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Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It
From a top economist, the real explanation for why recessions start, how long they last, and how to avoid them in the first place
“It is rare that a work of economic history is truly revolutionary. Goodspeed’s Recession is such a book.” ―Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money
What causes a recession? Do recessions end on their own, or do they require external intervention? Does a recession in one country mean the rest of the world will follow? Are we in a recession now?
Economic expert Tyler Goodspeed answers these questions and many more in Recession, a groundbreaking new analysis of economic contractions over the last four centuries. Combining the historian’s extensive primary source material and the economist’s arsenal of statistical analysis, this book rewrites what we know about recessions. Contrary to popular perception, recessions are not the inevitable bust that follows an unsustainable boom, and they do not operate like wildfires that clear out economic deadwood. Recessions are caused by adverse shocks like war and energy price spikes; and far from unleashing gales of creative destruction, post-recession economic growth typically resumes the same trend as before—all pain, no gain. While recessions have become less frequent over time, decisions made by businesses and governments can prolong recessions, and Goodspeed offers guidance to avoid making recessions worse. Issuing an important corrective to economic thinking, Recession is essential reading for high-level policymakers and armchair economists alike.
“It is rare that a work of economic history is truly revolutionary. Goodspeed’s Recession is such a book.” ―Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money
What causes a recession? Do recessions end on their own, or do they require external intervention? Does a recession in one country mean the rest of the world will follow? Are we in a recession now?
Economic expert Tyler Goodspeed answers these questions and many more in Recession, a groundbreaking new analysis of economic contractions over the last four centuries. Combining the historian’s extensive primary source material and the economist’s arsenal of statistical analysis, this book rewrites what we know about recessions. Contrary to popular perception, recessions are not the inevitable bust that follows an unsustainable boom, and they do not operate like wildfires that clear out economic deadwood. Recessions are caused by adverse shocks like war and energy price spikes; and far from unleashing gales of creative destruction, post-recession economic growth typically resumes the same trend as before—all pain, no gain. While recessions have become less frequent over time, decisions made by businesses and governments can prolong recessions, and Goodspeed offers guidance to avoid making recessions worse. Issuing an important corrective to economic thinking, Recession is essential reading for high-level policymakers and armchair economists alike.
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Published March 31, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 3, 2026
Thoroughly researched, analyzed and well written, this book considers the life and causes of economic expansions and recessions. Fairly technical, it presents coherent arguments with interesting facts
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
The Stories We Tell About Collapse
In “Recession,” Tyler Goodspeed argues that downturns are less moral reckoning than historical interruption
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 2026
“Recession” opens not with fate, but with interruption.
“Recession” is the sort of book that walks into a crowded room of economists, clears its throat, and informs them that they have been telling themselves the wrong story for generations. Tyler Goodspeed’s central claim is plain, bracing, and intentionally unfashionable: recessions are not the economy’s natural hangover after excess, not the moral correction to boom-time sin, not the healthy purge by which capitalism tidies its desk, and not the manageable byproduct of a policy machine that occasionally slips a gear. They are shocks—contingent, overlapping, historically specific blows that strike economies from outside the growth process itself. Locusts. Coal strikes. Banking fragility. Energy shocks. Piracy. War. Fear. The title “Recession” sounds almost comically broad. The book is anything but.
Goodspeed is writing against a habit of mind as much as against a school of economics. Again and again, he takes aim at our appetite for punitive pattern. We like the story in which booms breed busts because it feels orderly, chastening, almost hygienic: someone overreached, someone sinned, someone mistook prosperity for permanence, and history arrived carrying the invoice. Goodspeed’s argument is that this story has survived less because it describes the historical record especially well than because it satisfies a very old human wish for moral symmetry. He is not merely disputing an economic explanation. He is disputing a narrative reflex.
Panic arrives as atmosphere first, explanation second, in “Recession.”
