Narrative: This Time Is Different (New Era Thinking)

Overview

At every major asset-price peak, Georgist land-cycle advocates argue, prevailing opinion declares that the old rules of valuation and risk no longer apply — only for the crash that follows to look much like its predecessors. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff gave this pattern its name in This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2009), a non-Georgist survey of sixty-six countries across roughly eight centuries of financial crises, arguing that the recurring conviction that "this time is different" has preceded most of the episodes they study.[1] Advocates of the 18-Year Land Cycle invoke one specific, well-documented instance of the pattern: economist Homer Hoyt, having traced Chicago land values through the 1933 peak, himself predicted that his own cycle would be "only of interest to historians" because government economic management would prevent its recurrence — a claim Fred Harrison's The Power in the Land (1983) treats as refuted by the 1973–74 UK property-price crash that Hoyt's prediction did not anticipate.[2]

Who Invokes It

• Fred Harrison cites the Hoyt case directly, arguing that confident "new era" declarations recur at cycle peaks and are repeatedly overturned by the next downturn.[2]
• Reinhart and Rogoff, writing independently of the Georgist tradition and with no reference to land cycles specifically, document the same rhetorical pattern across a far broader dataset of sovereign defaults, banking crises, and inflation episodes.[1]
• Phillip J. Anderson's The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking (2008) extends the same argument across two centuries of US data, documenting specific banking failures at successive cycle peaks — the free-banking-era failures of 1837, the Panic of 1873, the 1929 bank collapses, and the 1973 collapse of the US National Bank of San Diego — framing the recurrence as systemic rather than a series of unconnected surprises.[3]

Limits and Caveats

Reinhart and Rogoff document the recurrence of the rhetoric, not that a single underlying mechanism — such as a fixed-length land cycle — is responsible; their periodization is by crisis type and country, not by an ~18-year land cycle, and the book does not endorse Georgist land theory or land value taxation.[1] The claim that land specifically, rather than credit or asset prices generally, is the recurring driver behind "this time is different" episodes is the Georgist interpretive addition, not something Reinhart and Rogoff assert. [CITATION NEEDED: direct chapter/page verification of "new era" language attributed to Anderson at the 1920s and 2000s cycle peaks specifically, beyond the banking-failure list already verified on the wiki's Anderson book page.]

See Also

• 18-Year Land Cycle — the cyclical claim this narrative defends against "new era" skepticism
• Harrison, The Power in the Land (book) — source of the Hoyt "only of interest to historians" case
• Anderson, The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking (book) — the US banking-failure evidence across cycle peaks
• Narrative: Land Speculation Causes Boom and Bust — the parent narrative this one supports
• Boom-Bust Cycle
• Homer Hoyt

Sources

1. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2009) — used for the book's title thesis and its survey of sixty-six countries and roughly eight centuries of financial crises (B-claim; mainstream, non-Georgist corroboration of the rhetorical pattern; publisher summary read). Publisher page
2. Fred Harrison, The Power in the Land (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1983), Ch. 8 — used for the account of Homer Hoyt's 1933 prediction that his cycle was "only of interest to historians," later contradicted by the 1973–74 cycle (A-claim, per the wiki's existing verified book-page summary). Wiki book page
3. Phillip J. Anderson, The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking (Shepheard-Walwyn, 2008), Ch. 16, 22 — used for the list of banking failures coinciding with successive US cycle peaks (B-claim, per the wiki's existing verified book-page summary). Wiki book page