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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: smolejv@gmx.net who wrote (4892)	6/13/2001 11:41:04 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

I was thinking more of business cycle type depressions. Wars, as we all know, cause inflation, often followed by recession as the economy tries to adjust to the shocks of social and economic change. My understanding is that the Black Death actually led to a period of economic growth - wages went up due to scarcity of labor, social mobility enhanced the status of those formerly held down. Not such easy questions to answer in the past, maybe, but becoming easier all the time, due to research by people like my favorite historian, Fernand Braudel, who wrote, among other things, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century. Braudel pioneered the study of large scale social change over long periods of time. I'm interested in shorter periods, and, unlike Braudel I am interested in the effects of wars, treaties, and great men, but I agree with Braudel that these are only symptoms of broader change. Thus, to understand the Potato Famine, it is important to understand not only the relationship of the Irish and the English, but also to understand the economic changes caused in Ireland by the change in diet from grains to potatoes (larger families among the poor, but almost completely dependent on one foodstuff.) The cultivation of the potato itself (introduced 1590) changed the centuries-old Irish social structure, because smaller plots of land could support families. The Irish population grew quite rapidly, but was impoverished and illiterate long before the Famine. irelandstory.com One economic effect of the Famine was an increase in the size of farms, which made the farmer more powerful economically and politically. irelandstory.com But I digress.