That may sound forbiddingly theoretical. In practice, “Recession” is most persuasive when it gets dirt under its nails. Goodspeed has an excellent eye for the detail that startles first and clarifies second. The American Midwest in 1931 is not suffering some vague agricultural weakness; it is being stripped by locusts. Colonial trade is not merely slowing; it is being harassed by pirates. Britain in 1947 is not just enduring postwar difficulty; it is freezing, rationed, flooded, and running by candlelight. These are not ornamental anecdotes pinned onto an abstract thesis. They are the thesis in action. The book’s recurring point is that economies do not contract inside pure models. They contract inside weather systems, fuel shortages, legal restrictions, transport failures, credit panics, and institutions built with more optimism than resilience.
One of the book’s sharpest gifts is that it drags economic history back into the world of bodies, freight, crops, fuel, and nerves. Too much writing on recessions proceeds as if downturns were generated inside charts. Goodspeed keeps returning them to the material world. Even where one resists the scale of his conclusions, it is hard not to admire the stubborn concreteness of the method. He does not want recession to remain an elegant abstraction. He wants it insect-ridden, overleveraged, underbranched, oil-shocked, tariff-pinched, and occasionally frozen solid on the dock.
In “Recession,” divergence becomes its own kind of drama.
The structure is cumulative and prosecutorial. Each chapter takes up a reigning explanation, metaphor, or article of faith and worries at it until it gives way. Expansions do not die of old age. Busts do not reliably follow booms. Recessions do not cleanse. Governments are not merely firefighters; they are often arsonists with a hose. Recessions are frequently national rather than synchronized. Recovery depends as much on confidence and expectations as on the clean disappearance of the original shock. Historical scenes open the door, but they are quickly pressed into argument. This gives the book real momentum. It also means some chapters feel argued in advance.
That tradeoff defines much of the reading experience. The gain is pace, sharpness, and unusual readability for a book this data-heavy. The cost is a slight narrowing of inquiry. Goodspeed is not especially interested in hovering over ambiguity when a point can be driven home instead. His ideal sentence is not one that lingers; it is one that turns, corrects, and advances. The prose, accordingly, is brisk, long-limbed, and often very good. He moves easily between technical discussion and narrative color, and he has a taste for chapter titles and formulations that do real work without showing off too hard. One feels throughout that he is impatient with sermon, cliché, and inherited piety alike.
“Recession” rejects the old fantasy that pain must be cleansing.
The chapter that best displays the book’s strengths may be “The Patriotic Recession,” which asks whether recessions are really as international, synchronized, and contagious as cliché insists. Here Goodspeed is especially good at taking a slogan and subjecting it to historical embarrassment. Sometimes yes. Quite often no. The comparison between the United States and the United Kingdom becomes one of the book’s richest lines of inquiry, because it shows that even broadly similar, deeply integrated economies can have strikingly different recession histories depending on their banking systems, energy mixes, and institutional arrangements.
The banking material is especially strong. Goodspeed’s contrast between America’s historically fragmented, under-diversified unit banking system and Britain’s nationwide branch banking system is lucid, memorable, and genuinely illuminating. Here the book becomes less a treatise on recessions in the abstract than a study of vulnerability: shocks matter, yes, but institutions determine whether shocks are absorbed, diffused, or amplified into disaster.
Recovery in “Recession” begins when fear loosens its grip.
Where “Recession” begins to overpress is in the size of its revisionism. Goodspeed is rarely content to say that conventional accounts are incomplete. He generally wants to prove that they are fundamentally mistaken. That gives the book its swagger and much of its pleasure. It also leads to some flattening. Boom-bust accounts are sometimes treated as though they were only ever morality plays. The “cleansing” theory of recession is often presented in its harshest form before being dismantled. One begins to feel that several distinct opponents have been folded into one large, obliging adversary.
Something similar happens in the treatment of the state. Governments are not just firefighters; they also generate shocks. The point lands. Still, the argument can edge toward understatement about the uneven but real power of policy. Goodspeed avoids the cheap pose of indifference, but his resistance to grand claims sometimes leaves too little space for partial success.
