this level. Try to find research details about the death rate among homeless people in Russia now – you will encounter big difficulties. You may find, but that may take a long time. And you will hardly find anything in newspapers, despite the fact that mortality among the homeless is there. And it’s about citizens of Russia and most likely the number of those dying is big. Perhaps the factor that not all of them volunteered to become homeless is the answer.

http://rt.com/usa/news/interview-with-boris-borisov/

[Os Cangaceiros]

This has been ripped apart on this website before. There is absolutely zero evidence that a mass famine that starved to death around 7 million people in the USA happened during the 30's. I have something to do atm but I'll see if I can find the threads when I get back.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

This has been ripped apart on this website before. There is absolutely zero evidence that a mass famine that starved to death around 7 million people in the USA happened during the 30's. I have something to do atm but I'll see if I can find the threads when I get back.

What do you say to the US government faking statistics for this time?


It’s interesting to note that the official American statistical data (mind you, in retrospect) does not show the increase, but decrease (!) in population in 1932-1933. This is made clear in the background of more than 5 million refugees, 2.5 million who lost their homes, and 17 million unemployed – which definitely proves the fake character of official USA statistics for the period. Those who falsified American statistics in the period overdid it to such an extent that in the peak crisis years of 1932-1933, they showed mortality rates lower than in the prosperous year of 1928.
The mortality records in the states are more impressive: Washington D.C. shows 15.1 deaths for every 1,000 people in 1932, confirming that mortality had grown. The calculation was done for the capital and that’s why the data looks authentic.
But mortality in North Dakota in the crisis year of 1932 is allegedly 7.5 persons out of 1,000 – twice as low as in the capital, and lower than in North Dakota in the prosperous year of 1925! South Carolina undoubtedly becomes the deceit champion: for the three years of 1929-1932 it made up figures of the death rate changed from 14.1 to 11.1 for every 1,000 persons.
According to the report the infant mortality situation in the country at the height of the depression had improved sufficiently in comparison with the prosperous years. From these reports we gather the impression that infant mortality rates in 1932-1933 proved to be the lowest in the whole history of statistics in the USA from 1880-1934.

http://rt.com/news/prime-time/where-did-americas-missing-millions-go-holodomor-lessons/#ref5

[Ostrinski]

There should be an automatic redirection of all posts containing links to RussiaToday into chitchat.

So many times including this one I think "wow, this looks interesti-- oh. RT."

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

There should be an automatic redirection of all posts containing links to RussiaToday into chitchat.

So many times including this one I think "wow, this looks interesti-- oh. RT."

So you are disputing that the USA faked the population statistics? Please link some statistics as to what makes you think that millions did not die because of the Capitalist Great Depression.

[Ostrinski]

I'm not saying they did and I'm not saying they didn't. I'm saying that anything that's pumped out of RT needs to be taken with a gigantic salt factory of un-unionized workers.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I'm not saying they did and I'm not saying they didn't. I'm saying that anything that's pumped out of RT needs to be taken with a gigantic salt factory of un-unionized workers.

It's not just him, in fact there are quite a few undernourishment fatalities in the US still today. 2.9 out 100,000 US americans will die of starvation. Think what that number will be in countries like Greece which has 25% unemployment and severe social cuts. It will most likely start being measured x/10,000 instead of 100,000. Then think of what 4 years of that would cause. The homeless, the children, the elderly etc. a large number would die of starvation if not for social programs and their families being employed.

I don't have any doubts about the Man's report. You have to remember that back then Americans did not even have social security, Medicare, Food Stamps and the like that are helping over 50% of Americans today. So an estimate of mine would be that if it's oughly 3/100,000 today, then it would most certainly have been measured in the x/10,000's. We would then with this very conservative estimate (given virtually no social government programs existing) talking about hundreds of thousands of thousands dying each year. So, I don't doubt that millions dies at all, the fact that the US government faked the population statistics severely (this was the biggest social crisi in Capitalist history, comparable to Greece) and that the population pyramid (a good template) compared to the actual number of Americans after the Depression showed 7 Million, indicts the US Bourgeoisie for not giving social programs to Americans earlier.

