Business Cycles Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Business Cycles - Essay Example Most observers find that the length of a business cycle from peak to peak, or from bottom to bottom vary, so that cycles are not systematic in their regularity. In fact, economic history shows that no two cycles are alike. Some economists dispute the existence of real "cycles" and use the term "fluctuations" instead. Others see enough similarities between shifts in economy and claim that studying business cycles in detail is a powerful tool which can serve us to determine the current state of the economy. The key question concerning business cycles is whether or not similar mechanisms that generate recessions and booms in capitalist economies exist. Periods of stagnation are a great burden for society. Being painful for large majorities of workers who lose their jobs, they produce pressure on policy makers to try to smooth out the oscillations. A very important goal of Western civilization since the Great Depression has been to limit the dips. However, government intervention in the economy can be a risky business. For example, some of Herbert Hoover's reforms (including tax increases) are widely believed to have deepened the depression. Managing economic policy in order to reduce the negative side effects of business cycle bottoms is not an easy job in a society with a complex economy, even when the theory of Keynes is applied. According to some nineteenth-century advocates of communism, this is an insurmountable difficulty. For instance, Karl Marx claimed that the business cycle crises of the capitalistic economy were inevitable results of its operations. From this point of view, all that governments can do is to delay the inevitable economic crises and to hope that they will not appear during their stay in power. Even then, crisis could emerge in a different form, for example as severe, unexpected inflation or an increasing government deficit. Worse, by delaying a crisis, western governments are seen as making it more painful for their successors and more dramatic for the whole society. In addition to the wide-spread left-wing criticism, Neoclassical economists question the ability of Keynesian policies to manage an economy. Challenging the Phillips Curve Nobel Laureates such as Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps argue that inflationary expectations negate the Phillips Curve in the long run. Their theory was supported by the stagflation of the 70's. Friedman claimed that all the Fed can do is to avoid large mistakes. He believes that the rapid contracting of the money supply in the face of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was such a big mistake. It turned what would have been a recession into a great depression (Rothbard, 1975). That is why, good forecasts of the cyclical movements of the economy and especially of the turning points of a business cycle are critical to improve policy decisions. The means of monetary and fiscal policy can also help to smooth the cycle out. The Austrian School of economics does not accept the suggestion that business cycles are inherent features of an unregulated economy and seeks for their origins in governmental intervention in the money supply. Austrian School economists underline the role of interest rates as the price of investment capital, which stays in the base

Luciano Berio Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Luciano Berio - Essay Example Together, they form the image of the young, mid-century composer, who is far cry from being introverted, "ivory-towered artist" stereotype. Berio was born in Oneglia, a small town in Northern Italy, where both his father and grandfather were church organists and composers. After preliminary study with them he entered Milan Conservatory specializing in piano, conducting and composition. In 1951scholarship took him to Berkshire Center at Tanglewood Massachusetts where he studiedwith Luigi Dallapicolla, who taught there that summer. In 1953, he attended the Darmstadt Summer School and met Stockhausen and Boulez, and learned about their musical interests. His totally-controlled Nines (1955) already described, reflects this trend. In 1960s Berio wroteseries of solopieces for flute, harp, solo voice, piano and trombone called Sequenza. In each discovers and exploits new sounds from the instruments. The Sequenza for trombone is particularly interesting in its absolutely new sounds; somecombination of the trombonist's singing or humming while he plays, as a result of blowing through the instrument without embouchure, others by tapping the side of the instrument. The Sequenza for voice also calls for sounds emanating from the throat. These pieces show Berio's interest in enriching timbral resources. They call for a new kind of virtuosity that goes far beyond conventional standards. The most ambiti The most ambitious and successful of Berio's works to date is Sinfonia (1968), written for eight voices (The Single Sisters) and orchestra, combined in that close connection -voices sounding like instruments and instruments sounding like voices- already found in Circles. In no sense a conventional symphony, the word Sinfonia is used in its original; meaning of "sounding together". Sinfonia is in four movements. The first is dominated by voices, speaking and humming, occasionally punctuated by crashing orchestral sonorities. The texts, spoken in stuttering manner, are from Le Cru et le Cuit, a study of Brazilian folklore by Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist. It is slow moving and carefully articulated between the vocal and instrumental sections. It is obviously planned and purposeful and is therefore unlike Stockhausen's Hymnen where there is little if any causal relationship between parts. The second movement is a tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King; the vocal parts consist of nothing more than the chanting of his name. The movement is elegiac and bell-like timbre and melodic outline. Instruments and voices are so interwoven in long, sustained unisons that it is difficult to distinguish between them. The third movement is the longest and most original. It is based on the third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony which is played as a more or less constant "background" but there are also references to Bach, Schoenberg, and Debussy, Strauss, Ravel, Brahms, Boulez, Stockhausen and others. In the foreground one hears snatches of a Beckett play and student slogans from recent confrontations. It is an amazing dreamlike jumbling together of sound images from the past and the present, reminding free associations of James Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, where different languages and dictions are brought together in a time-destroying present. Berio speaks of the movement as a documentary of an objet trouve (the Mahler movement), recorded in the mind of the listener. As a structural point of reference, Mahler is the