How 'long economic waves' could save capitalism - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Kondratieff was a young Russian economist who died in prison in 1938. He developed an economic theory that purportedly explains both the dynamism and the destructiveness of the capitalist economic systems. The source of this explanatory power, he contended, was the existence of “long waves” or “long cycles” that bred both leaps of prosperity and spasms of instability.
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Unlike normal business cycles, which lasted about a decade, Kondratieff’s long waves typically spanned 50 to 60 years. Initially, investment capital flows into new technologies. That’s the up cycle; the down cycle occurs when surplus production reduces prices and raises unemployment. Markets are saturated.
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If you Google “Kondratieff cycles,” you get a concise history of the theory
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