By the end of “Recession,” growth feels less triumphant than precariously resumed.
The ending is strong because it widens rather than merely concludes. By the final chapter, Goodspeed’s subject has expanded. The book is no longer just about downturns. It is about the stories people tell to convert contingency into moral pattern. We want recessions to punish something. We want suffering to correspond to prior excess. We want contraction to feel deserved. Goodspeed’s final insistence is that this habit is not only intellectually sloppy but socially dangerous.
Even with its overreach, “Recession” is an unusually brisk, brainy, and combative book. It restores strangeness to economic history. It makes institutional design feel dramatic. It returns physical texture to subjects often airbrushed into clean models. And it leaves behind a sharpened suspicion: that our neatest explanations for economic pain are often the stories we reach for when reality has already become too unruly to bear.
My final rating: 89/100, which translates to 4 out of 5 stars.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
In “Recession,” Tyler Goodspeed argues that downturns are less moral reckoning than historical interruption
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 2026
“Recession” opens not with fate, but with interruption.
“Recession” is the sort of book that walks into a crowded room of economists, clears its throat, and informs them that they have been telling themselves the wrong story for generations. Tyler Goodspeed’s central claim is plain, bracing, and intentionally unfashionable: recessions are not the economy’s natural hangover after excess, not the moral correction to boom-time sin, not the healthy purge by which capitalism tidies its desk, and not the manageable byproduct of a policy machine that occasionally slips a gear. They are shocks—contingent, overlapping, historically specific blows that strike economies from outside the growth process itself. Locusts. Coal strikes. Banking fragility. Energy shocks. Piracy. War. Fear. The title “Recession” sounds almost comically broad. The book is anything but.
Goodspeed is writing against a habit of mind as much as against a school of economics. Again and again, he takes aim at our appetite for punitive pattern. We like the story in which booms breed busts because it feels orderly, chastening, almost hygienic: someone overreached, someone sinned, someone mistook prosperity for permanence, and history arrived carrying the invoice. Goodspeed’s argument is that this story has survived less because it describes the historical record especially well than because it satisfies a very old human wish for moral symmetry. He is not merely disputing an economic explanation. He is disputing a narrative reflex.
Panic arrives as atmosphere first, explanation second, in “Recession.”
That may sound forbiddingly theoretical. In practice, “Recession” is most persuasive when it gets dirt under its nails. Goodspeed has an excellent eye for the detail that startles first and clarifies second. The American Midwest in 1931 is not suffering some vague agricultural weakness; it is being stripped by locusts. Colonial trade is not merely slowing; it is being harassed by pirates. Britain in 1947 is not just enduring postwar difficulty; it is freezing, rationed, flooded, and running by candlelight. These are not ornamental anecdotes pinned onto an abstract thesis. They are the thesis in action. The book’s recurring point is that economies do not contract inside pure models. They contract inside weather systems, fuel shortages, legal restrictions, transport failures, credit panics, and institutions built with more optimism than resilience.
One of the book’s sharpest gifts is that it drags economic history back into the world of bodies, freight, crops, fuel, and nerves. Too much writing on recessions proceeds as if downturns were generated inside charts. Goodspeed keeps returning them to the material world. Even where one resists the scale of his conclusions, it is hard not to admire the stubborn concreteness of the method. He does not want recession to remain an elegant abstraction. He wants it insect-ridden, overleveraged, underbranched, oil-shocked, tariff-pinched, and occasionally frozen solid on the dock.
In “Recession,” divergence becomes its own kind of drama.
The structure is cumulative and prosecutorial. Each chapter takes up a reigning explanation, metaphor, or article of faith and worries at it until it gives way. Expansions do not die of old age. Busts do not reliably follow booms. Recessions do not cleanse. Governments are not merely firefighters; they are often arsonists with a hose. Recessions are frequently national rather than synchronized. Recovery depends as much on confidence and expectations as on the clean disappearance of the original shock. Historical scenes open the door, but they are quickly pressed into argument. This gives the book real momentum. It also means some chapters feel argued in advance.
