Re: Kondratieff

In a message dated 4/8/2003 7:12:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time, larondin@yahoo.com writes:

> I have a question. Ken says that the world-economy has been
> depressed for the past 3 decades. The general understanding among
> world-systems people is that the world-economy entered a B-wave in the
> Kondratieff cycle as early as 1968, and no later than the early 1970s.
> Are we still riding that B-wave, 35 years down the road? Isn't this a
> longish time, and can anybody reasonably forecast the arrival of an A-wave
> any time soon? Or is Kondratieff no longer working?
>
> Warren


I was reading a book the other day claiming Alan Greenspan had wrecked the Kondradieff cycles because he was onto the peaks and troughs and started tinkering. Be that as it may....
I share the bafflement with the Kondratieff phenomenon. The most sensible explanation for the inexplicable arcana of the phenomenon is that it simply reflects natural, but not inherently organized, cycles of technical innovation since the Industrial Revolution. That creates a series of very rough cycles which are hard to analyze further. Steam... then the turn of the twentieth century phase, then the new information technologies. It does roughly divide the history into three (or is it four) phases since the great takeoff at the end of the eighteenth. 

The point about Greenspan is more than a serious joke. As we interact with any set of mechanical cycles we inherently observe, hence interact and modify their action. 
John Landon
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