The paper aims to explore what it means for something to be a social cycle, for a theory to be a social cycle theory, and to offer a suggestion for a simple, yet, we believe, fundamentally grounded schema for categorizing them. We show that a broad range of cycle theories can be described within...

Discerning family resemblances in the world of theories can be useful for several reasons. For one thing, noticing that two theories share the traits of a family of theories may help us to understand each of them better. Secondly, noticing the family resemblances may help us to model them more...

In this chapter, we explore whether various true, endogenous social cycle theories share common patterns and characteristics. We examine a number of prominent social theories describing cyclical patterns, and attempt to abstract an ideal type common to all of them, based on the idea of two...

The Austrian theory of the business cycle (henceforth ABC) frequently has been a target for critics of Austrian economics. In particular, a number of economists who are generally appreciative of other Austrian themes have singled out ABC as being, in one such critic's words, an “embarrassing...

Credit booms have globally fuelled hikes in stock, raw material and real estate markets which have culminated in the recent US subprime market crisis. We explain the global asset market booms since the mid 1980s based on the overinvestment theories of Hayek, Wicksell and Schumpeter. We argue...

The business cycles theories of Wicksell (1898), Schumpeter (1912), Mises (1912), Hayek (1929, 1935) and Minsky (1986, 1992) explain business cycles by distorted prices on capital markets, buoyant credit expansion and overinvestment. The exuberance during the boom endogenously causes the...

Das Papier untersucht auf der Grundlage der monetären Überinvestitionstheorien von Wicksell (1898), Mises (1912) and Hayek (1929, 1935) das Scheitern von geld- und finanzpolitischen Regeln zur Kontrolle von übermäßigem Geldmengenwachstum und ausufernder Staatsverschuldung. Es zeigt...