Kondratiev waves or supercycles

In economics, Kondratiev waves, also called grand supercycles or surges or long waves, occasionally also referred to as the K-waves, are the term for a regular S-shaped cycle in the modern (capitalist) world economy. Fifty to sixty years in length, it consists of an alternation of periods of high sectoral growth with periods of slower growth. This business cycle is more visible in international production data than in individual national economies and concerns output rather than prices. Some economists divide the Kondratiev wave into two 'seasons'; the Kondratiev Fall and the later part, the Kondratiev Winter. A bull market is associated with 'fall' and a bear market with 'winter'. More common today is the division into four periods with a turning point (collapse) between the first and second two. The Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev (1892-1938) was among the first to bring forward these observations in the 1920s. Previously, in 1913, J. van Gelderen (1891-1940) and Samuel de Wolff, from the Netherlands, noted the existence of 50- to 60-year cycles. Since these two wrote only in Dutch, their ideas became known more generally only recently. Early on four schools of thought emerged as to why capitalist economies have these long waves. These schools of thought revolved around innovations, capital investment, war and capitalist crisis. According to the innovation theory, these waves arise from the bunching of basic innovations that launch technological revolutions that in turn create leading industrial or commercial sectors. Kondratiev's ideas were taken up by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s. The theory hypothesized the existence of very long-run macroeconomic and price cycles, originally estimated to last 50–54 years. Since first originated, various studies have expanded the range of possible cycles, finding longer or shorter cycles in the data. The Marxist scholar Ernest Mandel revived interest in long wave theory with his 1964 essay predicting the end of the long boom after five years and in his Alfred Marshall lectures in 1979. However, in Mandel's theory, there are no long "cycles", only distinct epochs of faster and slower growth spanning 20–25 years. Long wave theory is not accepted by most neoclassical ("standard textbook") economists, who necessarily see technical change and innovation as exogenous rather than endogenous to economics, but it is one of the bases of innovation-based, development, and evolutionary economics, i.e. the main heterodox stream in economics. Among economists who accept it, there has been no universal agreement about the start and the end years of particular waves. This points to another criticism of the theory: that it amounts to seeing patterns in a mass of statistics that aren't really there. Moreover, there is a lack of agreement as to the cause of this phenomenon. Most cycle theorists agree, however, with the "Schumpeter-Freeman-Perez" paradigm of five waves so far since the industrial revolution, and the sixth one to come. These five cycles are: The Industrial Revolution--1771 The Age of Steam and Railways--1829 The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering--1875 The Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production--1908 The Age of Information and Telecommunications--1971 According to this theory, we are currently at the turning-point of the 5th Kondratiev. Some scholars, particularly Immanuel Wallerstein, have argued that cycles of global war are tied to Capitalist Long Waves, with major, highly-destructive wars tending to begin just prior to an output upswing.