Jones & Harrison (1997): The Chaos Makers

Overview

The Chaos Makers (1997) is a short statistical monograph by economic geographer Frederic J. Jones, published under the imprint of Fred Harrison's Land Policy Council, with Harrison contributing an editorial framing essay. The book assembles land-value and national-income data for the UK, US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Denmark to argue that land-price speculation — not monetary shocks or wars — drives the recurring 18-Year Land Cycle previously traced by Homer Hoyt in Chicago. Its most-cited legacy is a forecast, credited to this book, that a land-price peak around 2007 would trigger a global financial crisis — a call Harrison revisited and elaborated in his later book Boom Bust (2005; 2nd ed. 2010), and which the investment writer Phillip J. Anderson cites in The Secret Life of Real Estate when arguing that the cycle is cross-country rather than a US or UK peculiarity.

The book is short and out of print, and most of what is known about its specific contents comes second-hand through Harrison's and Anderson's later, more widely read books, both of which cite it as their forecasting precedent. Its data tables and methodology are accordingly reported here only as those later books characterise them.

See Also

• Fred Harrison — contributed the book's framing essay and later credited it with the 2008 crash prediction
• Harrison, Boom Bust — the 2005 book that revisited and elaborated the 1997 forecast
• 18-Year Land Cycle — the cyclical pattern the book's cross-country data was marshalled to support
• 2008 Financial Crisis — the event the forecast anticipated
• Cycles Are Credit, Not Land — the leading objection to attributing the cycle to land rather than to credit expansion generally

Sources

1. Phillip J. Anderson, The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2008), Ch. 18 — used for the claim that Jones's cross-country land-value/GNP ratios (Chicago, Japan, Australia, UK, Denmark) were marshalled to demonstrate the cycle's universality. See Anderson, Secret Life of Real Estate.
2. Fred Harrison, Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010, 2nd ed. (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2010), Preface and Ch. 11 §1 — used for the claim that The Chaos Makers was the first explicit statement of Harrison's 2008/2010 crash prediction. See Harrison, Boom Bust.
3. Frederic J. Jones, The Chaos Makers (Othila Press for the Land Policy Council, 1997), ISBN 978-1-901647-01-3, 108pp — bibliographic record confirming title, author, publisher, and length. Open Library