Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 11:13:22 -0800 From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari) Subject: M-TH: Cycles and Prediction Doug got me right (and thanks for the added info on Michael's commercial interest in Korea). "The IMF says 'a substantially more pronounced and prolonged' Asian crisis could reduce industrial-nation growth to 1.6% in 1998. Economists aren't good at seeing the big shifts. As Victor Zarnowitz, a business cycle scholar, puts it: 'The very occurence of a recession is an unsolved puzzle. There is no generally accepted explanation of why a normally well-functioning economy of a country with growing population and other productive resources should repeatedly suffer overall declines in eomployment, production, real income and sales.' WSJ, 1/5/98, A1 Zarnowitz has written a big book on business cycles; it is relied on by Steven Webber in an article for a recent *Foreign Affairs* about the conquest of the business cycle in the new economy . I haven't read these books by Zarnowitz, Richard Gordon (ed) or Howard Sherman on the the US trade cycle. So if Doug or Jerry want to share their thoughts at any time, please do. I would like to make the distinction, in reply to Jurriaan, between the prediction and explanation of cyclical downturns. But that will have to be put off until I read Leswek Nowak, as well as Peter Manicas who develops this distinction in his History and Philosophy of Social Science, several rewarding chapters of which I have read. David Hillel Ruben, once a Marxist philosopher, has also written an introduction to *Explaining Explanation*, which like so many important books has been sitting on my desk unread for too long. Rakesh --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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