[PEN-L:4605] Re: Kondratiev

[Bruce McFarling <brmcf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Andy English <aenglish@xxxxxxx> wrote

>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?
>

     One way to ask this question is to turn it around.  Is it
realistic to think that there aren't long waves?  I'd argue that,
at least under Gunnar Myrdal's model of circular and cumulative
causation in the economy (& society) long wave cycles are a lot
more plausible than 'natural rates' of growth.  However, it will
be what the system dynamicists call an 'entrained' cycle.  All
you need is a handful of growth processes that take roughly a
couple of generations to play themselves out.  They must in their
upswing effectively suppress emergence of alternatives, but fail
to do so after they have srtated to play out.  Then, because you
are looking at time scales where cultural change feeds into
political change feeds into orginational change feeds into
technical change etc. in interlocked loop, the cycles that are a
bit shorter get are a drag on the growth regime as it mature, the
cycles that are a bot longer get dragged on as the growth regime
matures, and you get what looks like a unified cycle.
     A K-wave model based on Myrdal's cumulative and circular
causation *implies* multiple determinants ('overdetermination' in
an Althusserian sense?? Is that an abuse of the phrase??), but in
one of these linguistic twists, is necessarily *not* a
deterministic model.

     As posted on Sun, 2 Apr 1995 22:51:16 -0700 by Evan Jones
<EVANJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> However, the recent generation of literature has been driven by
> the end of the post-WW
> trying to fit historical complexity into a pre-given 25/25
> cycle, and pretty much appropriating (and extending)
> Kondratiev's periodisation. ...
     It's important to note that there is nothing in a Myrdallian
K-wave that implies that the key players will be the same from
one wave to the next, or that the players will have the same
period from one to the next.  For example, a shorter cycle might
run further ahead of the K wave in the next growth regime, which
might lead to it running twice in a K-wave, so that it goes from
being an early drag on a growth regime to providing a second wind
as the next growth regime matures.  And above all, a new K-wave
is based upon a new growth regime, and is necessarily not a
repition of the previous cycle.

> My own prejudice is that the long waves stuff provides a useful
> first approximation heuristic, not least for teaching purposes,
> in order to get a handle on a complex evolutionary process.
> The rise and fall of a global hegemon (one of Mandel's
> elements) seems an important consideration.  But then one needs
> to step back from its deterministic flavour, and move on to a
> messier story..
>
     and IMHO this is almost exactly right on target.  Each K-
wave will have its own story, and when you start looking at the
effect on different people living in different places, the
unique elements of each K-wave is likely to be more important
than the similarities.  Coming out of the Great Depression and WW
II, for example, Latin America got a jump start on
industrialization; Taiwan and Korea got land reform (and
industrialization was suppressed in Taiwan while Korean industry
focused in the North).  Turn those two around, and we might be
talking about the "Dynamos of the South" instead of the "Asian
Tigers".

Virtually,


Bruce McFarling, Knoxville
brmcf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx