But here’s where you can start to find out. It’s a new video series about the Great Depression launching at the New York Times.

It’s amazing what people lived through in the first half of the twentieth century. Not that the 19th century or any other period in human history was anything but dark, germy, cold, and hard. Fact is, those of us born in the fifties and thereafter, at least in the Western world, have lived through the glory days of humanity. We’re almost a different race from those who came before us. And we’re lucky.

But, man, during the first Depression, the real and Great Depression, people actually scrounged for food. People actually stood in long lines for food. People actually starved.

This guy here is so hungry, he’s trying to eat a woman’s full-course hat.

This really serious looking fellow named Jack Cafferty at CNN.com asked his readers if they were worried about a full-blown depression. Here’s a quote.

There’s a 20 percent chance the U.S. will sink into a full-blown depression according to a professor of economics at Harvard University who has studied the economic cycles of the last 139 years. Robert Barro writes in the Wall Street Journal that the most serious concern these days is that our economic downturn will become something worse than the largest recession since World War II. And he comes to the conclusion that there’s a one-in-five chance that America’s GDP and consumption will fall by 10 percent or more — something we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

There are some interesting comments on the article, including this one by some clown who thinks we dare not speak the truth.

Keep posting questions like this and we will have one. A consumer economy is one based on consumer confidence and if consumers perceive and/or are worried about a depression, they will save rather than spend. If that is the case, we will inevitably have a depression. It’s effectively a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Brilliant thinking. Let’s all pretend everything is great, go out and blow all our money, and indeed everything will be great. The people who’ve lost their houses can pretend they didn’t. The people who’ve lost their jobs can pretend they didn’t. We’ll all just smile, keep quiet about our troubles, spend everything we earn, and the recession will just float away.