factoid of the day

[mrissa]

"Even before Wall Street's crash in October 1929, many executives thought their markets saturated. For example, in 1923 new cars outsold used cars three to one, but by 1927 the ratio had been reversed. To solve the 'used car evil' Chevrolet was paying dealers twenty-five dollars for each old car they destroyed." -- Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

This is the kind of rapid social change I just love to find as an SF writer. Just four years to change things that much! Betcha there were scientifiction writers shaking their heads and saying, "Look, nobody can write anything set in the near future any more. Things are just changing too quickly."

Comments

[bradipo.livejournal.com]

In Heinlein's Door into Summer the hero (unemployable because he comes from 30 years in the past and lacks any useful skills) gets a job smashing brand new cars. Its economy-boosting purpose is explained to him, but he doesn't understand. When he observes that the cars he's smashing don't have engines, he's treated like a dope for imagining that people would go to the trouble of putting engines in cars that are going to be smashed up anyway.

First published in 1956.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Also reminds me of Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague," which Pohl himself has said he never believed in, but wrote because H.L. Gold wanted him to and would pay him for it.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

There were some Cassandras in the mid-1920's too, which I always find fascinating in real life or fiction. These folks saw the trends you talk about and warned as early as 1925 and '26 that the bubble would burst and the markets would crash, just like the financial warnings I read in 2005 and 2006 about the housing markets and derivatives were preparing to plummet. The problem in fiction for me is trying to write a Cassandra that's not too blatant--which s/he would be if I simply paralleled the ones in the real world.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not only not too blatant, but not too limited. You don't -- well, let me back up, since I don't actually know for sure what you want. When I write about politics, I don't want to write about current politics in specific. I want to write about political ideas, some of them sparked by current politics. And sometimes it's hard, when you currently have a perfect example of a fairly universal political type, not to make it look like, "Oh, she's writing about Karl Rove," or, "Oh, she's writing about Bill and Hillary Clinton."

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I was primarily thinking about general ideas as well, rather than specific events. My problems tend to be the same ones many people have with foreshadowing: making the links between foreshadowing and the Events of Doom solid but not too obvious.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

The same thing (destroying older homes, old = 10 years) happened in the mobile home market about ten years ago.