Financial panics seem to be caused by productivity disruptions

As a newbie to economics, I observe what seems to be much bickering going on, over periods of decades or centuries, between some supposedly very bright people. Perhaps economists are spending too much time studying money, and not enough time studying the basics of production and consumption, such as the changes over time in the availability and costs of labor, commodities, transportation, retail product delivery and information processing.

It's as if those trying to understand Global Climate Changes (warming, cooling or whatever) spent too much time studying thermometers, and not enough time studying the thermodynamics of the Earth and the Sun.

For examples:

1. The Depression that began in 1873 might be said to have been caused by the disruptions resulting from the more efficient farming in the American heartland coming online, disrupting agricultural production in Europe.
2. The Depression that began in 1929 might be said to have been caused by the disruptions resulting from the more efficient industrial capacity in the American heartland coming online.
3. The Depression that began in 2007 might be said to have been caused by the disruptions resulting from the more efficient (lower labor costs) manufacturing capacity in the Far East (Japan, Korean, then China) coming online.
   
4. The American Civil War certainly involved in part disruptions in the cost of labor due to the waning of slave labor, which had been an essential element of the economy of the American Southern States.

There are likely other examples, such as wealth to the British Isles from their Empire in the 1800's, increases in information processing capacity from the Computer Revolution to which I just spent my last 30 years contributing, the impact of Railroads and subsequently Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system on American Transportation, the world-wide buildout of the Internet this last decade, the abundance of petro-energy from the Middle East and other places this last half century, ... There seems to be a Panic associated with many of these examples.

In many, not all, of the above examples, enormous new capacities at lower costs came online. Typically, to enable the buildout of these new capacities and to facilitate their consumption, great amounts of credit are extended. For example, the Chinese bought U.S. debt paper by the trillions, so that their factories would have customers.

This can result in a world economy awash in too easily gotten capital, that promotes an escalation of greed and corruption and pyramiding financial schemes, until the bubble collapses into a depression. After a period of time, that depression not having really destroyed the broken structures, but rather just left them sputtering and broken, leads to a great war, which destroys the broken and gives birth to a new structure.

Wealth that is not disciplined by those who have a stake in it turns sour. Nations, as children, can be spoiled rotten. Perhaps even human civilization can be so spoiled?

As Mises studies the mechanisms by which excess money turns sour, so also must we study the means by which excess productive capacity turns sour.