Читать книгу The Unintended Consequences of Technology - Chris Ategeka - Страница 20

Last but not least of the unintended consequences of capitalism are the boom-and-bust cycles. Bust cycles in particular are very debilitating to society. In 100 years, we've seen the 1929 stock market crash, the 1989 bust caused by the savings and loan crisis, the 2001 recession caused by stock market crash and high-interest rates, the 2008 mortgage housing crisis, and finally the economic fallout of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

These cycles fall into four phrases: boom, which is the aggressive expansion; peak, an inflection point where the economy stops expanding; bust, the contraction season; and the end of the bust, which is the inflection point where the economy stops contracting and begins to expand again (Amadeo, 2020).

The boom and bust cycles are caused by three forces—the law of supply and demand, the availability of financial capital, and future expectations. Technology companies, just like any other business operating in a capitalist economy, have a tendency to fall into booms and busts, with painful recessions and mass unemployment. These bust cycles affect the people at the bottom the hardest because most of them survive on paycheck to paycheck, thus the unpredictability of earnings is the biggest problem.