The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History

by David Hackett Fischer

of the changing value of commodities that money might buy, caused primarily by imbalances between demographic and economic growth. Marxists think that price movements represent the changing terms of transactions within social systems, mainly between social classes. Neoclassical models perceive prices as indicators of change in the flow of supply and demand, and explain price-revolutions as the result of imbalances in market-relations, caused by various demand-centered or supply-side events, or by changes in the structures of market-conditions themselves. Agrarian approaches link prices mainly to harvest conditions. Environmental models understand price-movements as ecological indicators which register imbalances between human activity and its natural environment. Historicists explain things in their particulars, and think of each price-revolution as a unique event with its own ad hoc explanation.