Economics: The Scottish Enlightenment stage theorists of the 1700s saw that each stage of production in society—gathering-hunting, herding, farming, and “commercial”—would fit with and require a different kind of cultural, social, organizational, and political superstructure to be built on top of it. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels added another stage—socialist steampower society was going to follow the bourgeois epoch that Adam Smith and company had called “commercial”, many today call “early capitalist”, and that I like to call imperial-commercial gunpowder-empire. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also added that transitions were epochs of crisis, class struggle, and revolution.

Since the ca. 1880 High-Steampower Age, we have had, successive and overlapping, Applied-Science, Mass-Production, Global Value-Chain, and now Attention-Info-Biotech Ages, with times of turmoil, crash, and crisis midwifing the cultural, social, organizational, and political adjustment to the Schumpeterian creative-destruction technological and organizational transformations of the underlying order of production, work, and life that take place every 40 years rather than, as was the case in the transformation from “feudalism” to “capitalism”, 600. Both Harold James and Linda Yueh are, half-consciously, gnawing at the problem of understanding these transformations. First comes recognition of opportunity from change, then investment, then euphoria, then panic and crash, crisis, adjustment, rebuilding, and reorganization. What this process gropes toward is an underlying economy that is more prosperous, more productive, and more in organizational balance with the shifted underlying technological base. But the process of groping does not get us much closer to replacing the government of men with the administration of things and a truly utopian world. And, reviewing James’s Seven Crashes and Yueh’s Great Crashes, Trevor Jackson seems to want something very different from histories of coping, adjustment, and reorganization which he criticizes as “incommensurate… complacen[t]… about the unequal distribution of wealth and power, and reflect[ing] an exhaustion of visions for a different, better world…”

But what history could ever be commensurate with humanity’s problems, on fire with rage about the unequal distribution of wealth and power, and full of transformative visions for a different, better world? Prophets make bad historians. And historians are not good prophets:

Trevor Jackson: The Crash Next Time: ‘Can histories of economic crisis provide us with useful lessons?… [Harold] James[’s]… first book, The German Slump (1986), is one of the best books ever written about the Great Depression, and since then he has published many more books, on individual firms and banks, on the international monetary system, and on globalization. He is the official historian of the International Monetary Fund, and he is a rare economic historian who sometimes publishes in cultural history journals…. His focus… is on supply crises… not currency, banking, or stock market crises, and he wants to analyze whether they promoted or restrained globalization…. Linda Yueh… aims to show that crises follow a set pattern: after a phase of euphoria they require solutions in the form of credible economic policies, and then they produce an uncertain aftermath…. Yueh is excellent in The Great Crashes on the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s. James’s chapter on the late nineteenth century in Seven Crashes is terrific….

Both books assume that crises are inevitable, and they are both composed of a history of failures and blunders, but they both conclude with optimism…. [But while] voting, recycling, and exercising choice are all valuable practices, but they seem incommensurate to global economic crises, the structure of the international financial system, and the political tenor of the moment…. They are focused on a limited horizon of conceivable change, reveal a complacency about the unequal distribution of wealth and power, and reflect an exhaustion of visions for a different, better world. But another lesson from history is that radical transformations seem impossible and unthinkable until they happen, and then they seem to have been inevitable… <nybooks.com/articles/20…>