We have been telling ourselves the wrong story about recessions for four centuries. And the consequences of that error are bigger than you might think.

Dr. Tyler Goodspeed, former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and author of the new book Recession, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to dismantle one of the most seductive myths in economics: that booms cause busts. Drawing on 132 recessions spanning four centuries of British and American history, Goodspeed makes a forensic and devastating case that economic expansions don't die of natural causes — they are murdered by shocks that nobody saw coming and nobody could have hedged against.

Yield curve inversions, inventory cycles, towering skylines, the ghost of Kondratiev — none of it actually predicts the next downturn. We are, Goodspeed argues, pattern-seeking mammals in a world that doesn't always offer patterns, and our hunger for moral narratives — the roaring twenties, the reckless bankers, the inevitable correction — tells us more about human psychology than it does about economic reality.

Despite our current gloom, recessions are actually getting rarer. But the greatest threat to long-run prosperity may not be the downturns themselves, but the paralysing stories we tell about them.

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