What Really Causes Recessions?
Chief Economist, ExxonMobil
Tyler Goodspeed challenges conventional wisdom on recession causality, presenting historical evidence to argue that economic downturns are driven by external shocks rather than inherent boom-bust cycles.
Do economic booms carry the seeds of their own collapse? It's one of the most persistent ideas in economics, and Tyler Goodspeed thinks it's wrong. Drawing on 132 recessions across more than three centuries of American and British history, Goodspeed argues that we keep telling ourselves the wrong story about why economies crash — and that recessions are typically caused not by the excesses of the boom that came before, but by adverse shocks we fail to anticipate or absorb. In this talk at UATX, Goodspeed presents his new book, “Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It.”
Tyler Goodspeed is chief economist of ExxonMobil and former acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard and a PhD in economics from Cambridge.
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