[Os Cangaceiros]

OK, here's the old thread: http://www.revleft.com/vb/7-million-people-t138742/index.html

Here's a good post, from near the end of the thread:



No one here, yet, has claimed that some people in the U.S. didn't starve to death during the Great Depression. We have numbers for New York City, for example, in the very low hundreds. Without hard data, the best we can reasonably do is extrapolate from the data we have, and assume, maybe, ten thousand people, out of 160 million, died from starvation or starvation related causes in that decade.

What the OP did, and what Sankara, Khad, and others keep attempting to do is claim that a demographic slowing of population growth is really seven million people in the U.S. died from starvation in the year 1931, with no photographs, no mass graves uncovered, no one's grandparents telling them about all the starving people, no communist news papers talking about all the starving people, nothing. BTW, mass graves are uncovered from time to time in the U.S. In Chicago in the 80s they found one for victims of the Chicago Fire. About ten to fifteen years ago, they found one of the Draft Rioters in NYC from 1863.

At the same time, we know from surveys that during the Great Depression, people had fewer children. "Mystery" solved, except that it was never a mystery in the first place. We always knew that the population growth slowed in the 30s because people had less children. But along comes some Russian claiming that, NO! the missing seven million people can only be explained by a secret famine the government cleverly hid from everyone, but only he was clever enough to figure it out, and we've got some clueless idiots running around defending the notion.

There has been real mass starvation in the U.S. before. During the Civil War the people of Vicksburg were reduced to eating dogs, cats, rats, and eventually digging up corpses before they surrendered. The commander of Andersonville was executed for starving his P.O.W.s American Indians repeatedly suffered from starvation. There is documented evidence for all of that. Let's ignore real historical events in the U.S., and go around shouting our fools heads off echoing some Russians with an inferiority complex about Stalin.

Furthermore, fatal illnesses often associated with poverty and famine (like the flu and turbuculosis) actually went down during the Depression:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2011/03/great-depression-had-little-effect-on-death-rates/

[Questionable]

This information was gathered using the same methodological as the ones for the Ukrainian famine and the Chinese one, so even if the numbers aren't accurate it reveals how much nonsense goes into examining these disasters in communist countries.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

This information was gathered using the same methodological as the ones for the Ukrainian famine and the Chinese one, so even if the numbers aren't accurate it reveals how much nonsense goes into examining these disasters in communist countries.

Capitalism killed 35 Million humans with undernourishment and Starvation in 2010, at least according to the UN. Contrary to anti-communist liars who try to paint a famine as a deliberate attempt at genocide instead of social-upheaval and famine, a critique of persons dying of starvation in Imperialist countries (not even talking about the exploited countries) is a critique of the cruelty of unequal distribution of the capitalist system.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

OK, here's the old thread: http://www.revleft.com/vb/7-million-people-t138742/index.html

Here's a good post, from near the end of the thread:



Furthermore, fatal illnesses often associated with poverty and famine (like the flu and turbuculosis) actually went down during the Depression:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2011/03/great-depression-had-little-effect-on-death-rates/


Without hard data, the best we can reasonably do is extrapolate from the data we have, and assume, maybe, ten thousand people, out of 160 million, died from starvation or starvation related causes in that decade[!].

In one year (2010!) in South Africa 20 out of 100,000 humans die of Malnutrition ("World Death Rankings"). That is 11 thousand humans each year in a modern industrialized economy, in the 21st century! Now think, what would it have been like in the great Depression, 80 years ago where industrial production in the USA shrank by 50%, where there were no food stamps, no social programs, no State healthcare etc.?

Persons in the US dying alone from starvation in the four worst years of the Great Depression would be in the hundreds of thousands a year if you think of all the factors (50% less stuff being produced, no food stamps, no pensions and then add over 20% unemployment in a time where elderly and children only survived through their family's help!). Then think of all the violence that erupted through a destroyed society (suicides, family murders from frustration etc.) accidents that happened through massive deregulation of labor laws, and the the shortage of goods and services!

I don't doubt for one minute that millions of persons died within that tragic period of traditional, Liberalst, no-social-state, Crisis Capitalism.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

For Revlefters to then come here and say "Ooh, Russians! Stalin complex!" in light of the official US Statistics saying that mortality rates went down in the greatest economic crash the US saw and has seen (blatantly faking statistics); is simply despicable!

