"Are we doomed to live through these boom-bust cycles over and over again?" Yes, for a few reasons: 1. The probability of a catastrophic event is low but non-

"Are we doomed to live through these boom-bust cycles over and over again?" Yes, for a few reasons: 1. The probability of a catastrophic event is low but non-trivial, so every so often society has to deal with some form of destruction on a scale that is larger than what the economy can absorb. In the ancient world the threshold was lower because economies were smaller, but even the largest economies today still have limits that will be exceeded periodically. 2. Debt is a necessary part of the economy, but we are generally bad at determining how much debt we should carry, and so we periodically overshoot. The result of overshooting is a financial crisis, in which many bad debts and unsustainable businesses will be destroyed (resulting in undershooting the optimal debt level, and thus allowing the cycle to start again). Ray Dalio wrote a free book about the debt cycle that is worth reading.