Of all the endeavors of economists, none has captivated them more or absorbed more of their labor than attempts to understand — with the aim of eventually taming — the business cycle. And none has left them with less to show for their exertions.

Referring, in 1999, to the U.S., Christina Romer, a highly regarded economic historian who went on to chair President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, reported that, despite the rise of an entire new subdiscipline — macroeconomics — largely devoted to getting a scientific grip on economic fluctuations, “the postwar era has not been, on average, dramatically more stable than the prewar era.” And while the years since Romer wrote included the longest U.S. economic expansion on record, that expansion depended on a painfully slow recovery from the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and it ended with the short-lived but still calamitous Covid crisis. Though other nations have had fewer downturns, in most they’re about as frequent as ever.

Why so little progress? Is a real breakthrough ever likely? After sifting through centuries of evidence from numerous countries, Tyler Goodspeed, himself a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (from June 2020 to January 2021), has news for us in his excellent new book, titled simply Recession, and it’s mostly bad. So far as their chances of success are concerned, economists who try to predict and prevent business downturns might as well be hunting snipe.

The main reason for this pessimistic finding concerns the true nature of what has long been known as the business “cycle.” The very term misleads, Goodspeed says, because instead of displaying a sinusoidal boom-and-bust pattern, with its predictable ups and downs, the course of nations’ economic activity looks more like a positive trend interrupted by randomly timed crashes. So much for theories that suppose that downturns are as punctual as comets but on an enigmatic timetable. Just as the hypothesis of epicyclical orbits temporarily saved Johannes Kepler’s geocentric astronomy from various empirical assaults, an increasingly elaborate set of proposed wave “intervals” kept up some economists’ hopes for the boom-and-bust theory well into the 20th century. But today most realize that they’d been “mistaking for regularity what is simply a random distribution” of economic bad luck.

And by bad luck, Goodspeed means really bad luck, for he also finds that a single bad throw of the economic dice, like a drought or a tariff war, has seldom sufficed to trigger a recession. Instead, just as perfect storms result when several bad weather conditions coincide, recessions are the results of random, if not improbable, “overlapping and interacting developments.” And, like perfect storms, they’re unpredictable — hence hard to avoid.

Despite popular theories that assume otherwise, Goodspeed says, busts aren’t even heralded by prior booms: Supposing that a long-enough run of economic prosperity makes a downturn more likely is no better than thinking that the odds of a roulette ball’s landing on red increase as it continues to land on black. Instead, Goodspeed says, “the depth, duration, and diffusion of recessions bear no resemblance whatsoever to the height, age, and constitution of the expansionary periods that precede them.” The very idea of unsustainable booms is, in his opinion, more fiction than fact. The data instead support Milton Friedman’s “plucking” theory of recessions, which likens the path of nations’ GDP to an upward-sloping string that’s been “plucked” downward here and there. While economists, not to mention other pundits, sometimes boast of being able to predict slumps, most are especially good at predicting those that never happen.

Not that every economic downturn is sui generis. Many are heralded by “inverted” Treasury-security yield curves, with short-term securities earning less instead of more than longer-term ones. Negative energy-supply shocks have also “been perennial accomplices to the murder of economic expansions.” But to suppose that either fact supplies surefire proof that a downturn is coming, so that authorities can take preventative measures with no risk of doing harm, is to overlook the warning implicit in the word “accomplices.”

And yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Goodspeed has no advice to offer those who seek to limit the damage done by recessions. For one thing, governments can avoid policies that make recessions more likely or more severe. Trade war — one of the shocks that worsened the Great Depression — comes to mind. So do attempts to check inflation from adverse supply shocks by keeping money tight, as the Fed tried to do in summer 2008 despite evidence of an economic slowdown. (Although Goodspeed misses an opportunity to say so, the Fed could generally do a better job of avoiding or at least moderating recessions by paying less attention to the inflation rate and more to the flow of spending, variations in which are more likely to translate into economic ups and downs.)

If the positive lessons Goodspeed draws mostly boil down to “Do no harm,” one reason may be that despite his rejection of wave and boom-and-bust theories of recession, he is himself guilty of downplaying the idiosyncratic nature of business downturns. That’s so because his findings often concern “typical” downturns, and what’s true of the typical downturn needn’t be true in every case. Take the boom-and-bust theory. Allowing that busts don’t generally follow booms, it’s conceivable that they do so now and then, though not often enough to make a statistically significant impression. In that case, keeping a lookout for signs of economic “overheating,” including exceptionally heavy spending, wouldn’t be a waste of time.

If Recession overgeneralizes on occasion, it more than makes up for it by exposing a large number of myths about business downturns. It accomplishes this con brio, by way of an engaging narrative enlivened by anecdotes — including ones about the reckless dealings of a Scottish rogue named Alexander Fordyce, about how Civil War financier Jay Cooke’s Northern Pacific gambit fell prey to grasshoppers, and about how former President Ulysses S. Grant unknowingly helped sponsor and was eventually ruined by a Ponzi scheme. To sum up, despite its occasionally depressing lessons, Recession is a thoroughly rewarding read.