Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
These are famous photographs. Lange looked out of her window in San Francisco one day and saw the employed workers lined for food. She ends up working for the Farm Security Administration and her job was to take pictures. The Great Depression was not just an economic catastrophe but it coincided with a terrible drought. So, Dorothea Lange ends up taking pictures for the FSA of people travelling from Oklahoma to California to find work and escape the drought – Okies, they were called.
Your next book is Dorothea’s Lange’s famous photos.
Yes. Everyone will recognise many of these photographs. She looked out of her window in San Francisco one day and saw unemployed workers lined for food. She ends up working for the Farm Security Administration and her job was to take pictures. The Great Depression was not just an economic catastrophe but it coincided with a terrible drought. So, Dorothea Lange ends up taking pictures for the FSA of people travelling from Oklahoma to California to find work and escape the drought – Okies, they were called. This is what Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is about. People were living in tents with children in the middle of nowhere. This is not the distant past – my grandparents told me about the Great Depression and going to the bank to collect savings which were all gone.
Read full interview
Gary B Gorton is an American economist and Professor of Management and Finance at Yale University. He is a former member of the Moody’s Investors Services Academic Advisory Panel and former director of the research programme on banks and the economy for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He has taught at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and previously worked as an economist and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. During 1994 he was the Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He has been a member of the New York Federal Reserve Bank Financial Advisory Roundtable since January 2009. He is an expert in stock and futures markets, banking and asset pricing. He has been an editor of The Review of Economic Studies.
