How long did the roaring twenties last

Americans donned masks, schools and public gathering places temporarily shut down, and one-third of the globe fell ill. Life insurance claims rose sevenfold, and American life expectancy decreased by 12 years. Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis hypothesizes that the pandemic falls into an ages-old pandemic pattern, one that our Covid present may mimic, too.

Christakis expects the Covid crisis to have a long tail, in terms of case numbers and social and economic impacts. But once the brunt of the disease abates in the U. We might see some sexual licentiousness. Like the s, Christakis also predicts lasting social and technological innovations will characterize this decade—think of how remote work and mRNA vaccines might shift status quos permanently.

After Covid reality will be all rosy. Agnolo di Tura wrote:. And then, when the pestilence abated, all who survived gave themselves over to pleasures: monks, priests, nuns, and lay men and women all enjoyed themselves, and none worries about spending and gambling. And everyone thought himself rich because he had escaped and regained the world, and no one knew how to allow himself to do nothing.

At its height, the influenza pandemic routinely made front-page headlines nationwide, says J. Even historians largely neglected the pandemic, until Alfred Crosby reignited the field in a book , where he captured these contradictions:. One of the many theories about why influenza faded from historical memory holds that the trauma of World War I subsumed it. Navarro floats another theory: Deaths from infectious disease epidemics happened more routinely then, so the pandemic may not have been as shocking.

According to data compiled by the New York Times , despite the much higher proportion of deaths from the influenza, the Covid pandemic has a larger gap between actual and expected deaths. Multiple historians pinpointed another significant discrepancy between the scarring impact of the Covid pandemic and that of the influenza: Whereas many Americans today have remained masked and distanced for over a year, the influenza raged through communities quickly.

Restrictions were lifted after two to six weeks, Navarro says, and most people still went in to work. But keep in mind, Hasse explains, that the jazz music and dancing that characterized the performing arts of the decade had roots that preceded the pandemic, like the Great Migration, jazz recording technology, and evolving attitudes about dancing in public.

Somehow, despite a global flu pandemic that killed , Americans in and , and a depression that gutted the economy in and , the United States not only recovered but entered into a decade of unprecedented growth and prosperity. Americans began a spending spree: the Roaring Twenties was on.

The Federal Reserve, created in , flexed its monetary policy muscles for the first time during World War I. Since the American public was unwilling to fund the war effort through taxes, the Fed did it by printing more money.

The result by was runaway inflation. Economists predicted a post-war crash as military factory orders dried up after the Armistice. At least not immediately. American consumers, who had patriotically scrimped and saved during wartime, began to live it up. Inflation ticked upward, and so did prices, but consumers were willing to pay anything for a taste of freedom.

To combat skyrocketing inflation, the Fed kept raising its discount interest rate to make borrowing more expensive. For example, the number of corporate industrial research laboratories increased threefold in the s and the number of research scientists and engineers more than doubled Nicholas, Manufacturing was revolutionised by the electrification of factories and the replacement of steam power by dynamos.

In combination with the introduction of mass production pioneered by Henry Ford, this resulted in new and improved products — such as automobiles, radios and refrigerators — reaching American consumers Quinn and Turner, For example, during the s, the number of US households with a radio went from zero to 12 million Nicholas, The technological revolution experienced by the United States increased productivity and was a key driver of growth at the time.

The technological revolution played a major role in the second reason why the US economy in the s can be described as roaring. As Figure 4 shows, the US stock market enjoyed a huge run-up from until , with the Dow Jones Industrial Average quadrupling in value.

Companies creating and using new technology were behind most of the rise in share prices in the s Nicholas, ; Quinn and Turner, This stock market boom, probably more than anything else, is why the adjective roaring has been applied to the US economy of the s.

The credit boom that helped people purchase the new mass-produced consumer durables also contributed Olney, ; Olney, Some speculate that the US consumer boom of the s was the typical response of liberal spending following a period of plague-driven austerity Christakis, The credit boom also enabled people to obtain mortgages more easily and helped to drive up property prices Nicholas and Scherbina, ; Gjerstad and Smith, The run-up in share and property prices did not last, with the stock market crashing in October see Figure 4.

For reasons that are not entirely obvious, the stock market crash was accompanied by a sharp contraction in consumer spending Romer, This was then followed by a contraction in mortgage lending and loans for consumer durables Quinn and Turner, The Roaring Twenties had well and truly come to an end.

After the excess of the s, the United States would go on to experience the Great Depression in the s. The lessons for policy-makers today from the Roaring Twenties in the United States are twofold.