That tradeoff defines much of the reading experience. The gain is pace, sharpness, and unusual readability for a book this data-heavy. The cost is a slight narrowing of inquiry. Goodspeed is not especially interested in hovering over ambiguity when a point can be driven home instead. His ideal sentence is not one that lingers; it is one that turns, corrects, and advances. The prose, accordingly, is brisk, long-limbed, and often very good. He moves easily between technical discussion and narrative color, and he has a taste for chapter titles and formulations that do real work without showing off too hard. One feels throughout that he is impatient with sermon, cliché, and inherited piety alike.
“Recession” rejects the old fantasy that pain must be cleansing.
The chapter that best displays the book’s strengths may be “The Patriotic Recession,” which asks whether recessions are really as international, synchronized, and contagious as cliché insists. Here Goodspeed is especially good at taking a slogan and subjecting it to historical embarrassment. Sometimes yes. Quite often no. The comparison between the United States and the United Kingdom becomes one of the book’s richest lines of inquiry, because it shows that even broadly similar, deeply integrated economies can have strikingly different recession histories depending on their banking systems, energy mixes, and institutional arrangements.
The banking material is especially strong. Goodspeed’s contrast between America’s historically fragmented, under-diversified unit banking system and Britain’s nationwide branch banking system is lucid, memorable, and genuinely illuminating. Here the book becomes less a treatise on recessions in the abstract than a study of vulnerability: shocks matter, yes, but institutions determine whether shocks are absorbed, diffused, or amplified into disaster.
Recovery in “Recession” begins when fear loosens its grip.
Where “Recession” begins to overpress is in the size of its revisionism. Goodspeed is rarely content to say that conventional accounts are incomplete. He generally wants to prove that they are fundamentally mistaken. That gives the book its swagger and much of its pleasure. It also leads to some flattening. Boom-bust accounts are sometimes treated as though they were only ever morality plays. The “cleansing” theory of recession is often presented in its harshest form before being dismantled. One begins to feel that several distinct opponents have been folded into one large, obliging adversary.
Something similar happens in the treatment of the state. Governments are not just firefighters; they also generate shocks. The point lands. Still, the argument can edge toward understatement about the uneven but real power of policy. Goodspeed avoids the cheap pose of indifference, but his resistance to grand claims sometimes leaves too little space for partial success.
By the end of “Recession,” growth feels less triumphant than precariously resumed.
The ending is strong because it widens rather than merely concludes. By the final chapter, Goodspeed’s subject has expanded. The book is no longer just about downturns. It is about the stories people tell to convert contingency into moral pattern. We want recessions to punish something. We want suffering to correspond to prior excess. We want contraction to feel deserved. Goodspeed’s final insistence is that this habit is not only intellectually sloppy but socially dangerous.
Even with its overreach, “Recession” is an unusually brisk, brainy, and combative book. It restores strangeness to economic history. It makes institutional design feel dramatic. It returns physical texture to subjects often airbrushed into clean models. And it leaves behind a sharpened suspicion: that our neatest explanations for economic pain are often the stories we reach for when reality has already become too unruly to bear.
My final rating: 89/100, which translates to 4 out of 5 stars.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
In his latest book “Recession,” economist Tyler Goodspeed analyzes economic contractions in the US and UK over the past few centuries. The intent is to prove that recessions are primarily caused by a confluence of random multiple shocks, which interrupt positive economic growth, rather than by flaws in previous economic expansions. The author categorizes some of these shocks as Acts of God (e.g., pandemics, droughts, hurricanes); Acts of Man (e.g., strikes, lockouts); or Acts of Church (e.g., war, oil price spikes, interest rate hikes, credit controls)—where “Church” means the individuals, institutions, and laws that govern economic activity.
The book begins with shocks that led to an autumn 1857 recession, including the failure of Ohio Life and Trust Company, the sinking of the “SS Central America,” and the fallout from restrictive New York banking regulations. The author examines each shock and shows how they interacted to contribute to the crisis. This pattern is repeated throughout the book for other economic crises.
