IIRC, some chunk of the Depression was deflationary, so you pretty much had to do better just sitting on cash (then) than having a lower-interest-than-the-effective-inflation rate.

I'm with you on Almanzo. Lately, I've started wondering if Pa was skipping when they moved so frequently.

I did finally finish the book. My major beef (after the it isn't history thing) is the strong apologetics for how the industry is not anti-competitive. Some components of the argument did make sense to me; a lot of them did not. I wish (perhaps the 2nd edition answers this) there had been some coverage of whether revolvers are essentially subsidizing transactors. I'm really starting to suspect that this has to be the case, and that the main reason credit card companies chase high-spending transactors is because they're hoping to catch them screwing up and missing a payment here and there -- after all, with the volume they go through, a single month's worth of interest from a transactor might be a typical annual interest rate from a revolver.

One thing that I hope is explored a bit more in the later version is how