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