Capitalism and the Great Depression Essay example

Some people take capitalism for granted and don’t even know what it is exactly. Capitalism is an economic system in which industry is privately owned; where the private owner has a surplus of goods that they sell to a third party, thus creating a market. This system has unerringly been around for centuries, and is used by multiple countries throughout the world, including the United States. It has proven to be a quiet successful system, where the people have control over their own market and reap the most benefits. Capitalism began to strive with the development of mass production, which was â€Å"the method of producing goods in large quantities at low cost per unit.†1 The economy was booming, and it appeared as if there was no end in sight.†¦show more content†¦When this is applied to the real world, it needs to be monitored to avoid a collapse. However, it was not, and companies simply thought that there would always be someone to buy their product. They 1. Mass Production, Encyclopedia Britannica Rangel 2 had never experienced a â€Å"saturated market† before. Once they began to see their sales figures fall, they simply thought they needed to produce more, so they did. They were trying to solve their overproduction problem with the same thing that got them there, which was mass production. An example of this would be a person digging for gold, and all they knew how to do was dig. So they would dig and dig, find the gold, and then continue digging to find more gold. In this case, there was no more gold to be had here. The bosses of the companies didn’t have any solutions for this problem, because this is all they knew. Mass production taught them one thing: more product equals more profit; and once that failed them they didn’t know what to do. More importantly, the employees of the bosses were greatly affected by mass production. Factory jobs required little to no skills, and consequently left workers with little to no skills. Workers were objectified to t he same trivial task over and over again. Sure their jobs appeared easy, but the repetition is what killed them both physically and mentally. This can be seen in an excerpt from a workers letter toShow MoreRelatedCapitalism : The Great Depression848 Words   |  4 PagesCapitalism is when the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. Capitalism has mercy on no one. Each individual lives in a society where the mass crowd complain about how the big business are buying the smaller ones but just doesn’t grasp the idea that all this is happening because of the consumers themselves. Within a system just as there is pros there are also cons, cons that are costly in the end. One of the biggest cons that capitalism promote is wealth inequality. Wealth can be inherited,Read MoreCapitalism And The Great Depression1725 Words   |  7 Pagesaspect of capitalism? 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