AHC: Pres. Ford wins in '76, difficult second term, how long for U.S. Republican Party to recover?

High rates of population growth have correlated to high surges in per capita wealth growth, as in Western Europe and the USA, where the wealth is widely distributed and thus the individual self interests of the expanding families, or rather their response to prosperity under traditional values, sensibly correlate to the number of babies--they can afford bigger families, we might conclude, and so population surges. Actually when we look more closely at it, even in nations as per capita rich and getting richer rapidly such as Britain during the first industrial revolution, we see a rather more ugly picture--much of the growth was coming from rather desperately poor people, people more abject and hand to mouth than their recent ancestors, who formed the labor forces of early factories working 12 or 16 hour days, 6 or 6 1/2 day weeks, and sending their young children to work in factories as well because wages were that low. Eventually, the working classes in Western Europe and the United States, through a series of transformations that definitely included stern demands for more political power and a higher share of the domestic product in wages, did get richer, later. And then they underwent a second demographic transition in which despite even higher levels of family prosperity than had been known to humanity before (at least, on a per capita basis, since we ceased to be gatherer-hunters, and on a thousands times higher absolute basis) started reining in family sizes again, voluntarily. Major drops correlate to major depressions and other causes involving general misery (such as a relative shortage of men after the bloodletting of the Great War) and relative surges correlate to prosperous days, but the general trend in the first world in the 20th century was for population growth to slow down and fall toward mere replacement levels, or even below.

Population surges in the Third World also correlate to general rises in productivity; as I said before, in order to possible for a continent to be fed from overseas, surplus wealth must exist to enable the necessary foreign purchases! But as in the early First World, if we look at the details of who did the work versus who got rich, we find they were not the same people, and the people having larger families were often not individually in a better position in terms of household finances to do so. The point I was making was that political conditions were needed to enable the working masses to share in the benefits of rising productivity in general, and those political conditions do not automatically follow from the economics. Pressure to get their share tends to exist but the response of the owners of wealth need not be the same as in the past or in other countries. The first world ruling classes did not have superdeveloped superpowers to appeal to for help in keeping their own working classes in check politically; they each had to figure out how to manage the social crises on their own, and typically did so in part by giving ground and letting the working people have a larger share. But in the Third World, it is an option for a kleptocratic dictatorship to get aid in the form of apparatus of repression, and use it with the implicit if not openly stated approval of the expatriate owners of a big share of the local national wealth, and this has happened many times.

If the working masses are able to get a larger share of the national product, in rough proportion to the rise in productivity, it may be that they still will have to purchase adequate food supplies from overseas as you say. But I think it is reasonable to figure that before having recourse to that, their rising effective demand will tend to patronize local production of food first. For one thing, it is local agriculturalists who are adapted to produce the mix of traditional foodstuffs the people with more wage money will prefer to buy first. Second, the platitudes of the old British Smithian and Ricardian economists and those of the latter day Chicago school to the contrary, very few successful capitalist nations have followed their dicta of laissez faire free trade policy to a successful outcome. All the rising economic powers of the capitalist world first took care, in the days before they rode to the top of the wheel of fortune, to guarantee national interest in national development in defiance of Smith, Ricardo, von Mises, Friedman et al, by looking to their national self-suffciency in essential crops, and to fostering industrial development under the protection of tariffs and other preferential policies. Japan is probably as textbook an example of a nation that lacks extensive resources per capita, including good agricultural land--I would bet its proportion of arable land to land agriculturally nearly useless (high mountain slopes instead of dry deserts) is no better than Iran's. But the Japanese are infamous among their would-be rice exporting partners in favoring domestic production of rice, and blocking cheaper imports, though this results in considerably higher food prices for the urban majority.

If Iran had been left in peace to evolve its own democracy, if Guatemala at the same time had similarly had its sovereignty respected, I would bet that the percentage of food imports would be considerably lower, and if this as in Japan meant higher prices for a meal, incomes would also be higher on average and at the poorest extremes, to enable survival. It may be that a world of hyperspecialization in agriculture as in all industries, where the large majority of every country's product is exported and the majority of necessities are imported, is more inevitable as the population grows, and according to the British and Chicago school economists, such a world would be richer than any other alternative too. But that is an assumption they take as proven, not demonstrated, and whether they are right that this is the outcome a market wherein the primary producers of wealth--the working people--enjoyed the lion's share of purchasing power, it should be clear that if we live in a world where the majority of purchasing power is in the hands of people considerably higher up the economic ladder, we have no rational reason to expect good outcomes for the people near the bottom. If their weak market bargaining position is compounded with a weak political position as well, in political systems most aptly described as "one dollar, one vote," then we can expect even starker disparities.