In 2010, 35 Million humans died of Starvation, half the world's yearly death rates are of Hunger and undernourishment illnesses. What makes you RevLefters think it is impossible that 7 million american humans died of the destructive effects of crisis, starvation, goods and service shortage, huge unemployment in a time where (like said) there was no social state to speak of, during the Great Depression?

[ComradeOm]

I'm going to try to keep this civil. Let's start off with my patented Plausibility Test:

Is it likely that seven million US citizens could die of starvation in what would be one of the worst famines in modern history without leaving a shred of evidence? That is, that millions of Americans could die without anyone noticing?

If you answered yes to the above then I suggest that you take a good long look at yourself and try to come to terms with the fact that you're an idiot. Harsh, perhaps, but it is hard to overstate the degree to which this thread, and the sheer stupidity of it, offends me. So much for being civil

What probably offends me most, aside from the rank stupidity, is the apparent belief that history is some passive and ethereal object; that you can just 'discover' one day that millions of people died and nobody noticed. That's not how the world works - historical events leave traces, not just statistics. That people could believe that seven million people (some 5% of the population) could just disappear and leave not a trace, be it physical graves or an impression in popular memory, is just a wilful delusion


This information was gathered using the same methodological as the ones for the Ukrainian famine and the Chinese one, so even if the numbers aren't accurate it reveals how much nonsense goes into examining these disasters in communist countriesNo, it's not. Leaving aside the fact that these were different organisations in different countries, nobody was simply guessing in the USSR. The infamous 'Kurman gap' of 8m in the 1937 Soviet census wasn't a simple guess or unfavourable comparison to predictions. What the census takers discovered was that the product of the registered number of births and the registered number of deaths did not match the actual population total. Their conclusion being that there must be 8m unregistered deaths somewhere (which they tried, and failed, to handwave away with various crude modifiers)

In contrast, there is no such hole in the US census. The figures simply add up in a way that the Soviet ones didn't. There is no missing 7-10 million US citizens who have supposedly vanished off the books

As far as I can make out, this joker Borisov seems to have started from the assumption that the "previous demographic tendency was preserved" throughout the Depression, ie that the birth rate remained constant. Not only is this baseless, it's nonsense - we know that the fertility rate fell (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2012/world-population-data-sheet/fact-sheet-us-population.aspx) during this decade. But by using this false assumption our friend Boris has suddenly conjured into existence an extra 7-10m people who never existed in the first place. No wonder their disappearance left no traces :glare:

What Boris is doing is aping those US Cold Warriors who took guesses at the Soviet population and counted children who went unborn to produce 'population deficits' of tens of millions. And he's doing it for the same reason: selling 'whataboutisms' to an eager market of idiots who prefer to be pandered with nonsense that confirms their prejudices and saves them from the briefest moment of critical thought

[Sir Comradical]

It depends what you consider to be the normal death rate (a certain percent of the population dying each year is normal). Surely during times of economic hardship like during the GD, this death rate would have increased, and that increase would translate to x million excess deaths. Whether it's 7 million, I'm not too sure. But I find it absolutely impossible to believe that death rates went down in the USA during the Great Depression, let alone that they stayed at the same level. Surely they would have increased if only marginally.

From RT link posted above:


"But mortality in North Dakota in the crisis year of 1932 is allegedly 7.5 persons out of 1,000 – twice as low as in the capital, and lower than in North Dakota in the prosperous year of 1925"This does seem odd given that the current mortality rate in the US is 8 after having fallen over time. (Assuming that the RT is reporting correctly).

Another reason I find it hard to believe that mortality rates didn't increase at all (or that they fell ffs) during the GD is because they did increase marginally in the aftermath of the current crisis, that despite a relatively better social safety net than during the GD decade.

http://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=united+states+life+expectancy#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_cdrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA&ifdim=region&tstart=-290340000000&tend=1287493200000&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false

[Positivist]

Capitalism killed 35 Million humans with undernourishment and Starvation in 2010, at least according to the UN. Contrary to anti-communist liars who try to paint a famine as a deliberate attempt at genocide instead of social-upheaval and famine, a critique of persons dying of starvation in Imperialist countries (not even talking about the exploited countries) is a critique of the cruelty of unequal distribution of the capitalist system.

