This economist studied 400 years of recessions. His bleak conclusion: stop trying to predict them

In the early 18th century, the American colonies suffered a depression-level economic contraction. There was no war. No financial panic. No obvious villain—except, as it turns out, Blackbeard. Atlantic piracy had reached its peak, blockading the port of Charleston and choking off trade routes from the Caribbean to Long Island. Trade collapsed. The money supply collapsed. The economy followed. It’s the kind of cause-and-effect that doesn’t fit neatly into any business-cycle theory. And according to Tyler Goodspeed, that’s precisely the point. Goodspeed, the chief economist of ExxonMobil and a former acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, spent years combing through four centuries of economic data—from 17th-century colonial trade collapses to the 2008 financial crisis—and arrived at a conclusion that is either deeply clarifying or deeply unsettling, depending on your disposition. Recessions, he argues in his new book Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It, are not cycles. They are random. And they will keep happening, forever, because history will keep happening. Goodspeed completed the book largely before joining Exxon and wrote it in his private capacity, he told me, not as a representative of the company. “The reality is that recessions will continue to happen because history will continue to happen,” Goodspeed said in a recent interview with McKinsey’s Author Talks. “The idiosyncratic nature of recessions rebels against evolved human logic,” he told me over email. “We are pattern-seeking mammals; patterns are how we relate observed stimuli to subsequent negative experiences.” Humans naturally try to link trauma to some precipitating action in hopes of correcting it next time, he said. History just doesn’t work that way. “I’m sure there will be participants in the market for economic prognostications who will continue to insist that they possess a