The Marxist historian and urban theorist died in October aged 76. As a theoretical innovator, his singular political approach is as prescient and urgent as ever.
By Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
Davis’s modesty won out over the truth. Four years earlier, he had, in fact, done just that. Writing in the
Los Angeles Times, he laid out the fundamental problems of the housing bubble then underway. Noting its particular precarity in Southern California, he also went on to discuss how it might affect the country and the world: The “national economy may be equally vulnerable to property deflation, with a mild jolt sufficient to end the current American boom, and perhaps throw all the dollar-pegged economies into recession.” Davis wasn’t the only one who saw that crash coming, of course. But in the Moyers interview, he downplayed his clairvoyance with a joke: “People of the left like myself are famous,” he said, for “predicting 11 of the last three depressions.”