Iran, Guatemala and a long list of other nations were not left free to develop as their own domestic political process would have it; the priorities of powerful superstates were imposed on them instead. I believe this, more than a presumed inevitable population surge, determines the nature of the market priorities and land usage in these countries, and indeed that the population surges themselves are outcomes of the imposition of colonial and neo-colonial dependencies, just as the great surge in British population correlated with the expulsion of the peasant majorities off the land into wage dependency in industry (and the remnant on the land also fell into wage dependency as hired farm workers). The question is, when and in what form, if ever, will there be the political restoration that shifts a larger share of the higher productivity produced wealth back into their hands that would form the basis of a market economy responsive to the needs of the working masses, rather than to the profits and pleasures of a privileged few? Obviously that day need never come.

And this is why I am an economic Eeyore and not a buoyant optimist. Because economy is political economy, the political position of the ordinary person is very poor and getting worse along with the economic, and we have so damn many neo-Malthusian apologists who cherry pick out a single point to attack in an effort to evade the larger crisis staring us in the face. I know a Marxist proletarian revolution is out of the question because it will turn into a nuclear civil war, with all the other WMD and other arsenals of high tech repression thrown in too. Finding another way is not easy. But a childlike faith in the good benefits an Islamic like submission, not like Muslims to a purported loving and merciful and all powerful if stern God, but to the "magic of the marketplace" in all its mindlessness and perversity, is definitely not better.
 
All the rising economic powers of the capitalist world first took care, in the days before they rode to the top of the wheel of fortune, to guarantee national interest in national development in defiance of Smith, Ricardo, von Mises, Friedman et al, by looking to their national self-suffciency in essential crops, and to fostering industrial development under the protection of tariffs and other preferential policies.
And, as it so happened, all of those rising economic powers were in a better position to grow their own food than many, if not most, countries in the world today; they had more fertile, better watered soil, better crops, better mechanization, and in a number of cases controlled some of the best arable land in the world. Focusing on self-sufficiency in food makes sense if you're the United States, but no sense at all if you're Saudi Arabia or Libya, for example. And once the United States (Canada, Australia...) are producing giant amounts of food at a low, low price, it's a lot harder for the local smallholder to compete. Not impossible, but most of the crops that people grow anywhere are the same, so harder.

Japan is probably as textbook an example of a nation that lacks extensive resources per capita, including good agricultural land--I would bet its proportion of arable land to land agriculturally nearly useless (high mountain slopes instead of dry deserts) is no better than Iran's. But the Japanese are infamous among their would-be rice exporting partners in favoring domestic production of rice, and blocking cheaper imports, though this results in considerably higher food prices for the urban majority.
You can terrace mountain slopes; it's much harder to water the desert (and Iran has a large number of steep mountains, too).

I believe this, more than a presumed inevitable population surge, determines the nature of the market priorities and land usage in these countries, and indeed that the population surges themselves are outcomes of the imposition of colonial and neo-colonial dependencies, just as the great surge in British population correlated with the expulsion of the peasant majorities off the land into wage dependency in industry (and the remnant on the land also fell into wage dependency as hired farm workers).
And I think you're confusing correlation for causation and ignoring the fact that many third-world countries, which had more favorable growing conditions, were able to retain self-sufficiency in food--sometimes despite having similar relative population gains to Africa. For example, South America went from a population of 74 million to a population of 600 million between 1900 and 2010, a similar degree of growth as Africa, and it would be hard to argue that it was at all less dominated by outside forces than Africa, but South America is self-sufficient in food. In fact, some less developed countries, like India, gained self-sufficiency in food or even became food exporters where they had not been before. Now, you could blame this on a lack of investment in African agriculture instead, driven by outside forces...but the beneficiaries of the Green Revolution were also mostly dependencies of the superpowers--Mexico, the Philippines, and Brazil were all major beneficiaries of the Green Revolution, for example. And there have been attempts to bring the Green Revolution to Africa; they simply have not succeeded, with a wide variety of reasons, both political and technical. I think the story is a lot more complex than simply "bad old capitalists turned the rest of the world into a giant extractive machine and destroyed local agriculture in search of profit".
 
