2020 Books in Review
This third annual book review is another short one. As usual, the mix is heavy on history and anchored by the faith-based genre. The history books examine two separate but similar economic bubbles during the 1920-1930s, one in Florida and the other in & around Oklahoma. The last book, on the topic of Heaven, is thought-provoking for people of all world views.
Bubble in the Sun by Christopher Knowlton
This book does an incredible job of putting the history of Florida in the context of broader economic events. It weaves a confluence of factors together that uniquely brought change to the Sunshine State and simultaneously captures the culture of the era with a particular emphasis on architecture. It’s very much a history of Florida but also a character study as it uncovers many personal dynamics that drove the development.
The underlying thesis is that the Florida real estate boom was the catalyst for the Great Depression. Like most bubbles, Florida’s story is speckled with countless examples of over-confidence combined devastatingly with over-leveraging. This account deftly describes how the events in Florida triggered the initial contraction in the national economy, making it a precursor to the collapse on Black Tuesday three years later.
Notable quotes
From one viewpoint, the Florida land boom is a familiar story of middle-aged men, behaving badly – financially, maritally, and, all too often, morally – in a manner that seems especially unsurprising today. Each of Florida’s real estate barons let his ego be warped by the adulation of the crowd, by his susceptibility to greed and ambition, or by his newfound status, wealth, and power.
The spread of the automobile, the growth of the suburbs, the popular new forms of credit, and the blossoming consumer culture all combined to shape the first fully articulated conception of the American Dream.
The automobile, more than the railroad, the streetcar, or any other factor, turned the American landscape from raw land into real estate. It did so by making the land accessible and thus developable: its value could be easily established, enhanced, and commodified.
Riding [Carl Fisher’s fledgling concept of a Florida highway] in a military convoy in 1919 would give then Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower the idea for the national highway system, which became a reality with the passage of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956.
…no development was more significant than the changing attitudes toward the use of money…Americans began to spend and borrow more freely than ever before. As credit restrictions eased throughout the 1920s, many home owners, or aspiring home buyers, layered on second and third mortgages….The layering of store credit and instalment debt for cars and kitchen appliances on top of mortgage debt for the home would create a precarious balance for many households.
What they all overlooked, however – what real estate buyers throughout the country would overlook – was the role that personal debt plays in a downturn and how badly it leverages your losses. …This is a fundamental feature of debt: it imposes enormous losses on exactly the households that have the least.
The dollar losses in the 1929 stock market crash were surely greater than the total losses in Florida land, but importantly, the number of stock market investors was likely far smaller than the number of investors in Florida.
“As to why the boom stopped, the answer is very simple. We just ran out of suckers.”
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wrote about those who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s for California. This is the story about the ones who stayed. It’s also a story, similar to Bubble in the Sun, about a boom and bust cycle fraught with over-leveraged individuals who chased an opportunity created, in part, by government incentive. They miscalculated the size of the opportunity and lacked the conservation techniques necessary to sustain their efforts.
Federal homesteading incentives brought a wave of would-be farmers to the prairie grasslands of Oklahoma and Texas who took on debt to acquire tractors to cash in on high wheat prices. When prices fell, farmers responded by replacing more grass with wheat, attempting to claw back their losses from the price drop with added volume in hopes of meeting their debt obligations.
The mass planting only suppressed prices further while the ground became so defaced it no longer protected the region from its natural foes, namely, wind and drought. Then the weather turned ugly. In 1933, there were 70 days of severe dust storms, each bringing economic activity to a halt. Between 1930-1935, over 750,000 farm bankruptcies or foreclosures occurred.
President Hoover declined to purchase the surplus wheat (and other farm products). His reasoning was that it would betray a free market, despite being the one who initiated the artificial prices in the first place that spurred over-production. As a conservative, these sort of faux principled stands are particularly bothersome. It wasn’t until the FDR Administration repurchased homesteads and excess crops while also encouraging with new farming and conservation techniques that would eventually stabilize the region.
There are two key differences between the books: First, those who farmed the Plains never reached the glamour and wealth of their Florida real estate counterparts ten years prior. Second, while government incentives played a role in both bubbles, the creation of new debt instruments facilitated poor personal and business decisions in Florida; whereas, on the Plains, President Hoover’s incentives for farmers weren’t properly adjusted once the business cycle changed. The outdated federal involvement undercut the work of thousands, wiping out entire communities.
Notable quotes
The flattest, driest, most wind-raked, least arable part of the United States was transformed by government incentive, private showmanship, and human desire from the Great American Desert into Eden with a haircut. Settlement was a dare, on a grand scale.
What changed everything for…dryland farmers was the tractor. In the 1830s, it took 58 hours of work to plant and harvest a single acre. By 1930, it took only three hours for the same job….[it] would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass. But for now it was a technological miracle.
…Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, day of the worst duster of them all. The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon.
At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres…the epicenter was the southern plains. An area the size of Pennsylvania was in ruin and on the run.
It takes a wind of thirty miles an hour to move dirt; at forty or fifty, it’s a dust storm.
The drought was in its fourth year, and it was the worst in at least a generation’s time. But long dry periods were as much a part of the Great Plains as the grass itself. What was different in 1935 was that the land was naked. If the prairie had been held in place by adequate ground cover – grass, or even the matted sprouts of wheat emerging from winter dormancy – the land could never have peeled away as it did, with great strips of earth thrown to the sky.
Nearly 70 years later, some of the land is still sterile
Heaven by Randy Alcorn
Last year, my wife and I began talking about the subject of Heaven and our mutual surprise that it’s rarely a focus of Sunday sermons. We noticed it’s common for pastors to imply Heaven in their messages, but it’s often more of an afterthought presented in the most general of terms.
Heaven fuels our hope and shapes our lives. Yet, it rarely seems front of mind. Some Christians may presume it’s selfish or beside the point to dwell on heaven. This book argues that it’s precisely the point, because desiring Heaven is synonymous with desiring God. They are one in the same, because wherever God dwells, there Heaven is.
One reason Heaven isn’t discussed much in church is that we don’t know everything about it. Revelation is probably best known for addressing it but can be challenging to decipher.
Beyond Revelation, “Scripture provides us with a substantial amount of information, direct and indirect, about the world to come, with enough detail to help us envision it, but not so much as to make us think we can completely wrap our minds around it.” This book helps to Biblically de-mystify traditional assumptions about Heaven, namely, that we will be disembodied spirits sitting around, bored, playing harps and such.
From a non-Christian perspective, no one escapes death, and most people believe in an afterlife of some sort. With that in mind, it’s worth considering thoughtful views on eternity. From any perspective, it’s important to concern ourselves with eternal matters.
Notable quotes
Heaven makes life matter. It reveals life and many things in it as eternal.
A.W. Tozer, “In nature, everything moves in the direction of its hungers. In the spiritual world it is not otherwise. We gravitate toward our inward longing.’ That’s why we need to spend our lives cultivating our love for Heaven. That’s why we need to meditate on what Scripture says about Heaven, read books on it, have Bible studies, teach classes, and preach sermons on it. We need to talk to our children about Heaven.”