Rapid technological change occurred in the industrial sector of the United States concurrently with the Civil War, the expansion of railroads, the influx of immigrants, the conquest of the South, and an eruption of social and political unrest in Europe (revolutions in France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy in the period 1848-1870).Yet financial instability, with frequent events called "panics," was fairly normal -- as was the rise of criminals, embezzlers, and frauds to great wealth and power.1. Is economic theory a reasonably adequate tool for modeling all this, or should we instead choose a multidisciplinary approach?a. Economists try to create models, such as Hyman Minsky's famous "financial instability hypothesis," that link recurring patterns in the economy to non-economic factors such as regulation and deregulation by legislators, income polarization, and the business cycle. Economists bring a level of order to the chaotic. b. Economists usually get it wrong because they are overly focused on money. c. Historians, geographers, soil scientists, chemists, climatologists, and even psychologists do the necessary labor of collecting data, while all economists do is make abstract models that look like science but are actually spurious or, at best, oversimplifications. d. Details matter. Economists generalize.