Recessions are commonly thought of as a consequence of unsustainable booms that lead to inevitable busts, with some viewing busts as recurring on a regular, cyclical basis. The author partly attributes this thinking to our innate search for patterns, which can mistakenly lead us to find causality between events where none exists. For example, the author cites numerous instances of long expansions that were sporadically interrupted by short contractions. This is to illustrate that the depth and duration of recessions lack any actual resemblance to the height and age of preceding expansionary periods.
In a chapter on economic fluctuations, two former US Treasury officials compare such fluctuations to “symmetric oscillations about a rising trend.” These oscillations symbolize peaks and troughs that proportionately undulate and, over time, average to an overall upward trend in economic activity. In an opposing view (supported by the author), economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman compares economic contractions to random downward “plucks” on a firm but elastic string. These plucks represent adverse shocks that temporarily halt periods of otherwise uninterrupted long-term growth, where the depth of each downward pluck is symmetrical to the height of its rebound.
The author explores several other topics. One is the role that fear can play, even after shocks dissipate. The author uses the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo as an example. When the embargo terminated, energy prices remained significantly higher than pre-recession levels partly due to a heightened perceived risk of future supply disruptions. Another, based on the author’s analysis, is the general ineffectiveness of policies targeting economic fluctuations. Notwithstanding, the author favors policies that lessen the adverse effect of recessionary shocks on households most negatively impacted by them.
“Recession” is an insightful and educational read. The author effectively supports his position that economic contractions are principally caused by a convergence of multiple adverse shocks. Events leading to the recessions discussed are adequately presented, as are the actions of key players involved (e.g., business leaders, bankers, economists, government officials). Economists, policymakers, and others who read this book will better understand the nature of recessions and how to interpret economic contractions going forward.
[My special thanks to Basic Venture (Hachette Book Group) and NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this book.]
The book begins with shocks that led to an autumn 1857 recession, including the failure of Ohio Life and Trust Company, the sinking of the “SS Central America,” and the fallout from restrictive New York banking regulations. The author examines each shock and shows how they interacted to contribute to the crisis. This pattern is repeated throughout the book for other economic crises.
Recessions are commonly thought of as a consequence of unsustainable booms that lead to inevitable busts, with some viewing busts as recurring on a regular, cyclical basis. The author partly attributes this thinking to our innate search for patterns, which can mistakenly lead us to find causality between events where none exists. For example, the author cites numerous instances of long expansions that were sporadically interrupted by short contractions. This is to illustrate that the depth and duration of recessions lack any actual resemblance to the height and age of preceding expansionary periods.
In a chapter on economic fluctuations, two former US Treasury officials compare such fluctuations to “symmetric oscillations about a rising trend.” These oscillations symbolize peaks and troughs that proportionately undulate and, over time, average to an overall upward trend in economic activity. In an opposing view (supported by the author), economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman compares economic contractions to random downward “plucks” on a firm but elastic string. These plucks represent adverse shocks that temporarily halt periods of otherwise uninterrupted long-term growth, where the depth of each downward pluck is symmetrical to the height of its rebound.
The author explores several other topics. One is the role that fear can play, even after shocks dissipate. The author uses the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo as an example. When the embargo terminated, energy prices remained significantly higher than pre-recession levels partly due to a heightened perceived risk of future supply disruptions. Another, based on the author’s analysis, is the general ineffectiveness of policies targeting economic fluctuations. Notwithstanding, the author favors policies that lessen the adverse effect of recessionary shocks on households most negatively impacted by them.
“Recession” is an insightful and educational read. The author effectively supports his position that economic contractions are principally caused by a convergence of multiple adverse shocks. Events leading to the recessions discussed are adequately presented, as are the actions of key players involved (e.g., business leaders, bankers, economists, government officials). Economists, policymakers, and others who read this book will better understand the nature of recessions and how to interpret economic contractions going forward.
