Answering Your Questions

Armstrong v Kondratieff?
Copyright June 27th, 2011

There is always a tendency, I suppose, to cast everything in a black or white confrontation. Kondratieffs work is distinctly different from my own, yet the commonality is the central thesis of a business cycle. The difference is largely what is being measured. Kondratieff took the economy at face value and the world was substantially different then. Implicit in his work is both war and the transition of the Industrial Revolution. At the time, commodities accounted for about 70% of the economy in the 19th century, 40% by 1900, and less than 10% by 1980.

This chart on inflation illustrates the incorporation of war in the raw data used by Kondratieff. If he were alive today, his model would be biased toward the service industry. The problem people are creating by comparing me to Kondratieff is they are creating a confrontation rather than looking at the commonality long wave theory of the business cycle. I have written numerous times how I began with a list of panics that composed 26 within a 224 year period that produced a wave duration of 8.6 years. I then found that 6 waves constructed a major wave of 51.6 years. Because I began with a list of Panics, there was no bias insofar as any particular sector was involved. It became obvious that the sectors would change for each boom and bust, but the point was there was something that boomed and bust. It was a cycle of panics rather than a particular sector. I back-tested through history and was stunned how the same frequency worked in ancient times as it did in modern times. Here is a chart of after the economic meltdown during the 3rd century Rome. Even the reforms imposed by the Roman Emperor Diocletian that did away with the old Greek tetradrachms that were once silver in the days of Pericles replacing them with a bronze Follis, that reform in 295AD was merely followed by a return of debasement and collapse in weight of the coin. The next monetary reform doing away with the Follis and replacing it with the Centenionalis, came in 348AD right in line with the 51.6 year wave formation. There are countless examples from history that show the same thing. The rise and fall of nations and even the Dark Age was 6 waves of 51.6 years amounting to 309.6 years. The entire monetary history of mankind with his rise and fall of empires, nations, and city states simply beat to this frequency that in itself incorporates everything around it including natural events such as environment. It turned out after collaborating with scientists studying ice core samples, that there was about a 300 year cycle in the energy output of the sun and when plotted along the data of the rise and fall of civilization, it too fit nicely. There is so much incorporated within this frequency that it will take another lifetime to unravel all its mysteries. Kondratieff and I began with different data and arrive at different conclusions, yet were united in the basic idea of long-wave theory. It is not a confrontation, but is a true collaboration in the evolution of knowledge for one does not invalidate the other.