In the early 90's there was a lot of talk about Kondratieff and his long wave theories in the financial news and on the old FNN cable station in particular. You know how it goes people get on tv and blah,blah,blah. So I decided to do a little research and find out what Kondratieff had written from the perspective of what was available in English at that time. I figured most of the people on tv were probably big bullshitters and were parroting second hand or third hand information from dubious sources.
Interestingly enough, only about 50 or 60 pages of Kondratieff have ever been translated into English and some of these are synopsis of longer articles by Kondratieff or partial translations of longer articles. Mostly from the mid 1920's.
There is very little in the way of data tables, in the above, and some of the data concerns the history of land rents in France. The math appears to be trigonometric functions, possibly hinting at Fourier transforms. Les or Enrique, please note, this would be up your alley. This is speculation on my part and not to be taken too seriously.
The writings of Kondratieff that I gathered are from established American economic journals and could be retrieved.
>From other sources. I have read that Kondratieff was able to make enemies of
both Trotsky and Stalin; I find this very funny. The guy must of had somthing
on the ball.
Sincerely, Tom
James Devine wrote:
> At 01:37 PM 8/18/98 -0400, Carl Remick wrote:
> >Re Mark Jones': "K-Wave theory assumes that time's arrow does not apply
> >to capitalism and things go on for ever, like the mock-waves in a
> >provincial rep production of Madame Butterfly. But capitalism
> >had a beginning and it will have an end."
> >
> >As I recall, Nikolai Kondratrieff got sent to Siberia for the heresy of
> >saying these waves were recurrent, rather than approaching a climax.
> >Never been able to understand the animus economists in general show
> >toward the K-wave (e.g., Alan Blinder: "K-wave theory smacks of
> >economic determinism and borders on mysticism."). Certainly seems to be
> >enough evidence of the toll taken by generational forgetfulness to
> >support the K-wave as a rough rule of thumb.
>
> One thing is that the best evidence for the existence of K-waves concerns
> prices, not output or employment. Another is that the posited mechanism for
> causing repetitive waves is theoreticaly weak. Yet another is that the
> different theorists posit different dates for the phases of the waves (so
> that some see a K-wave recovery at the same time that others see a
> collapse). There are also significant differences among the K-waves. And
> there are alternative explanations....
>
> K-waves are more of a matter of faith (or if you will, an assumption) than
> they are a serious theory.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu &
> http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html