Ótimo artigo sobre sobre crises financeiras no Imperio e seu impacto sobre o comportamento da população masculina.
Market analysts have discovered that there are a few growth industries during depressions: Macaroni and cheese is flying off the shelves, along with cheap gin, video games, running shoes, and handguns. It is a disturbing image—one imagines unemployed men with time on their hands playing Fallout 3 (shoot mutants in a postapocalyptic Washington) and Overlord II (control evil minions who burn houses and beat up peace-loving, dope-smoking elves) while eating mac and cheese. Are those same men lacing up their running shoes in preparation for Armageddon?
Pundits have come to label the current economic downturn a "he-cession." In the summer issue of Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam, a fellow at the New America Foundation, suggested that because men's traditional jobs (particularly in finance and construction) have declined faster than women's (particularly in health care and the service sector), we might see a rise in angry, unemployed men—a source of social instability in 1990s Russia and today's Middle East.
There have been a lot of economic downturns in American history. While economists in the Reagan years tended to highlight the slow, gentle increase in American GDP that seemed to feed economic growth from the American Revolution forward, heterodox economists have argued that the American economy has been riven with crises, shocks, and other bear-market calamities. Where orthodox economists have read back into history the "Great Moderation," heterodox economists have seen hysteria, chaos, and violence. Cultural historians, meanwhile, have noticed a lot of hysterical talk about manhood, violence, and chaos during the panics of 1785, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873—the list goes on. So what do scholars have to tell us about the tribulations of previous American panics? Was manhood in peril then? Were unemployed men really dangerous?
The United States has been thick with bad debts since the beginning of the Republic. As Woody Holton showed in Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang, 2007), revolutionary states often financed and fed their armies with IOU's that they did not or could not pay. The value of the IOU's and state currencies fell with Schwarzeneggerian speed as banks and other creditors refused to accept them. The states promised to pay eventually (this may be sounding familiar), but those who needed cash—soldiers and widows—could not wait. Speculators bought up their IOU's at pennies on the dollar. (Speculation could be equal opportunity, as far as gender was concerned; Abigail Adams proved a fairly adroit speculator in New England paper.) Though some people fared well in the postrevolutionary crisis, tempers flared. Responding to public pressure, states passed "stay laws" to prevent creditors from seizing land. Other states guaranteed that valueless state money would be payable for all debts. That angered a young Thomas Jefferson, who sold his father-in-law's land on the installment plan. Virginia law forced him to take useless state currency for it.
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