The effects of the Dutch tulip mania and the South Sea bubble were restricted to a relatively small proportion of their respective societies; this was hardly true of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and seems to be turning out even less true of the Great Recession now under way.

This was pointed out many years ago by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine. He argued that the revolutionary change that gave rise to the first urban civilizations was not agriculture, or literacy or any of the other things most often cited in this context. Instead, he proposed, that change was the invention of the world’s first machine — a

The desperate expedients now being pursued to expand the American money supply in a rapidly contracting economy have exact equivalents in, say, the equally desperate measures taken by the Roman Empire in its last years to expand its own money supply by debasing its coinage.

That distinction between a relatively unregulated secondary economy and a tightly controlled tertiary economy seems to have worked fairly well, just as the removal of all limits on the tertiary economy has consistently ended very badly.

The primary economy consists wholly of those nonhuman processes that yield economic goods to human beings. Thus a farm and the crops grown on it are part of the secondary economy, while the soil, water, sun and genetic potential in the seed stock that make the farm and its crops possible are part of the primary economy. In the same way, a mine

Our era, the media never tires of repeating, is the Information Age; economic sectors dealing with mere material goods and services have been relegated to Third World sweatshops, while the economic cutting edge deals entirely in the manufacture, sales and service of information in various forms.

the political classes of the industrial world convinced themselves that money was the source of wealth rather than the mere measure of wealth it actually is.

Such proposals outrage the common conviction that going backwards is a bad thing.

TANSTAAFL — short for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” — popularized by Robert Heinlein in his science fiction novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress