World-System UK Counterfactual (1800-1950) No WWI, Great Depression or WWII

 

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There is no simple explanation for why the Early 20th Century was so catastrophic for the World System: World War I (WWI), the Great Depression (GD) and World War II (WWII), all in a row, all followed by a series of minor wars, crises and unresolved problems until the Present. 

Imagine that you were British inventor, physicist and engineer Archibald Montgomery Low (1888-1956) and you had heard about George Vacher de Lapogue predictions about growth and catastrophe in the 20th Century, but you found them a little wacky.** So you produced the graphic above (based on mental models, mathematical equations and speculation) predicting the path of British Development for the first half of the 20th Century to check de Lapoque's predictions. Each Attractor Path was based on a different Geopolitical Alignment:

• WE
• BAU
• DE
  
• RW
• US
• W

Notes

**  Archibald Montgomery Low (1888-1956) produced many accurate and many not so accurate forecasts. He did not forecast World War I, the Great Depression, World War II or any future Geopolitical Alignments for Great Britain. George Vacher de Lapogue, however, did based on exponential growth and theories of White Supremacy (needless to say, we are still dealing with White Supremacy in the Trump Administration and these problems never seem to go away).

Wikipedia

• Historiography of the causes of World War I Historians writing about the origins of World War I have differed over the relative emphasis they place upon the factors involved. Changes in historical arguments over time are in part related to the delayed availability of classified historical archives.
• Schroeder, Paul W. Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered (2025), influential essays by a leading historian
  • Schroeder, Paul W. (2007). "Necessary conditions and World War I as an unavoidable war". In Levy, Jack; Goertz, Gary (eds.). Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals. Routledge. pp. 147–236. ISBN 978-1-134-10140-5.
  • Schroeder, Paul W. (2004). "Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War". Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan US. ISBN 978-1-4039-6357-4.
• The Long Nineteenth Century a term for the 125-year period beginning with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, and ending with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was coined by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, and later popularized by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.
• Kennedy, M. (2014) Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history': Niall Ferguson
• Crafts, N. (2014) Walking wounded: The British economy in the aftermath of World War I
• What is the Best Counterfactual for the Long Nineteenth Century?
• The Man in the High Castle is an alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick, first published in 1962, which imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War II.
• Hypothetical Victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of the Second World War (1939–1945)  a popular topic in the alternate history sub-genre of speculative fiction and in scholarly works that discuss the possible alternative path of history.
• Pasdirtz, G. W. (1981) Instability and Late Nineteenth Century German Development UW-Madison Thesis.
• Timeline of the Great Depression The initial economic collapse which resulted in the Great Depression can be divided into two parts: 1929 to mid-1931, and then mid-1931 to 1933. The initial decline lasted from mid-1929 to mid-1931.
• Timeline of British History 19th Century
• Timeline of British History 20th Century
• Geopolitical Economy a contemporary Marxist approach to understanding the capitalist world historically. It was proposed by Radhika Desai in her Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire as a critique of contemporary mainstream theories of International political economy (IPE) and International relations (IR).

UKL19 Measurement Model

Three component state variables of the UKL19 Model explain 100% of the Variation in the indicators: UK1 = (Overall Growth), UK2 = (XREAL+X-L-HOURS-U) Export-Employment Controller and UK3 = (X-XREAL-Q-N) Malthusian Export-Price Controller.

UKL19 Time Plot

Overall growth in the UKL19 model continued through the Nineteenth Century and may or may not have been approaching a steady state around 1900. The Export-Employment and Malthusian Export-Price Controllers hit a minimum just before 1860  (see the Boiler Plate for a discussion of Historical Growth Controllers).

UKL19 BAU Forecast

AIC Statistics

All the models estimated from the Maddison Data Set are unstable (see the Boiler Plate). The best short-term (year-to-year) model is linkage to Western Europe (WEL19 Model) . The best Attractor Model is linkage to the US (USL19 Model) The Random Walk (RW) and other models have overlapping AIC Confidence Intervals.

UKL19 BAU System Matrix

The model is unstable and is very close to a Random Walk (RW).

ChatGPT

Google Gemini

World-System French Counterfactual (1800-1950) No WWI, Great Depression or WWII

Dec 24, 2025. The New York Times is reporting (here) that "for the second consecutive year ...[France has failed]... to agree to a new national budget by the end of the legislative calendar." It is difficult to understand what is going on in France without some historical background, specifically how France responded to World War I and the Great Depression. ChatGPT reports that 

In this post, I am going to use France's economic statistics in the Long 19th Century to forecast France's economic performance in the early 20th Century. The multi-model forecasts based on different input assumptions for the FR19 Model are presented in the graphic at the beginning of this post. The results are somewhat surprising!

I looked at the following possible drivers for the French Economy: (1) None (Business-as-Usual, BAU, and Random Walk, RW), (2) Technical Productivity, TECHP, (3) the World System (W), (4) Western Europe (WE), (4) Germany (DE) and the United States (US). The best model, using the Akaike Information Criterion was US input ([-1215 < AIC = -1138 < -1077]). All the models were unstable (some were cyclical, see the Eigenvalues below in the Notes with the AIC Statistics) and  collapsed (except the RW) at some point in the Early 20th Century. 

At first, you might think that the models are predicting the Great Depression. They are not!** We know from the historical record that the French Economy did not collapse as a result of shocks from WWI, the Great Depression and WWII (according to ChatGPT, in any event).

Then, how are we to understand the forecasts from the 19th Century Models? To understand the French Economy in the 19th and early 20th Century, we have to look back further before the first (1878-79) and the second (1848) French Revolutions. I'll do that in future posts.

For this post, let's take the German perspective as embodied in the Schlieffen Plan to invade and neutralize France before the First World War. Assume (counterfactually) that Field Marshall Alfred von Schlieffen had output from the FR19 BAU model (here) or at least understood that France was a collapsing power. The idea of a lightning first strike to neutralize France before fighting Russia on the Eastern front would seem attractive and necessary. 

Of course, everything changed for France after WWI, during the Inter-War Years. France reacted very conservatively to the Great Depression and stabilized the economy (or at least turned it into a Random Walk).

Returning the present Budgetary Crisis in France, it would be reasonable to predict that any fundamental changes would require formation of a New Republic (see history here). A budget crisis is, historically, not significant enough to trigger major political change.

You can stabilize the FR19 BAU model with instructions in the code (here). For more information about data sources and how the models were constructed, see the Boiler Plate. You can follow a Blog Roll of other postings I have done on the French Economy here.

Notes

** This may be too fine a point. The  FR19 Model is characterizing the French Economy as in Growth-and-Collapse mode after 1900. And, Growth-and-Collapse was  certainly a factor as\s France faced WWI, the Great Depression and WWII. The historical events of the early 20th Century, however, are more complicated than the state of the French economy. There is no simple monocausal explanation.

• The Long Nineteenth Century a term for the 125-year period beginning with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, and ending with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was coined by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, and later popularized by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.
• What is the Best Counterfactual for the Long Nineteenth Century?
• The Man in the High Castle is an alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick, first published in 1962, which imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War II.
• Hypothetical Victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of the Second World War (1939–1945)  a popular topic in the alternate history sub-genre of speculative fiction and in scholarly works that discuss the possible alternative path of history.
• Pasdirtz, G. W. (1981) Instability and Late Nineteenth Century German Development UW-Madison Thesis.

FR19 AIC Statistics

The Akaike Information Criterion statistics show that (1) all the models were unstable and (2) the best model was input from the US19 BAU model.

FR19 Measurement Model

Three components from the FR19 BAU model explain almost 100% of the variance in the indicator variables. The components are (1) FR1=(Overall Growth), (2) FR2=(0.5633 Q + 0.5979 X - 0.2781 N - 0.4070 HOURS) Malthusian Export Employment Controller, and (3) FR3=(0.75876 XREAL - 0.3849 X - 0.4924 HOURS) Export-Price Employment Controller.

FR19 System Matrix

The FR19 BAU System matrix is unstable with two strong negative feedback components, F[1,3] = -0.05130896 and F[2,3] = -0.05297408, both from the Export-Price Employment Controller (recall that World Trade Collapsed during the InterWar years).