The Crash of 2016

September 30, 2013
The prolific author and talk-show host Hartmann (The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight) will always be a radioman at heart, and his latest book displays the influences of his preferred medium. Here, he argues that history is essentially circular—that after a severe period of turmoil and hardship “it takes about eighty years for those who remember to thoroughly die out”—the next great tragedy coming as a result of humankind collectively forgetting the lessons that could have prevented it. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great Depression all occurred according to schedule, and now America is due for another cataclysm, suggests Hartmann. This momentarily intriguing, but ultimately unconvincing model is buttressed by conspiracy theories accusing Goldman Sachs and other multinational financial institutions of orchestrating a global coup. Drawing readers in with purple prose and righteous indignation, Hartmann proposes populist remedies that seem unequal to the task of averting imminent catastrophe, suggesting that “all the money oil companies pay to lease and extract oil on public land could be distributed to all Americans equally,” and proposing mechanisms for strengthening worker-owned cooperatives.