If I concede your point--and I am not really haggling here, it is well made--will you concede that this is a side issue nit-picking on a tangent from the central argument I am making in this thread, which is that right or wrong, crazy or sane, I am indeed arguing that capitalism, in its detailed and innate nature, is indeed the major determining factor, more so than geography? The thread after all is about the USA, not about the third world directly. I had another example of regionalism via lopsided development--the "decadent" US South becoming the "dynamic" Sun Belt.

The point is that the development of a world-encapsulating system like capitalism is indeed complex, not to be reduced to a few universal and eternal rubric phrases like "A rising tide lifts all boats" or "free trade is always optimal for all partners." Certainly the polemical equation between market freedom and political freedom would seem to me to be a fabulous tall tale indeed.

So reducing my position to wicked capitalists being wicked because they are wicked is not really engaging with it either. Capitalists do what is opportune under the conditions they face; if they are faced by strong popular organization of the working people they will put on a human face and make common cause with all sorts of benign projects, and they may find ample profit that way--though I doubt many would go looking for it in such a direction.

My basic argument with GeographyDude here is that I am saying capitalist imperatives do dominate, and that the conditions changed for deep reasons, much deeper and prior to the oil shock, around the cusp the 60s going into the 70s. In this case I believe the change involved a prior basis of surge and boom running out of steam around that time, putting capitalism onto its most obviously parasitic track wherein profits tend to fall, and offsetting that trend it is necessary to tear up all sorts of previously agreed to social compacts that could be afforded in a more buoyant age, to feed all "Fat" in society to the imperative of maintaining profit rates by any process no matter how destructive. In such a phase, the win-win politics of the postwar prosperity no longer hold and the ruling class calls forth Volckers, Greenspans, Friedmans, Reagans, Bushes, Pinochets, crusades against foes raised up against us by blowback of our policies and generally the outlines of the world as we know it today. In so doing I am being a fatalist of course and a creative alternative that shows that being such a gloomy Gus is not necessary would be an interesting challenge. I'd probably feel compelled to pick it apart by trying to show how this part is ASB unlikely, that part is terribly vulnerable to this known interest, the other part--would have been nice... but in the end it all comes down to world views I guess.

I too was raised in a world view that said capitalism was good, that development is what every nation needs and wants, that essentially every nation's developmental path is pretty similar and there is no hierarchy of rich, central powers seeking (consciously or otherwise) to maintain their privileged place atop the Wheel of Fortune while some will nevertheless be sucked down and new powers rise to enjoy the top for a while, and could not see how something as clearly, well, free, and voluntary, and win-win, as simple trade could ever be part of an extractive mechanism.

Since then I've come to see things differently, and if the picture of the world and its likely future is less pretty to me now, it is also a lot more detailed and structured, cause and effect seem to be in operation, and what were once head scratching mysteries now seem to have clear explanations.

Thus, I don't think the miseries GeographyDude and I both commonly identify as such are nearly as easily avoided as he seems to. It is a battle of world views I suppose.

So it is a bit disappointing to me that instead of anyone tacking that head on, they just go for peripheral stuff. I'm seeing the same kind of thing in the space threads too, instead of people taking the core issue head on, looking for little gotcha's here and there they can find. This is annoying and it does not address the central points. Which leave me with my own views there pretty much unchallenged, if alone.
 
