(09-02-2016, 09:43 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The eighty-year cycle reflects a biological reality: the extinction of the memories of the memories of children five to ten years old when events happened. Those are the last people to remember events and popular culture, and the last to warn us of the bad consequences of trends that they resist from early adulthood. The real-estate bubble that Sinclair Lewis described so well in the 1920s in Babbitt was impossible so long as many people dreaded another real-estate bubble was impossible so long as people who remembered the reality behind Babbitt were still around, even if they had been 'only' in early elementary school at the time. By the latter part of the Double-Zero Decade such was possible again because people born in the early 1920s had vanished from public life. People who could see only the quick profits coulld rule the day.
This idea seems plausible, there certainly was a 2000's bubble (peak 2006) that shows up in a plot of the Case-Shiller real estate price index. No such bubble appears in the index for the 1920's. On the other hand, the Hoyt index of land values in Chicago land value, shows a bubble peak in 1925. Both Case-Shiller (1894) and Hoyt (1891) show a bubble peak in the early 1890's. Hoyt also shows bubbles in land value bubble peaks in 1836, 1854, and 1869-73. Land sales volume show corresponding bubble peaks in 1836 and 1854 and also an earlier one in 1818. They all precede or are contemporaneous with financial crises in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929. In short, there is evidence in support of panic-producing peaks in real estate associated with 1929 and 2008, but also with 1893, 1873, 1857, 1837 and 1819. So as far as real-estate-driven financial crises go, it seems their recurrence rate was 16-36 years. If you add in the panic of 1907 (which reflected a stock market bubble, as I maintain was the case for 1929 as well) then the cycle length is 14-22 years, in other words about 1 crisis per turning, on average, not 1 per saeculum. The beguiling explanation for the apparent 80 year "cycle" suggested by the last two panics does not explain the phenomenon of recurrent panics before then.
The significance of this is, your concept would say we won't see another financial crisis in our lifetimes. The 19th century experience suggests we could see yet another in our lifetimes, and the Millies here--more than one. Thus, it is testable.