The Ghost of Tom Joad guitar work and the lyrics on many of the tracks are a somber reflection of life in the mid-1990s in America and Mexico. The character of Tom Joad entered the American consciousness in John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Grapes of Wrath", set against the economic hardships of the Great Depression. This spawned a film version starring Henry Fonda, which in turn inspired folk singer Woody Guthrie to pen "The Ballad of Tom Joad". The album's release was followed by Springsteen's solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, which ran from 1995 to 1997 and consisted of mostly small
Causes of the Great Depression monetary shocks, productivity shocks, and banking shocks – but those developments become positive after 1933 due to monetary and banking reform policies. According to the model Cole-Ohanian impose, the main culprits for the prolonged depression were labor frictions and productivity/efficiency frictions (perhaps, to a lesser extent). Financial frictions are unlikely to have caused the prolonged slump. In the Cole-Ohanian model there is a slower than normal recovery which they explain by New Deal policies which they evaluated as tending towards monopoly and distribution of wealth. The key economic paper looking at these diagnostic sources in relation to the Great Depression