So it is a bit disappointing to me that instead of anyone tacking that head on, they just go for peripheral stuff. I'm seeing the same kind of thing in the space threads too, instead of people taking the core issue head on, looking for little gotcha's here and there they can find. This is annoying and it does not address the central points. Which leave me with my own views there pretty much unchallenged, if alone.
Frankly, I have to admit that it's usually really hard to figure out what your main point is because you write such long posts! It's hard to tell what's important and what's peripheral when you write what would, for anyone else, be a very long post on what you later say was a minor point. If you wrote much shorter and more to the point posts, then I think you would get more people engaging with your main point--e.g., in your original post, you could have just said,

"In my opinion, the stagnation from the 1970s onwards stemmed not from any contingent factors like the oil shock or the interest rates of Volcker or the union-busting of Reagan, but from a deep malaise in capitalism itself, which was described by Ernst Mandel in his book, Late Capital. From the 1940s to the 1970s, it had been possible to grow profits by substituting synthetic inputs such as plastics for raw materials from underdeveloped colonial nations, which happily made it easy to provide benefits to everyone, at least in developed countries; but from the 1970s onwards, those technological elements have been exhausted and so the result has been that profits only grow through by cutting costs. The costs cut could come from capital or labor; capital has the power, so they came from labor."

That would be a fair representation, yes? And it would lead you into many fewer digressions on points of secondary or tertiary importance that confuse the issue and also attract the attention of people who are trying to argue against you.
 
Frankly, I have to admit that it's usually really hard to figure out what your main point is because you write such long posts! It's hard to tell what's important and what's peripheral when you write what would, for anyone else, be a very long post on what you later say was a minor point. If you wrote much shorter and more to the point posts, then I think you would get more people engaging with your main point--e.g., in your original post, you could have just said,

"In my opinion, the stagnation from the 1970s onwards stemmed not from any contingent factors like the oil shock or the interest rates of Volcker or the union-busting of Reagan, but from a deep malaise in capitalism itself, which was described by Ernst Mandel in his book, Late Capital. From the 1940s to the 1970s, it had been possible to grow profits by substituting synthetic inputs such as plastics for raw materials from underdeveloped colonial nations, which happily made it easy to provide benefits to everyone, at least in developed countries; but from the 1970s onwards, those technological elements have been exhausted and so the result has been that profits only grow through by cutting costs. The costs cut could come from capital or labor; capital has the power, so they came from labor."

That would be a fair representation, yes? And it would lead you into many fewer digressions on points of secondary or tertiary importance that confuse the issue and also attract the attention of people who are trying to argue against you.

This is very very fair criticism. It would be best if I could do that, just put out the essential point and leave it there. There are two reasons I don't tend to work that way.

1) I am defensive and paranoid by nature. This probably relates to growing up hearing impaired. I desperately do not want to be misunderstood, and so try to address every possible contingency or objection anyone could raise. I am defending against the secondary and tertiary lines of attack as I go, and this obviously bogs me down pretty badly.

2) In this case, I did go in with pretty much the fair summary you extracted for me in mind, but very often--as in the New World Fraco-Anglia thing you have going--I jump in with some reaction and then it dialectically evolves, as I consider the counterarguments to what I am saying, until often I wind up in a very different position than when I started. I was going to say that English are going to colonize New England no matter what you do, then I started thinking of ways to divert them and it led me to a different place.

In sum...as Victor Hugo or someone like that said, "If I had more time, this letter would be shorter!" It takes time to work out what my real position is, upon due consideration of all facts, and then to look at the sheer mass of what I have written to get there, and snip out redundancies and eliminate side tracks and boil stuff down into solid gems of succinct reasoning and argument. By the time I have done this, the thread will have moved on to other things.

You have no idea how often I do start a reply, go through this process, get it "almost done" but I'm too tired to go on, the thread slips off and I decide it was not going to be well received for any number of reasons--including that sometimes when all is said and done, it was tangential and largely off topic even before I spun off the tangents to the tangents. You don't see these because I don't post them.

So yes, it gets worse!

I see that you did indeed extract the essential thrust exactly as I should have boiled it down to.
 
Please notice that according to the classical equilibrium/marginal utility academic economic theories that draw these graphs, OPEC or any other merely conspiratorial, monopolistic organization should not be capable of forcing an abrupt rise in the price of oil. . . .
Maybe Ricardo writing back in the 1800s? But when I took my only two economics classes freshman year 1982-'83, we did talk about how monopolies try to price discriminate in order to maximize their profits. Don't remember whether we specifically talked about cartels.
 
. . . My basic argument with GeographyDude here is that I am saying capitalist imperatives do dominate, and that the conditions changed for deep reasons, much deeper and prior to the oil shock, . . .
I'll say it's probably AND BOTH. Yes, it's deeper reasons AND the 1973 and '79 "supply shocks" due to oil. And it's important to understand these so that it's not viewed as some huge mystery.

