Arcane Item of the Day

Larry Kudlow dusts off a 19th Century economist to discuss the impact of weather on economics.

The British by repute spend a lot of time talking about the weather and the nineteenth century English economist William Stanley Jevons built a business cycle theory around it—or more precisely built a theory around the weather on the sun! As our readers know, we love classical economists and Stanley Jevons (as he preferred to be called) is yet another whose ideas might need to be dusted off. His theory (he first published on this in 1875) linked sunspots to the weather and, in a much more agrarian economy than we currently have, from the weather to crop production and thus economic growth. Now, there are those who have linked sunspot cycles (which have a cycle of 11 years) with hurricane activity (for example, Jill Hasling and John Freeman—ironically of the weather research center in Houston, Texas—published a paper in December 1993 on The Prediction of Tropical Cyclones or No Tropical Cyclones by Means of the Solar Cyclone Strike Index).

Besides the theories of Mr. Jevons, the article takes a serious look at how the destruction and reconstruction might affect certain sectors of the economy.

I call it a good read, but you know I like this kind of stuff.

Economics and Markets Posted by jk at September 26, 2005 2:58 PM