The National Board of Economic Research formally declared that the United States is in a recession and has been for a year. And Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, America's central banker, declared that the situation bore "no comparison" with the Great Depression, which was "an order of magnitude" more grave.

As Bernanke pronounced those words, the fall in metal prices over the last four months became greater than their fall in the four years from 1929 to 1933. This is not a cheap attempt to score a point, but to suggest that Bernanke is both right and wrong. This is not your grandfather's Great Depression; it is ours, and it will be different.

Indeed, our Great Depression will be unique. It will not hurt nearly as much. There will be no sad trail of farm families fleeing the dust bowl of the Great Plains. There will be no hobos riding the rails, and no shanty towns of homeless of the kind called Hoovervilles. Indeed, there should be no housing shortages for some time, if local governments have the wit to take sensible advantage of foreclosures.

Our generation's Great Depression may not be short, it is already sharp and it evidently is going to be nasty. It is likely to hurt most the illegal, the ill-educated and the young, in that order.

It will hurt the illegal because the 10-plus million illegal immigrants are the cushion that is going to stop unemployment of Americans from expanding to 1930s levels. They will find it harder and harder to get work, and then to get paid, and to have anything like decent money.

Remittances back to Mexico have collapsed this year and will fall further as undocumented migrants flee south in droves. But those who remain will depress wages for unskilled Americans, which is why the ill-educated face real trouble. There will be a minimum wage, currently $6.55 per hour, but less than $12,000 a year is hardly an income to feed a family on, let alone house and clothe them.

The young are going to hurt because, unlike their parents, they are mostly graduating with sizable college loan debts. They are coming of age in a recession, and they will find that an increasing number of the jobs they might hope to get are capable of being sent offshore. A new survey by Harvard Business School finds as many as 40 percent of American jobs, including more and more white-collar jobs, can be sent offshore.

And at the same time, young Americans are going to find their baby-boom elders will be fighting like cornered rats to cling to their own jobs. The sharp fall of the stock markets means that fewer baby boomers will be able to afford retirement. They'll work as long as they can, and if that means no vacancy for junior, tough.

So do not expect a new generation of 20-somethings to start solving the housing crisis by signing up to take on mortgages on all those unsold and foreclosed homes. First, they won't be able to afford even their low, low prices. Second, they'll be bad credit risks because of their college loans. Third, the 20-somethings do not want to live in the suburbs of Phoenix and Las Vegas, where the housing glut is most marked.

The interesting news about our Great Depression is that it may be a blessing in disguise. It may help us get through the big inflection points that were about to hit us anyway and force us to change some fundamental aspects of our socioeconomic system.

First, most of us have realized that gasoline is a finite resource and that dear old planet Earth might have trouble coping with a billion Indians and a billion Chinese taking to the roads like Americans. Sometime over the next 10 to 30 years we are going to be shifting from a carbon-heavy to a carbon-light system and very dramatically reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. The Detroit we have known is doomed.

Second, and associated with this shift in carbon dependency, we may be easing into a transition away from an economy based on consumption to one based on sustainability. It is not only the carbon challenge that will require this, but the imminent need for much more rational water management.

Third, some deep changes already have become apparent. The Group of Seven as the symbol of global economic governance is giving way before our eyes to the Group of 20. The West, after more than two centuries of easy dominance, is going to have to learn to share and to embrace concepts like interdependence. The sovereign wealth funds of Asia and the Middle East have the cash that Western banks and companies need. They also have the cash required to buy up those U.S. Treasury bonds that will be floated to finance the "stimulus packages" the incoming Obama administration is promising.

Maybe there is a fourth change on the way, a psychological shift that ought to be familiar to most of us from our parents and grandparents. The value system of the "Greatest Generation," for those who grew up in the 1930s, was distinctive. They believed in thrift, in collective action, in the ability and duty of government to do the right thing and in the need for self-sacrifice.

They believed in the traditional civic virtues that go back to ancient Greece and Rome: in duty, in courage, in fidelity, in the conviction that there was something greater and grander than their own individual lives. They didn't just believe this; they lived it, fought for it and won. We may have to learn their lessons all over again. It might even do us some good.

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