To everyone else listening in, yes, I know we've spent a lot of this thread talking about economics. But I'd say economics determines between 60 and 90% of what happens politically, say, 95% of the time! ;) of course, not always, there are other factors.
 
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http://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Please also notice the lower productivity from 1973 to 2015, only 73.4%. And in tough times, sure, corporate executives are going to try to bust down labor more.

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EPI or Economic Policy Institute is on the liberal side of the political spectrum.
 
. . . 1996 is the very latest.
A Democrat is President during the '80s. Another Democrat is elected in '88 and handles the 1991 recession somewhat better than Bush, Sr. did and this Democrat wins re-election in '92.

Okay, how do the Republicans reposition themselves in '96.
 
A Democrat is President during the '80s. Another Democrat is elected in '88 and handles the 1991 recession somewhat better than Bush, Sr. did and this Democrat wins re-election in '92.

Okay, how do the Republicans reposition themselves in '96.

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Maybe after three failed elections they shift left? Maybe not.
 
A Democrat is President during the '80s. Another Democrat is elected in '88 and handles the 1991 recession somewhat better than Bush, Sr. did and this Democrat wins re-election in '92.

Okay, how do the Republicans reposition themselves in '96.

Why would there be a '91 Recession? and Dems as prez since 1976? 20 years is a long time for one party to keep power
 
Why would there be a '91 Recession? and Dems as prez since 1976? 20 years is a long time for one party to keep power
In this scenario, Ford wins in '76 so a Democrat would be in power for 16 year TTL if they held on until '96.

A Democrat is President during the '80s. Another Democrat is elected in '88 and handles the 1991 recession somewhat better than Bush, Sr. did and this Democrat wins re-election in '92.

Okay, how do the Republicans reposition themselves in '96.

The Democrats would run out of steam at some point and put up a dud. If it wasn't in '92, it would be in '96. Do you honestly think in a scenario where Bush Sr. handles the Early '90s recession better and gets re elected in 1992 that the GOP would win in 1996 with Dan Quayle or Bob Dole (either one of them would most likely be the nominee) on a good economy alone when the Democrats would possibly have candidates like Gore, Biden, Bradley, Gephardt, Kerry, Ann Richards, as she'd most certainly be re elected if Poppy got a second term, and Mario Cuomo who also has a good chance to be re elected in a Bush wins '92 TL?
 
Why would there be a '91 Recession?
There was OTL. In fact there is always some sort of recession to some degree every decade, within a few years of the end of it.

If you weren't around in the '91 recession, I assure you I was. Massive numbers of store closures, including auto dealers, and plummeting prices for new cars as the dealerships became desperate were what I noticed in particular.

I was around for the crises of the late 70s that Reagan turned into massive unemployment in the early 80s, and for the general stagflation crisis beginning in the early 70s that plagued the whole decade. You may recall JFK's campaign slogan in 1960 was "Let's Get This Country Moving Again"--a reference to the mild but still serious late 50s recession. US economy was also stagnant when the Korean War broke out.

It's like a clock almost. For this reason, while I would think an author could justify the '91 recession being either better or worse in impact, and shift it back or forth 12-18 months, one who glided through the end of any decade without bothering to mention the recession would be making a mistake, or cheating, or have taken steps to make the economy no longer capitalist in the ATL.

This is one reason I think the mainstream economists are completely useless, because there is this major and regular phenomenon lying right in front of them for anyone to see, which has serious effects on people's lives, and yet they have no ready explanation and tend to describe each new crash as though it were completely ad hoc and unexpected.
 
Maybe an 1980s Democratic administration, same Keynesian priming the pump but a little less money toward military build-up and a little more toward infrastructure, much more middle-of-the-road regarding labor unions, bold in using the SBA loans for experiments and honest in evaluating the feedback from these experiments,

Yes, a Democratic administration better damage-controls the loss of manufacturing jobs than Republicans OTL, but doesn't really receive credit for this.

