“The Stock Market Crash of 1929″, on The American Experience, PBS’s on-going cultural history of the United States. The story gives a little background on the 1920s boom and the lead-up to the crash, but concentrates mostly on the critical year 1929. It only mentions the Depression briefly, and ends with film footage of a big New Year’s Party welcoming the new decade. It looks like a Roman orgy in a Bible movie. There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on, but no one’s actually getting laid.

The show made no effort to draw parallels to modern times, or discuss modern stock market practices and regulations, other than to remark that many stock-price manipulative practices which were perfectly legal back then are technically not allowed today–for example, bribing financial journalists to talk up your stock.

The program was particularly interesting because it was originally broadcast in 1990, so it should be fairly free of 21st Century biases or spin. It also featured a lot of film interviews with many of the participants in the events of that time, or their children; eyewitness accounts, all on grainy film, no videotape. The scholars and economists interviewed were also from decades ago.

It’s amazing how little we’ve learned. How similar those events were to the events of 2007 and late 2008. The only difference seems to be our crash took longer to unfold, and wasn’t as deep, but otherwise, you see the same motivations, the same personalities, the same confidence, the same rhetoric, the same psychology. It’s the same shoot-em-up, the same rodeo. And of course, the fat lady probably hasn’t sung for us yet, either.

There was a film interview with John Kenneth Galbraith, who said something like (as best I can recall from memory)

The funny thing is that this was really nothing new. It happens about every 30 or 40 years. That seems to be about how long it takes for people to forget the last one, about how long it takes to grow a new generation of suckers.

And we missed one, the one that was due to hit us in the early 70s, by JKG’s reckoning. So maybe we have learned something after all. But I’m still waiting for the fat lady’s song.