William B. Stronge is an emeritus professor of economics from Florida Atlantic University. The Irish-born Stronge has made his home in South Florida for several decades, having taught in FAU's economics department for 35 years. Recently, he wrote The Sunshine Economy: An Economic History of Florida since the Civil War. He said the hardest part about writing the book was the recent history of Florida's economy. The Miami Herald sat down with Stronge at FAU's Catanese Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, where he is a senior fellow in economics.

Q: Can you talk about the bubbles or fevers that have been a hallmark of Florida's economy?

A: They called them fevers in the 19th century and booms. Recently, we've been calling them bubbles. Usually this gets started because there's too much money floating around, generally because of an excessively easy monetary policy, which is generally regarded as the reason why we've had our most recent bubble.

In the '20s, it was part of the democratization of tourism, to some degree. Imagine yourself getting in your car and driving down in 1923 and you run up against somebody you met last year. And somebody says, ''You know I bought a lot, and it's now worth 50 percent more than it was last year.'' You say to yourself, ''Wow,'' then you buy a lot. Then you go back to Iowa or wherever and you say, ''Hey, people are making 50 percent return on lots in Florida'' and they all want to buy.

Gradually it gets completely out of hand. Lots were cheap in Florida back in those days. Back then, you had county government recorders and officials who had to record real estate transactions. They were small offices [that] were overwhelmed by all this extra activity going on. And so you paid for a binder, which was a very small amount of money, until the transaction cleared in the county office. When the transaction cleared, then you had to come up with a down payment.

But you had a couple of months before the down payment, and they found they could sell the lots before the transaction cleared. When you bought a binder, you immediately put it back on sale.

Q: How many real estate bubbles have we been through in Florida?

A: The one in the 1920s was one of the first nationally. There had also been one in California. Then you had another one between 1972 and 1978. Then you had a much smaller bubble in nonresidential real estate, mainly, in the 1980s. Then we've just come through one.

Q: What happened to Florida's economy during the Great Depression?

A: We all have an image of depression that it's the 1930s and it's 'Brother, can you spare a dime?' And that certainly describes the period between 1929 and 1932 when the national economy hit rock bottom, as did Florida's. Florida was much the same as the national economy on the way down, [but] Florida came back more rapidly. If you think for example of hotels and South Beach, they were built in the 1930s at a time when people were supposed to have no money.

Travel was a relatively new phenomena in the '20s and '30s and it wasn't hit as badly as other industries. Florida didn't have large industrial companies that were heavily unionized that resisted reductions in wages. If you think of a Florida hotel in the 1930s, many of them were only open for half a year and often time they were linked with another hotel up in Michigan that was open in the summer.

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