1. Ralston Saul
Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades.
Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or
political events, may make it to half a century. Beyond that, little
short of military force can keep them in place.
The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just
over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious,
economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in
Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely
to the intensive use of military and police force. Keynesianism, if
you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its
more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own
Globalization, with its technocratic and technological
determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years. And now it,
too, is dead.