Would you mind providing a source for this?

[Geiseric]

I can believe that capitalism starved more than 35 million humans in 2010 lol. However I can't believe that none of the old people I know, who moved to san fransisco because of the dust bowl and depression, happened to forget 7 million people dying. My grandpa was around during the depression, and he said that times were tough, but the problem was more so overproduction of food, forcing the small farmers out of business.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I can believe that capitalism starved more than 35 million humans in 2010 lol. However I can't believe that none of the old people I know, who moved to san fransisco because of the dust bowl and depression, happened to forget 7 million people dying. My grandpa was around during the depression, and he said that times were tough, but the problem was more so overproduction of food, forcing the small farmers out of business.

Yearly roughly 1% of the human population dies. So in 1932 there would normally have died roughly 1.3 million humans a year. Death by Starvation is only one rising factor among many other in economic catastrophes. I don't find it very trivial that death rates would have increased by a lot. I mean, look at Greece! In Greece the statisticians are saying that life expectancy will fall by ten years as it did in the Capitalist-restoration Depression in Russia in the 90's.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Would you mind providing a source for this?

UN FAO World Food Report 2010.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm more than a little skeptical of this claim, but if it was shown to be true, what does it matter at this point? Is there some question as to if the Great Depression was hard on regualr people in the US? The population decline that we know about, caused by decreased birth rates and migration out of the US, not to mention internal migrations from the south and "dust bowl" that resulted both in deaths and in people simply falling off the grid, are evidence of the difficulties of those times.

And frankly as far as the class goes, the suffering is not what makes the 1930s significant, it's the struggles and increasing militancy from below. That's the history (which is often hidden, glossed over, or bent back into serving the system) that should be highlighted to workers and made relevant to today.

[Positivist]

UN FAO World Food Report 2010.

Thanks.

[ComradeOm]

If anyone's interested in the actual data, as opposed to wild theories and assumptions, then most of the actual census statistics can be found on this site (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/vsus.htm). For a massively detailed summary of the decades 1900-40, see here (warning: huge PDF) (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsrates1900_40.pdf)

In fact, from this I've pulled together a quick outline of the US crude death rate during the first four decades of the 20th C. it now occurs to me that this is probably available online. Oh well. Here's crude deaths per 1,000 1900-40:


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v142/GreaterDCU/Misc/USCrudeDeath.png

Note the decline/stagnation during the Depression years. The obvious conclusion being that the economic hardhsip suffered did not translate into mass famine... a conclusion that could also be drawn from looking at other affected countires. Also, the spike in 1918 is obviously Spanish Flu, which killed a 'mere' 500k US citizens. Any mass starvation on the scale that Borisov is proposing would have sent this line off the charts

Hence Borisov's assumption that the data is falsified, ie that there was a cover up. The problem is that there's no evidence for this. To falsify these headline figures you'd have to go down a level and falsify the state returns and then go down again and falsify the actual census returns and mortality notes. All of the latter, or at least the census sheets, are available online (http://1940census.archives.gov/) and you could in theory start counting from the bottom up

Again the Soviet example is a useful counterpoint. When the Stalinists decided to falsify the figures (both census and economic) they simply applied a number of crude modifiers to the headline figures and didn't publish the rest. So there are mountains of very useful and accurate economic and demographic surveys, which historians are poring through today, with a few misleading summaries sitting on the top

What's being proposed here however is that the US government, in contrast to its persumably more honest Soviet counterpary, engaged in a far, far greater cover-up and went right through the data to distort everything. That's nothing more than a conspiracy theory


UN FAO World Food Report 2010.You have a link to that?

[Sir Comradical]

It just seems so counter-intuitive. How on earth can the great depression correspond with a lowering of the mortality rate?