[My special thanks to Basic Venture (Hachette Book Group) and NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this book.]
April 1, 2026
This is a brisk and original discussion of 300 years of macroeconomic fluctuations in the US and UK. While it covers some well-trodden ground, it also offers many surprising takes.
One contribution of the book is to integrate US and UK recession data. He shows that in both cases expansions don't die of old age; that a slight majority of recessions are "patriotic" in that they tend to effect one of the two countries but not bothl that the extent and length of the expansion does not effect the size of the recession and so forth. The "plucking" model wins out over the "oscillation" model of recession, which imagines that expansions can go above trend. Instead, recesssions show a clear tendency to go below trend, but then to return to trend quickly. Unlike expansions, the extent of the recession does correlate with the speed of the recovery (expansions are faster for bigger downturns), and recessions do "die of old age," in fact, the average is about 1 year. Although expansions have gotten longer over time, it does not appear to be due to macroeconomic management, since that tendency stretches back to the 19th century, and recessions, unlike expansions, have not gotten shorter or less destructive.
The book highlights the importance of idiosyncratic shocks for causing many recessions, especially energy shocks. The 1900 and 1902 coal strikes in the US led to clear recessions, as did the 1926 coal strike in the UK. In the 18th century bad weather or bad harvests were usually enough to initiate a recession, as in 1710, 1731, and 1740, and such bad weather could also help explain the 1879 crisis and even part of the post-World War II UK crisis, where cold weather effectively froze ships in their slips and prevented coal deliveries. As the author shows, although issues like energy and weather and money could often help explain an individual recession, a unicausal explanation of recessions doesn't make sense.
On the whole, the author recommends quiescence in the face of recessions: they tend to heal themselves. Thus he recommends more focus on the expansions than the downturns. The book thus offers good common sense along with novel economic contributions and just interesting history.
One contribution of the book is to integrate US and UK recession data. He shows that in both cases expansions don't die of old age; that a slight majority of recessions are "patriotic" in that they tend to effect one of the two countries but not bothl that the extent and length of the expansion does not effect the size of the recession and so forth. The "plucking" model wins out over the "oscillation" model of recession, which imagines that expansions can go above trend. Instead, recesssions show a clear tendency to go below trend, but then to return to trend quickly. Unlike expansions, the extent of the recession does correlate with the speed of the recovery (expansions are faster for bigger downturns), and recessions do "die of old age," in fact, the average is about 1 year. Although expansions have gotten longer over time, it does not appear to be due to macroeconomic management, since that tendency stretches back to the 19th century, and recessions, unlike expansions, have not gotten shorter or less destructive.
The book highlights the importance of idiosyncratic shocks for causing many recessions, especially energy shocks. The 1900 and 1902 coal strikes in the US led to clear recessions, as did the 1926 coal strike in the UK. In the 18th century bad weather or bad harvests were usually enough to initiate a recession, as in 1710, 1731, and 1740, and such bad weather could also help explain the 1879 crisis and even part of the post-World War II UK crisis, where cold weather effectively froze ships in their slips and prevented coal deliveries. As the author shows, although issues like energy and weather and money could often help explain an individual recession, a unicausal explanation of recessions doesn't make sense.
On the whole, the author recommends quiescence in the face of recessions: they tend to heal themselves. Thus he recommends more focus on the expansions than the downturns. The book thus offers good common sense along with novel economic contributions and just interesting history.
April 15, 2026
The statistical analysis is impressive and mostly convincing. I'm persuaded that there are not really business cycles or at least not predictable ones, that the length of a period of growth is unrelated to the probability of a downturn and that the causes of recessions (other than wars) are usually combinations of largely unpredictable sui generis factors. I see how we have a tendency to make up morality tales that color recessions as the appropriate punishment for our excesses and bad behaviors, which may have been excessive and bad, but which don't really tell us much about causation. Further, this tendency to create moral scapegoats may lead us to attempt misguided corrective actions that do more harm than good.
