Richard Sennett states in his highly stimulating new book (The Culture  
of the New Capitalism, published this year by Yale University Press),  
"The operation of the business cycle was not understood statistically  
until the end of the nineteenth century" (p. 16).  
  
This statement triggers several questions in my mind:  
  
First, very simply, whose work is he referring to?  I was under the  
impression that business cycles as we know them today were first  
identified and analyzed by Arthur Burns and Wesley Mitchell in their  
1946 book, Measuring Business Cycles...  
  
Second, whoever did the first identification, and whenever that was,  
when exactly did business cycles first start affecting industrial  
society?    
  
Third, economic fluctuations in pre-industrial societies presumably had  
a largely climatic or monetary basis...Did this really change with  
industrialisation?!    
Did climate really stop affecting the business cycle?   
Which was the first country to demonstrate deliberate and intelligent  
control of consumer price inflation and money supply? (not that anyone  
has this perfect even now of course).  
Is it the case that, in the case of industrialised society, we simply  
added to climate and finance a third factor: the time-lag between demand  
and supply and the fact that any chain of intermediaries tends to  
amplify actual demand into much greater apparent demand, leading to the  
over-provision of manufacturing facilities, leading to over-supply.....  
  
Naturally, the nature of business cycles has changed over time since the  
period of late industrialisation: for example, before World War II,  
prices typically fell during a recession; since the fifties, prices have  
risen during downturns, though usually more slowly than during booms.  
What was responsible for that change between the pre- and post-WWII  
period?  
  
What is the relationship between the stage of development of capitalism  
and the nature of the business cycle most evident in it?    
  
Business cycles, or booms and busts, seem to be more typical of  
Anglo-American economies than of European Continental economies.  If  
this is so, why?  
  
Why is it that interest rates, for example, appear to be lower and more  
stable in Continental European economies than in Anglo-American  
economies?  The same is the case with growth rates....  
  
In learning to control consumer price inflation, we seem to have lost  
the ability to control asset-price inflation.  If so, why?  Who has  
looked into the question of the role that is played by "out-of-control  
asset-price inflation" in the economy?  
  
Have we simply changed the level at which the business cycle functions?:  
from the time when the economy was dominated by real  
agricultural goods and services,   
to the time when the economy was dominated by manufactured  
goods, not of a sort that aided the real economy but of a sort that  
generated a life of their own (everybody needs food, do we really  
need computers?), then to the time when the economy was dominated   
by paper money transactions - even more removed from that real economy,   
and finally to the present, where the economy is dominated by  
the leveraging of digits in cyberspace ("completely removed from  
reality")?  
  
I exaggerate, but perhaps you see what I mean...  
  
Prabhu Guptara