Megatrends are shaping the world and of course geopolitics as well and we are most of the time unaware of this. Demography, migration, sustainability (environmental and budgetary) are key issues for Europe and the world from a long term perspective. It is lesser known that megatrends often develop by cycles of different types and lengths.
Nikolai Kondratiev was exiled to the Russian Gulag and executed in 1938 because Stalin did not like his views on the Soviet economy and his theory of economic cycles. How accurate and powerful Kondratiev’s theory was is demonstrated not so much by Stalin’s rage as by the fact that history is cyclical: war followed by peacetime, economic boom by recession, political tranquility by political crisis.
Academics probe into past cycles because they want to be able to predict the future. Why are there cycles in the first place? Why is expansion followed by stagnation and then recession? Simply because production or human output is not constant, but there is a mysterious equilibrium, a certain level which production should not fall short of or exceed. The economy is unaware of this tipping point and when it deviates from the equilibrium, markets crash and an overproduction or overvaluation crisis breaks out. Long periods of economic boom are inevitably followed by a bust and recession. The problem is we never know when and how hard the next crisis will hit. At the height of the crisis in late 2008, the Queen of England asked a simple but pertinent question of her country’s brightest minds. Visiting the London School of Economics, she wondered out loud: “Gentlemen! Why did no one foresee this awful recession?” Of course no one could give a straight answer; the eminent economists just stared at their shoes. A lot of people are convinced that the cycles and crises of the past could provide some guidance. Economists started to investigate economic cycles in the middle of the 19th century, discovering medium-term cycles first and then long-term cycles in the early 20th century. The four main types of economic cycles are known as the Kitchin wave, the Juglar wave, the Kondratiev wave and the Braudel wave. There are innumerous other types — every economist studying cyclical fluctuations was keen to have one named after themselves — but the others do not really deserve attention.
The Kitchin inventory cycle, is a short business cycle of about 40 months. Inventories fluctuate as the short-term approach of businesses influences their stocking and destocking policy. The cycle named after Joseph Kitchin, which is not a proper macroeconomic cycle, is followed by the Juglar cycle, often identified as ”the” business cycle. In 1860, French economist Clement Juglar identified the presence of economic cycles 7 to 13 years long. The low point of such a cycle is marked by an overproduction or financial crisis.
The Juglar cycle is the only one that politics can respond to, simply because this is the longest timeframe that successive governments can comprehend. When we talk about anticyclical policy, economic stimulus plans and recovery packages, we talk about the vicious side of this wave.
The third cycle on our list is called the Kondratiev or long technological wave. The Kondratiev wave spans a period of 50 to 60 years and is divided into a phase of high-growth expansion and a phase of recession. How did Kondratiev discover these waves? He observed prices, wages, interest rates, industrial production and the use of raw materials in the USA, England and France. A thorough analysis of these data revealed a sinusoid running through 150 years. Kondratiev noted that turning points in the wave coincided with revolutions and wars. Some divide the Kondratiev wave into four ”seasons”. The Kondratiev Spring is a time of rapid growth, falling unemployment, improving productivity and relatively stable prices. The economy is in its youth. The Kondratiev Summer sees growth level off as the economy reaches its limits in output and resources, and with it a brief recession as a warning of things to come. The brief recession in the Indian summer shakes up the economy as the Kondratiev Autumn arrives. Stability and normalcy is restored in society, which becomes consumption-oriented and prices begin to soar. With the Kondratiev Winter comes a collapse of the system and brumal depression sets in. A major three to four-year crisis is followed by a decade of deflationary stagnation.
There are several explanations for the Kondratiev wave. Some say that it exists because every generation spends 25 to 30 years of its life in active work, which roughly corresponds to half of the cycle. Others suggest that these waves arise from important innovations that launch technological revolutions (the railway) or investments that bring major improvements in a sector (education), which take roughly a Kondratiev cycle to trickle down to the economy. There are those who think that the next Kondratiev wave will build on the revolution in nanotechnology. Previous cycles have all had a key innovation that opened a new chapter in history. The first cycle (1790-1842) the steam engine, the second one (1843-1897) the railway, the third one (1898-1949) electricity and the car, the fourth one (1950-2000) the airplane and nuclear energy.
The longest cycle is named after the great French economic historian Fernand Braudel. The Braudel wave or secular cycle encompasses the changes of the deepest structures, which are only discernible over long periods of 100 to 200 years. As the pace of change in the world around us accelerates, the cycle’s span is shortened from 200 years to around a century. This fourth wave follows the evolution of comprehensive systems such as the interrelation between agriculture and industry or services and the industry.
Believers in the wave theory claim that these four superimposed heaving waves determine the rhythm of the economy and of history. When the crests or troughs of two waves coincide it has disastrous consequences for humanity. In the decades following the Napoleonic War, in a period of extreme uncertainty, a Braudel and a Kondratiev wave peaked synchronously. The stock market crash and crisis of 1873 was set off by an overlap of a Kondratiev and a Juglar cycle. The Great Depression of 1929 occurred at the low-point of a Kondratiev wave. Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratiev timed the publication of his book to perfection. The Major Economic Cycles came out in 1926, when the West’s economic growth looked unbreakable. Three years later people were rushing to the library for a copy of the Soviet economist’s book. The oil crisis of the 1970s was a tumult of waves. A Juglar, Kondratiev and Braudel apex at the same time. Some economists consider the whole theory nothing more than pseudoscience. On the other extreme those who could not give their name to a cycle search for and claim to have found mathematical (read: mystical) correlations between the waves, such as the formula 1 Kondratiev = 3 Kuznets = 6 Juglar = 12 Kitchin. As crises demonstrate, people will take anything to the extreme, be it the economy, science, economics or quantum physics. There is one discipline where exuberance is almost a prerequisite: futurology, whose key drive is to predict the future, which is in fact an important incentive to examine the past. The good Reverend Thomas Malthus is widely considered the first pioneer of futurology. He predicted over 200 years ago that food production would not be able to keep up with population growth, which would lead to famines worldwide. His theory did have one fault, though: he could not possibly foresee the technological developments that gave us modern farm machinery, fertilizers and GMO crops. Although there are many people starving in the world today, the global trend is just the opposite: despite the exponential population growth there is an abundance (if not oversupply) of food on Earth. Starvation in the third (developing) world is the result of political and financial anomalies and war rather than a problem of production capacity.
Jared Diamond, an evolutionary biologist, professor of geography at UCLA and critically acclaimed author of numerous popular science books, believes that there is no need for computerized risk analysis, research of trends and complex climate models to know what the future holds for mankind. Various groups of the human race, civilizations, have always outgrown their natural environment, which led to their decline or extinction. One of his favorite examples is that of the indigenous people of Easter Island. When Polynesians populated the island about 1,500 years ago, it was covered by lush vegetation. When discovered by a Dutch explorer in 1722, the island was barren with nothing but hundreds of monumental statues and a few locals wandering around. The islanders were so primitive that it was hard to believe that their forefathers had had the technological prowess to erect the huge moai. The natives cleared the forests to replace them with arable crops and to use the timber to erect the statues and to build canoes. After centuries of irresponsible logging, the islanders ran out of trees to cut down while the population exploded. Deforestation led to soil erosion, which in turn reduced crop yields and, with the forests gone, they had no canoes for fishing. The island became overpopulated, the food supply dwindled, the ecosystem collapsed, and the natives began killing each other, even resorting to cannibalism. For many this might be a worrying reminder no matter if they believe in waves or not.