![]() They lack nuance, or don’t offer enough evidence. ![]() Usually, cycle theories or long-wave patterns suffer from problems of overfitting past data – or pushing past events through vague-enough definitions such that almost anything goes. I see these stories quite a lot: the historian Niall Ferguson had plenty of long-arc thinking in his latest book and the generational theory by William Strauss and Neil Howe ( The Fourth Turning), is all the rage in the crypto world. Many other theories exist that try to account for fluctuations through long-dated cycles, identifying historical patterns over 50 or 100 years. One kind of explanation goes by the name of “long waves” – perhaps the most famous of which is Kondratieff waves, developed by the Soviet and Marxian economist Nikolai Kondratieff. It was a broad-scope class in the many heterodox ideas that economists have about what causes business cycles, and what makes the output, employment, and financial prosperity fluctuate so wildly around otherwise steady long-term trends. ![]() The best class I took in all my economics education was called “Cyclical Fluctuation,” taught by Dr. ![]()
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