Question
If the Internet and t.v.'s 24-hour news cycle had existed during the Great Depression, would it have ended sooner?
Answer
A faster news cycle doesn't necessarily mean more actual news. In fact much of today's news is repetition, dramatization and other random noise and fury signifying nothing. We have more programming hours and webpages to fill than real information to fill it with.
So my guess is that it would have taken exactly as long, but it would have been far harder to figure out if/when the end happened, because of the increased volatility associated with a more frantic news cycle operating on the same amount of actually relevant information. The existence of hedge funds etc. today also increases volatility.
In a way the question is not interesting because you already had a sufficiently fast news cycle by the 1930s to diffuse information to move markets in fundamental ways. With the telegraph, you basically had communication that moved at least 2x faster than the economy itself, so faster would be over-sampling (I am applying a loose, metaphoric version of something known as the Nyquist sampling theorem). A more interesting comparison would be with pre-telegraph recessions where information could not move faster than a horse or ship and events on the ground could overtake information diffusion processes routinely.
So my guess is that it would have taken exactly as long, but it would have been far harder to figure out if/when the end happened, because of the increased volatility associated with a more frantic news cycle operating on the same amount of actually relevant information. The existence of hedge funds etc. today also increases volatility.
In a way the question is not interesting because you already had a sufficiently fast news cycle by the 1930s to diffuse information to move markets in fundamental ways. With the telegraph, you basically had communication that moved at least 2x faster than the economy itself, so faster would be over-sampling (I am applying a loose, metaphoric version of something known as the Nyquist sampling theorem). A more interesting comparison would be with pre-telegraph recessions where information could not move faster than a horse or ship and events on the ground could overtake information diffusion processes routinely.