[ComradeOm]

The most obvious reason is that, while unquestionably a time of hardship, the Great Depression was not a major demographic crisis. Certainly not of the sort that can be compared to contemporary events in Russia. There was unemployment and there were soup kitchens but there was no mass starvation or epidemics. So we shouldn't expect a massive rise in mortality

With that in mind, the Depression has to be put in the context of a very marked downwards trend in mortality. That graph doesn't show the scale all that well (it's clearer here (http://phe.rockefeller.edu/death/index_files/image002.gif)) but these decades saw a really dramatic fall in the crude death rate. This was the product of a variety of factors - the beginnings of meaningful public healthcare in the 1920s, the development of infrastructure throughout the western states, developments in medical technology and, particularly, a marked improvement in healthcare for the black population (largely driven by the 'Great Migration' from the rural South to northern urban centres). These were pretty major macro shifts in what was a fairly transformative few decades for the US

So it's not that more people didn't die during the Depression or that it somehow led to lower mortality rates. It's that a) not a huge number of excess mortality occurred and that b) this wasn't enough to make a dent on the overall strong downward trend. There were other factors at play

(An additional hypothesis might be that the bump in the death rate in the late 1930s was the product of delayed health issues resulting from prolonged malnutrition or poor living conditions during the earlier, leaner, years. Just a theory though, albeit one that reinforces my original point - this was not a sharp demographic crisis on a famine scale)

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

The statistics on the link you provided are from the US government that are being scrutinised here. Are you going to trust the US government for statistics on its killing of Vietnamese, the British bourgeois State for mortality statistics for the Irish? According to the US government, in the year 1933 the US had the lowest mortality rates per capita in its entire history. Does the fact that the US was producing nearly 50% less material wealth (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?&id=INDPRO&scale=Left&range=Max&cosd=1919-01-01&coed=2012-07-01&line_color=%230000ff&link_values=false&line_style=Solid&mark_type=NONE&mw=4&lw=1&ost=-99999&oet=99999&mma=0&fml=a&fq=Monthly&fam=avg&fgst=lin&transformation=lin&vintage_date=2012-09-09&revision_date=2012-09-09) in the year 1934 than in 1929; in a time where there was not yet a rationing of goods as in WW2 (and those with money took the little that was left in stores); where there was no pension program for the elderly; when there was 25% unemployment; not bother you the slightest?

[ComradeOm]

Have you found a link to that UN report yet?


The statistics on the link you provided are from the US government that are being scrutinised here. Are you going to trust the US government for statistics on its killing of Vietnamese, the British bourgeois State for mortality statistics for the Irish?Are you seriously comparing a census of the US population by the US government to estimates of Vietnamese combat deaths? How strange

Let's make clear the scale of the cover-up that you are proposing. Washington would have had to amend the records of thousands of county-level registrars to remove all traces of those millions who apparently died of starvation. At the same time they would have had to remove an equal number (10m) of births from the records in order to artificially deflate the birth rate. I've no idea how you propose that these 'hidden births' remain off the system for years to come. Then the census would have to be purged in the same manner to balance the books

All of which is of course necessary because the US government, for some unfathomable reason, decided to make these highly fraudulent figures, including the raw data, public. Any gap in the numbers (eg a ten million difference between registered deaths and the official death rate) would be pretty obvious. How silly of them

And this is just the paper trail. Perhaps the men in black suits were wiping people's memories and removing the physical remains of these millions of missing dead?

We are in fact probably talking here of the greatest, and most successful, cover-up in world history. Nothing the Soviets did comes even close to this. Well done to Boris for discovering... sorry, for making a wild and unfounded assumption that reveals all


According to the US government, in the year 1933 the US had the lowest mortality rates per capita in its entire historyWhere did you get that from? The death rate in 1933 was approx 25% higher than today's equivalent and comparable to Ethiopia in 2012 (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2066rank.html). It was not the "lowest mortality rates per capita [sic] in its entire history"

[Luís Henrique]

2.9 out 100,000 US americans will die of starvation.

There are two different ways to read such "data".

One is that each year 3 out of each 100,000 Americans will die of starvation. Which would mean each year 9,000 Americans die of starvation.

The other is that 3 out of each 100,000 Americans who die each year die of starvation. Which would mean that each year some 90 Americans die of starvation.

What is the case?

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

According to the US government, in the year 1933 the US had the lowest mortality rates per capita in its entire history.

Here is a historical series (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005131.html) of mortality rate data for the United States, from 1900 to 2005. It doesn't support your claim. Yes, the mortality rate for 1933 was the lowest in history up to that year, but if further fell considerably from them on.

