For well over a century business cycles have run an unceasing round. They have persisted through vast economic and social changes; they have withstood countless experiments in industry, agriculture, banking, industrial relations, and public policy; they have confounded forecasters without number, belied repeated prophecies of a "new era of prosperity" and outlived repeated forebodings of "chronic depression."
Periodically, our economic system becomes the spectacle of unemployed men who are able and eager to work; abundant tools to work with and materials to work upon; and a nation in need of the goods that these men, by the use of these idle machines, might make out of these surplus materials. Yet, month after month, the men and machines and materials are not brought into productive relations with each other.
Business-cycle theorists concerned themselves with why the economy naturally generated fluctuations in employment and output, [while the rest of the profession] continued to operate on the assumption that full employment was the natural, equilibrium position for the economy.
The other mystery is the reason why there is a business cycle - the irregular rhythm of recessions and recoveries that prevents economic growth from being a smooth trend.
This book offers an analytic description of the complicated processes by which seasons of business prosperity, crisis, depression, and revival come about in the modern world. The materials used consist chiefly of market reports and statistics concerning the business cycles which have run their course since 1890 in the United States, England, Germany and France.
No two business cycles are quite the same; yet they all have much in common. They are not identical twins, but they are recognizable as belonging to the same family.
Analyzing business cycles means neither more nor less than analyzing the economic process of the capitalist era.... Cycles are not like tonsils, separable things that might be treated by themselves, but are, like the beat of the heart, of the essence of the organism that displays them.