May
23rd
Sat
23rd
Everyone bought real estate; and everyone was ‘a real estate man’ either in name or in practice…all were engaged now in this single interest and obsession. And there seemed to be only one rule, universal and infallible-to buy, always buy, to pay whatever price was asked, and to sell again within two days at any price one chose to fix. It was fantastic. Along all the streets in town the ownership of the land was constantly changing; and when the supply of streets was exhausted, new streets were feverishly created in the surrounding wilderness; and even before these streets were paved or a house had been built upon them, the land was being sold, and then resold, by the acre, by the lot, by the foot, for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
—
No, this isn’t commentary from a Planet Money podcast or the New Yorker about the real estate fever that led to our current depression. Thomas Wolfe wrote these words in his 1934 classic You Can’t Go Home Again. The above paragraph describes a small North Carolina town in late April/early May of 1929. The stock market crashed in October of that year.
History cycles and recycles. Even the earth has been resetting itself for billions of years.
The saying goes that people who don’t learn from the past are bound to repeat it. But that’s not true. People learn and adapt, but they don’t change what makes them intrinsically human, which is why stories endure.