If you read the data correctly, they show a steep decrease from 1900 to 1930 (1.72% in 1900, 1.47% in 1910, 1.30% in 1920, 1.13% in 1930). Such progress is then halted; in 1945 the mortality rate was 1.06%, only marginally lower than in 1932 (1.09%). This exactly reflects the Depression; the mortality rates, that would otherwise continue to fall, remained steady for 15 years. Post WWII, the mortality rates indeed resume their decrease (1.06% in 1945, 0.93% in 1955, 0.94% in 1965, 0,88% in 1975) until the cycle of capitalist expansion is over, when they again stabilise (0.87% in 1985, 0.88% in 1995, 0.82% in 2005.

Of course, other factors influence the mortality rates; if there aren't breakthroughs in medical science or public sanitation, there is no reason for the mortality rates to fall, etc. As you can see from Comrade Om's graphic, there is a peak in mortality rates in 1918, probably due to the Spanish flu and unrelated to the state of the economy.

But the claim of 7 million deaths - which boils down into 2 million, as we further read the article - in 10 years would mean 700,000 excess deaths per year. For a population of 125 million people, this would mean an excess death rate of 0.56% during those years. Or in other words, that the mortality rates during the period would have had to raise from their average 1.05% to 1.6% - essentially, similar to that during the well documented epidemics of 1918.

Of course, if we tone the things down to 2 million excess deaths in a decade, or 200,000 excess deaths per year, this would mean an excess death rate of 0.16%, which is not as much absurd.

What is under discussion, essentially, is this: up to 1930, the US population was growing at a rate of about 1.5 million people a year. From 1930 to 1937, however, it grew about only 800,000 people each year. Which means a deficit in growth of 700,000 thousand people each year - or 7 million people in ten years, with the problem that from 1930 to 1937 there are only seven years, not ten. However a look about the populational growth data for before 1930 shows it varied wildly - in 1924 and 1921, for instance, the population increased by more than 2 million people, while it only grew by 1.5 million in 1923 and 1926. The only reasonable way to explain such oscillations is to take into account that the US were receiving huge numbers of immigrants - mainly from Europe - in the first quarter of the 20th century, and that immigration, as opposed to natural growth, is subject to intense short term variations due to economic and political reasons. Now, the years from 1930 to 1937 were years in which Europe as a whole was rearming for war, and in consequence restraining emigration as it would hamper its armies. So, a steep fall in the populational growth should be expected. Add to that the fact that people will avoid having children in a situation of economic crisis, and it explains most, if not all, of the decrease in populational growth in the US in the thirties.

Luís Henrique

[Paul Cockshott]

The figures OM produces are certainly nothing like the clear rise in death rate in Russia during the Yeltsin period which did lead to around 7 million excess deaths. In this case the increase in mortality is crystal clear.

[Raúl Duke]

ComradeOm makes a few good points, from a historian-like standpoint.


That's not how the world works - historical events leave traces, not just statistics. That people could believe that seven million people (some 5% of the population) could just disappear and leave not a trace, be it physical graves or an impression in popular memory, is just a wilful delusionA claim that 7million people died in a mass starvation/etc and yet there's little to no primary sources, forensic evidence, or oral history about it seems sketchy. Proper historical research requires this kind of stuff.

All he (B.B.) has going for him is a claim that statistics were manipulated...
and he doesn't exactly prove that with evidence. The guy isn't doing history, it sounds more like conspiracy theory.

He tries to prove that claim with an assumption, which allegedly is faulty.


As far as I can make out, this joker Borisov seems to have started from the assumption that the "previous demographic tendency was preserved" throughout the Depression, ie that the birth rate remained constant. Not only is this baseless, it's nonsense - we know that the fertility rate fell (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2012/world-population-data-sheet/fact-sheet-us-population.aspx) during this decade. But by using this false assumption our friend Boris has suddenly conjured into existence an extra 7-10m people who never existed in the first place.Look, we're not exactly trying to defend the US's image. But the deal is people shouldn't be passing around faulty non-history as factual when it ain't. When you throw a 'new' historical claim like "the US had 7 million deaths" you're going to need a big deal of actual evidence.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I'm not vulgarizing the Great Depression by hacking on a number "7 Million!" or something like that. But to belive the claim that the Great Depression did not cause massive premature deaths is childish when you compare it so similar events, PC mentioned Russia already.

