Paul Krugman just gave a poetic analysis of the quickly coming economic depression, and it harkened me back to my days as a mechanistic Marxist, sitting around pondering “Die langen Wellen der Konjunktur.” Ah, yearning for the Kondratieff downturn that would finally bring about the demise of capitalism. Of course, the reason why predictable cycles like these haven’t caused much of a problem is that capitalists used to be smarter (well, at least after the first Great Depression). Now, they’re ignorant, sneering, greedy frat boys and sorority sisters hell bent on doing whatever the fuck they want without paying attention to data (history is, after all, data).
