I believe our Great Depression was worse.
As far as I know, standing in line with baskets hoping
for a shot at some dwindling, poorly distributed cornucopia of “goods” had been going on through ALL regimes prior to Gorbachev’s.
Remember, The Soviet Union had reached the end of its rope,
and a reformer named Gorbachev was soon in power.
While this probably didn’t revolutionize productivity, it
did give Russians a sense of new possibilities.
Our Depression virtually BEGAN with a statist BIG Gov President who
stayed in power for a 12 full years.
And OUR Depression was in black and white!
US depression began with gov money printing to fund WWI. This falsely jacked up farm, crop, industrial labor wages and more causing a false boom. European agriculture recovered and food exports, prices, farm land collapses in early 1920’s, not recovering until WWII. Coolidge clearly saw Depression commingle. Hoover started near every FDR big gov intervention program. FDR ran against Hoover big gov. Until he got in office, then in best bucket of warm spits difference, FDR carried on Hoover’s central planning.
My parents lived in Oklahoma when they were first married. He went to work for Sun Oil Company and was sent to the east Texas oil field. That's where they were in the depression so they never suffered from that - he had a good job with Sun Oil and plenty of food as they had a garden and pigs and chickens and fruit trees and that monthly check from Sun Oil. They could buy what they needed.
If you were in Texas, you could get a job in the booming oil fields. It looks like it is the same now - the state of Texas can't over spend due to their constitution preventing that and there are jobs around everywhere and a new oil field in south Texas and that area is booming.
I think it is the diversity of Texas job “fields” that keeps her going. Texas is so big that different natural resources are spread around the whole state and those resources make jobs in those areas.
God Bless Texas for her natural resources.