This is not your grandfather’s Great Depression. It’s ours, and it will scar and mold and re-shape us in its own unique way. In its accumulation of bad debt and consequent squeeze on credit, it may have similar origins to the social and economic trauma that brought us Adolf Hitler and the New Deal, Britain’s “Hunger Marchers” and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. But the course and the casualties and the impact of our Great Depression will be different. At the same time, its long-term effects, like those of the 1930s, may prove to be surprisingly useful, re-shaping our global economy and our social systems in fundamentally positive ways.

Our Great Depression, first and foremost, may not hurt nearly as much as the original. The United States is unlikely to see the 26.6 percent decline in GDP and the 25.7 percent decline in real personal income that the Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates the nation suffered between 1929 and 1933. There will be no sad trail of farm families fleeing the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains. There will be no hobos riding the rails, and no shantytowns of homeless called Bushvilles or Obamavilles as the originals were called Hoovervilles. Indeed, there should be no housing shortages for some time, if local governments have the wit to take sensible advantage of foreclosures.