Joanna
^^^^^^^ CB: Yes, immiseration, mass unemployment and mass poverty, is a secular trend ( in the economists' sense) not a cyclical one. It's Marx's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. We need a new War on Poverty !
The greater the social wealth, the functioning of capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal... But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army. the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, ...and the greater is the official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.” (p. 707).
Raya Dunayevskaya has a nice essay on this. Raya Dunavevskaya 1979
Lecture 12 Part VII Chapter 25 The Lot of the Working Class
http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1979/outline-capital/ch12.htm
Secular variation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_variation
For the historical trend of decreasing age of menarche, see Puberty#Historical shift. The secular variation (also secular trend or secular drift) of a time series is its long-term non-periodic variation, as opposed to its periodic variation. Of course, whether something is perceived as a secular variation or not depends on the available timescale: what appears to be a secular variation over a time scale of centuries can turn out to be a periodic variation over a time scale of millions of years. Natural quantities often have both periodic and secular variations.
The term secular variation is used wherever time series are applicable
in economics, operations research, astronomy (particularly celestial mechanics), etc.
^^^^^ CB: Sounds like secular "variation" is something that doesn't vary over a long period of time.