>On Behalf Of Carrol Cox
>
> Doug is always too tentative. Be bold. People forget false
> predictions and remember the bold valid ones. Leave
> out the maybe. My guess is that almost all of the radical
> upsurges of the last 200 years have come in priods when
> conditions were improving.
Although it can also be argued that radical movements usually have an upsurge when there is a general pattern of improvement, thereby raising expectations, but people suffer an economic setback leaving them below those rising expectations. The French and Russian revolutions I believe fit that pattern, but it means that the strongest radical upsurges often happen at a delicate point where economic troubles setin, but not so severely that average folks internalize the slump psychologically and retreat to conservative individualistic self-defensive actions.
A stock market crash would not necessarily sink the whole economy, but would dash the expectations of all those folks thinking Internet millionairedom is just around the corner for all of us. That might be just the right combination of strong underlying conditions with dashed expectations to fuel the general upsurge in activism currently spreading.
-- Nathan Newman