[Prof. Oblivion]

But to belive the claim that the Great Depression did not cause massive premature deaths is childish when you compare it so similar events

Then please provide us with the sources that support this "massive" assertion.

[Luís Henrique]

I'm not vulgarizing the Great Depression by hacking on a number "7 Million!" or something like that. But to belive the claim that the Great Depression did not cause massive premature deaths is childish when you compare it so similar events, PC mentioned Russia already.

What would the similar event be, the crisis of the extinction of the Soviet Union? But it was a quite different phenomenon. The Soviet Union had an extensive healtcare net that suddenly disappeared, leaving a population that heavily relied on it abandoned. This may have the main cause of the increase of mortality rates, instead of the economic recession.

The United States in 1930 didn't have a similar structure, so it already had its "excess deaths" - if you want to call them so - before the Depression. This leaves only the economic recession as a possible cause of increased mortality. But the effect of the 1929 recession in the mortality rate quite certainly was not one of increased rates, but one of interrupting the ongoing fall of the rates. If you want to translate that into "excess deaths", you would have to suppose that the death rate could have fallen from 1930 to 1937 at the same speed it fell from 1945 to 1952 (when it fell from 1.06% to 0.96%). That would mean reducing the death rate from 1.13% in 1930 to 1937 to 1.03% in 1937, resulting in some 125,000 less deaths for the whole period. But this would be very speculative, as it would presuppose that the only difference between the two periods was the economy, when we know that medical technology made some important advancements during WWII.

An economic depression certainly does have an impact on the life of people, but it is simplistic to suppose that such impact is merely "more deaths by starvation during the recession than during prosperity times". One important thing to take into account is that in any society the life expectancy is not so much a function of how old an adult can expect to live as it is a function of how many newborns can expect to survive until adulthood. Consequently, any event that reduces the birth rate will quite certainly also reduce the death rate. Less children means less people on the most vulnerable age. And an economic recession certainly lowers the birth rate, so any increased death rate among people who were already born on the onset of recession would have to be measured against a reduced absolute number of newborn deaths (even if the relative rate of newborn deaths increases) given the birth rate reduction.

There are also other factors that may play against the obvious idea that the index of economic activity and the death rate correlate in an inverse way. Less economic acitvity probably means less deaths by accident and heart diseases, for instance, as those are directly correlated to economic activity (labour is a dangerous thing, let's remember!)

Luís Henrique

[ComradeOm]

I'm not vulgarizing the Great Depression by hacking on a number "7 Million!" or something like that. But to belive the claim that the Great Depression did not cause massive premature deaths is childish when you compare it so similar events, PC mentioned Russia already.Hmmm? I intrepreted Paul's comment as it's perfectly clear that there was a marked rise in the mortality rate in 1990s Russia (although I would very much hesitate to translate that into excess deaths) in a way that there clearly wasn't in the US...

But frankly your position is only slightly more sophisticated than '7 million dead!': it's '7 million dead because obviously there was a depression (and then the government covered everything up)'. No matter how many times you say it, you've yet to show that the Depression did in fact leave to this supposed mortality spike. You've given us absolutely nothing to believe that "the Great Depression caused massive premature deaths"; as if the more presence of soup kitchens indicates people dying off by the million

Luis has hit the nail on the head above. These were two very different societies in very different times with very different demographic changes. The Great Depression has to be placed near the beginning of the 20th C collapse in US mortality rates (something echoed across the West at the time) while Russia was seeing a sudden collapse of the state medical system in an industrialised nation. I have no idea why you're trying to draw a comparison between the two; particularly given that the Russian experience was far, far more jarring and catastrophic in that it involved fundamental structural reforms of an entire economy and society

[erupt]

...particularly given that the Russian experience was far, far more jarring and catastrophic in that it involved fundamental structural reforms of an entire economy and society

Yeah, like parents not feeding the sickest of the children in the family so there was enough garlic and bread for the children that were not wavering on the precipice of death during the Soviet Famine, or Holodomor, or whatever one wants to call it terminology-wise.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Freedom of movement in the Russian countryside was severely limited during the famine, wasn't it? That probably exacerbated the effects of it...