There's still the slow slide with a smaller percentage of American citizens having access to middle-class and above jobs. Perhaps a Republican candidate in 1996 says he, or she, can better champion the interests of average, working-class Americans. I mean, he or she hits the right stride in appealing to many middle-class swing voters, as well as swing voters who aspire to the middle-class, as well as most upper-income voters who are swing voters. (1 swing voter = 2 regular voters who may or may not stay home, and I think this is largely where it's won or lost)
 
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CaliGuy

Banned
In regards to the Presidency, it depends on how successfully the inflation problem is handled. A quick defeat of inflation in the early 1980s would result in the GOP winning back the White House in either 1988 (if there is a poor Dem candidate that year) or 1992 (if there is a good Dem candidate in 1988). If inflation and/or unemployment remains high up to 1984, though, then the GOP probably wins back the White House that year.
 
. . . This is one reason I think the mainstream economists are completely useless, because there is this major and regular phenomenon lying right in front of them for anyone to see, which has serious effects on people's lives, and yet they have no ready explanation and tend to describe each new crash as though it were completely ad hoc and unexpected.
I disagree.

I have heard stagflation described as "the refutation of the Keynesian consensus." Meaning, economists were often successful in smoothing the ups and downs of the business cycle, just not in this case.

And to the criticism that each downturn is described in ad hoc fashion, this is where I'd say that often an advanced, modern economy is biologically complex. Just like a doctor in a large city hospital may see and treat a lot of cases of pneumonia. And pneumonia would seem like it should be pretty straightforward, but it can be caused by a lot of different microbes and of course everyone's immunity and reaction can be a little different. This doctor could literally go weeks before seeing two cases which were substantially the same.
 
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There was OTL. In fact there is always some sort of recession to some degree every decade, within a few years of the end of it.

If you weren't around in the '91 recession, I assure you I was. Massive numbers of store closures, including auto dealers, and plummeting prices for new cars as the dealerships became desperate were what I noticed in particular.

But the number of butterflies over a decade would make that date irreverent, like does the Berlin Wall come down on schedule, or does the USSR wheeze onwards without RR's game of 'Deep Pockets' with Military spending then getting rid of most nuclear weapons?
 
But the number of butterflies over a decade would make that date irreverent, like does the Berlin Wall come down on schedule, or does the USSR wheeze onwards without RR's game of 'Deep Pockets' with Military spending then getting rid of most nuclear weapons?

I said that. The date of the visible shift from previous prosperity as it was called and obvious crisis is variable. The exact sectors in which the collapse begins is variable. Whether there is a clear correlation between geopolitical events such as the crash of the USSR or the fall of the Berlin wall, or Congressional decisions to either slash US military spending, or raise it, is variable.

What is not variable is that the decade cycle, plainly visible to those with eyes to see going back to the first industrial revolution in the early 19th century, indicates deep seated, fundamental relationships that produce a cycle, and these cycles persist throughout any number of seismic shifts in society. Therefore, what we know is, sometime around 1990, maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later, a crash of some kind is to be expected, and to persist for some years. How intense the downturns are, and how buoyant the upswings are, is also variable, but there is another pattern governing that--the deep factors I mentioned earlier make some contiguous sets of ten year cycles more buoyant, with booms that reach higher than average and last longer, and crashes that are shorter and more easily recovered from and do less damage. Vice versa other generational periods are stagnant, the "booms" are weak and unimpressive, the crashes come early and linger long with deeper stagnation in the troughs doing more damage.

We went from a buoyant generation to a stagnant one around 1970.

So yes, your point is entirely correct and thanks for totally missing mine, which I made succinctly too. If you'd read it you'd note I said what you said. If you mean on the other hand to imply that had it not been for the crash of the Soviet system and military cutbacks, or Saddam Hussein's decision to invade Kuwait, or any other peculiar and contingent bit of historical chaos, the crash would have been avoided completely--I say no, it would shift around but it would not fail to occur, as it always had every decade before no matter what the state of the world politically, or even generally economically. In stagnant long periods, crashes continue to add insult and more injury to injury; in buoyant ones they show up on schedule like a mild case of flu to remind us that a real flu can kill us all. Keynesian macroeconomic manipulations, when they have the traction afforded by general prosperity in a boom to provide the tension to work with, can mollify them. They never ever prevent or eliminate them. The decadal boom bust cycle is a fundamental of any capitalist society, in any stage of development allowing it to still be basically capitalist, because it emerges from the fundamental mechanisms and preconditions for capitalism to exist.
 
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