Those were the most major ones of the 19th, 20th and 21st century in terms of of depth. The exact cut off would be more be subjective however.Simon_Jester wrote:ArmorPierce, that ignores all the recessions that happened in off-years. There were panics over and over throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, some of them roughly as large as the panics you cite. Plus, plenty of other crises happen in between recessions- World War One comes to mind.
The point isn't that you can't find economic crises recurring every 80 to 90 years if you cherrypick through the numerous panics which have occured at roughly 10-20 year intervals ever since the modern stock/banking economy was founded. It's that the response to those crises isn't predictable or the same every time. It doesn't have the same effects on generational psychology- the way people reacted to the Great Depression is very different from the way they're reacting to the current crisis, and both are very different from the reaction to a 19th century depression.
The forces involved are at best quasi-cyclic; there's so much room for chaos theory to kick in that you can't generate a predictable four-cycle engine of generations off of it. So calling the people who were born around 1980 a "Hero Generation" because of analogy to people who lived 80 or 160 years earlier, while abstracting out all the confounding variables, strikes me as a very bad model.
I don't know about the hero generation but I will put forth this. It is a fact that during good times, people become greedy and more risky with their financial decisions. Following bad times people become more risk averse. This is true across the board. People are people and people tend to react predictably on a basic level across time.
Logically it would follow that the worse financial crisis you followed, the greater the risk aversion.
