Name: The Great Wave
ISBN: 9780195121216

The Great Wave

"The history of prices is the history of change," writes David Hackett Fischer in this broad sweep of western history from the middle ages to our own time. His primary sources are price records, which are more abundant for the study of historical change than any other type of quantifiable data. Fischer uses these materials to frame a narrative of price-movements in western history from the eleventh century to the present. He finds that prices tended to rise throughout this long period, but most of their increase happened in four great waves of inflation - which he calls the price-revolutions of the thirteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. The four waves shared many qualities in common. All had the same movements of prices and price-relatives, falling real wages, rising returns to capital, and growing gaps between rich and poor. They were also very similar in the structure of change. Each of them started silently, developed increasing instability, and ended in a shattering crisis that combined social disorder, political upheaval, economic collapse, and demographic contraction. These crises happened in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and late eighteenth centuries. They were followed by long periods of comparative equilibrium: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Victorian era. In all of these eras prices fell and stabilized, wages rose, and inequalities diminished.

What Hacker News says

bjshepardJul 2016

"The idea of a Grand Supercycle bear market may be interpreted to suggest that mankind will never learn from its past mistakes, or become self-aware in a macro-economic sense. The historical study presented in David Hackett Fischer's The Great Wave (Oxford University Press, 1999), however, presents a meticulously argued case that the periodic crises in human history are becoming steadily less volatile, which suggests that some kind of species-wide learning is occurring."

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dnauticsJun 2014

The deflationary road leads to the dystopia portrayed in The Hunger Games: one or two massively advanced cloistered cities for the mega-rich, and vast feudal slave classes feeding them with coal and other should-be-obsolete things.

Huh? That's what the inflationary road leads to. This should be obvious, inflation skims value off the top of everyone's savings and channels it to the ultra rich (or politically connected, aka ultra rich). Almost every society in history, over the past 4000 or so years has been weakened by inflation, not deflation.

As a counterpoint, the US, which had a pretty good net deflationary run for about 150 years, had a pretty significant social equalization (freeing the slaves) over that time period.

The "deflationary spiral" hypothetical is popular idea but it is not supported by any historical evidence whatsoever (conceding that it may be true), mostly because despots have had a really hard time keeping themselves from debasing the currency over history.

I suggest reading this for some broad historical perspective: http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Wave-Revolutions-History/dp/...

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dnauticsOct 2010

Economics:

The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Ebb and Flow of History. David Hackett Fisher.

This book is incredibly, incredibly prescient. Written in 1997, almost predicts the current financial situation. If you want to have an idea where, based on 1000 years of history, our economy and the state of the world is going, then you should read it. It didn't change my perspective (I called the crash of 2008-2009 a few months before it happened) but it really gave me a firmer understanding behind why I was correct to have felt like that was going to happen. It's also a page-turner. Fisher is an incredibly good writer and wrote a fascinating picture of revolutionary america in "Paul Revere's Ride".

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Wave-Revolutions-Rhythm-History/...

Malcolm Gladwell's books are good, too, but my position on them is that the insight is all stuff you should have figured out - sometimes you just need gentle reminding. I noticed outliers and tipping point on your shelf, those will go very very far in helping you come up with entrepreneurial strategies. Outliers got me off my butt and got me programming android (I hadn't touched computer programming in 4+ years)... I would suggest popping the gladwells to the front of your queue.

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