The Business Cycle

This treatise draws on the works of Wesley Clair Mitchell, Karl Marx and John Keynes to argue that recessions and painful involuntary unemployment are endogenous to capitalism. It explains why the business cycle produces economic loss during its contraction phase, and growth in its expansion phase.

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Are the recurring recessions of the capitalist world merely short-term adjustments to changing economic circumstances in a system that tends, in general, toward equilibrium? In this accessible study of the business cycle, Howard Sherman makes a powerful case that recessions and painful involuntary unemployment are endogenous to capitalism. Drawing especially on the work of Wesley Clair Mitchell, Karl Marx, and John M. Keynes, Sherman explains why the nature of the business cycle produces serious economic loss and misery during its contraction phase, just as it produces growth in its expansion phase.

Originally published in 1991.

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