But still I'm not fully convinced by the book. Sometimes the arguments about causative factors for recessions felt like saying that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused WWI. Yes it did, but it would be wrong to ignore the underlying systemic factors that were ultimately more important than the assassination. For example, I have to believe that overleveraged speculation and totally unregulated financial markets were key factors in the Great Depression. It really was bad behavior that couldn't go on forever. And surely insane derivatives, excesses in the home mortgage market and lack of regulatory oversight had something to do with causing the 2008 financial crisis. Seems like more bad behavior justly punished to me. Too bad that the rest of us had suffer along with the idiots when the collapse came. So while I'm against grand theories of history and think big ideas about causation of historical events are often wrong, still I do think that recessions tend to follow periods of excess more than this book would have us believe and that our morality tales are not always wrong. Maybe I am, in the words of Mr. Taleb, being fooled by randomness, but I don't think so.
But still I'm not fully convinced by the book. Sometimes the arguments about causative factors for recessions felt like saying that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused WWI. Yes it did, but it would be wrong to ignore the underlying systemic factors that were ultimately more important than the assassination. For example, I have to believe that overleveraged speculation and totally unregulated financial markets were key factors in the Great Depression. It really was bad behavior that couldn't go on forever. And surely insane derivatives, excesses in the home mortgage market and lack of regulatory oversight had something to do with causing the 2008 financial crisis. Seems like more bad behavior justly punished to me. Too bad that the rest of us had suffer along with the idiots when the collapse came. So while I'm against grand theories of history and think big ideas about causation of historical events are often wrong, still I do think that recessions tend to follow periods of excess more than this book would have us believe and that our morality tales are not always wrong. Maybe I am, in the words of Mr. Taleb, being fooled by randomness, but I don't think so.
May 24, 2026
Goodspeed presents a compelling narrative in which recessions are external shocks rather than endogenous busts caused by overexuberance or greed. He describes recessions as plucks and not oscillations.
While the author is an excellent storyteller, his graphs are hard to understand. The lack of color is one limitation, but unclear labels and graph descriptions make them hard to follow.
Left and right-leaning readers will find the theories of their favorite economists savaged by Goodspeed. He takes on economists from Hayek, to Samuelson, to Summers for espousing a single cause explanation for recessions. Alternatively, the author believes that a combination of exogenous events, such as locusts, interruptions in the supply of fossil fuels, wars, and pandemics, causes recessions.
His prescription for government is to do no harm. To stay out of the way. Unfortunately, no politician can do nothing and keep their job.
This is an interesting book that most will find controversial. Of course, that is why it is worth reading.
While the author is an excellent storyteller, his graphs are hard to understand. The lack of color is one limitation, but unclear labels and graph descriptions make them hard to follow.
Left and right-leaning readers will find the theories of their favorite economists savaged by Goodspeed. He takes on economists from Hayek, to Samuelson, to Summers for espousing a single cause explanation for recessions. Alternatively, the author believes that a combination of exogenous events, such as locusts, interruptions in the supply of fossil fuels, wars, and pandemics, causes recessions.
His prescription for government is to do no harm. To stay out of the way. Unfortunately, no politician can do nothing and keep their job.
This is an interesting book that most will find controversial. Of course, that is why it is worth reading.
May 21, 2026
In Recession, Tyler Goodspeed challenges macroeconomic orthodoxy with historically rich argument. Rather than accepting the common view that recessions are the inevitable hangover of an overheated boom, Goodspeed utilizes four centuries of U.S. and U.K. data and shows that contractions are almost always triggered by sudden, external supply-side shocks—from 18th-century crop failures to modern energy crises or pandemics to failed or misguided government fiscal or monetary policy.
This book is an engaging and eye opening read. It will completely change how you look at the business cycle.
April 27, 2026
I have not read a book that warrants a 5 star rating for a long time.
I commend this book to anyone in history, generally and economic history in particular. It is fascinating, and well-written too.
I commend this book to anyone in history, generally and economic history in particular. It is fascinating, and well-written too.
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