[PEN-L:4566] Kondratiev in the WSJ

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (jones/bhandari)]

BTW, The WSJ article Gene Coyle mentioned made optimistic use of the
Kondratiev idea:

"perhaps the most reassuring evidence for a middle-class surge is that it
has has happened before.  Around 1900, the US also faced what economists
called a 'productivity paradox': Big electrical generators had been
invented, but they hadn't yet led to surges of factory production.
Meanwhile, the gap between the lower and upper middle classes was
growing....20 years later, both trends reversed.  Factories and offices
were redesigned to take advantage of electricity, as power grids
crisscrossed America and boosted productivity nationwide....In this
generation, computers and community colleges offering technical educations
may be similar engines of change.  Paul David...says it can take 40 years
for a new technology to alter a society....  we are now 25 years past the
invention of the microprocessor, which spawned the personal computer
revolution.  This suggests a surge in computer-related productivity may lie
just ahead." ("Reason for Hope", WSJ 3/29/95, A1)

Any thoughts?  I hope this productivity surge does not undergo a
'dialectical inversion' (so to speak) and culminate, like the ones of old,
in global imperialism, war, fascism, the destruction of the people of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   The analysis which I quoted from Andrew Kliman in
a previous post provides good theoretical grounds for questioning such
optimism grounded, as it is,  in leaps of labor productivity *within* the
bourgeois forms of commodities and value.

Rakesh

ps there is a very detailed critique of long wave theories in George Garvy,
Review of Economic Statistics, v 15, n4 (Nov 1943)


>Is there anything to the notion of Kondratiev waves?
>I tend to be skeptical, since the underlying technology
>of society changes so much during the 50-year "cycle"
>and because of the impact of large political events
>(World War Two for example), that such a large scale
>cycle could be governing the world economy.
>Some "marxists" I know swear by Kondratiev's thesis,however.
>Is there any real basis to it, in economic theory,
>Marxist or otherwise?
>
>-Andy English
>Phoenix Arizona