Abstract
Lead economies ascend via Kondratieff waves. The etiology of these Kondratieff waves (k-waves) is complex because their effects are so pervasive. It may also be that their sources are equally numerous. However, one of the unfortunate by-products of the K-wave’s political–economic centrally is that it means different things to different analysts. Since price data were studied early, a number of observers equate K-wave fluctuations with monetary pulsations. Others link it to generational shifts, investment spikes, stock market oscillations, or war impacts. K-waves encompass all of these activities but it is not clear that it serves our analytical purposes to leave the identity of the core nature of long-term economic pulsations so open-ended. The causal ambiguities contribute strongly to K-waves’ controversial status. The more elusive the core identity of K-waves, the easier it is to take the subject less than seriously. The proposed remedy is to acknowledge technological clustering as the central K-wave motor, until or unless we find otherwise.
Parts of the argument in this chapter first appeared in a different form in “The Kondratieff Wave as Global Social Process,” in George Modelski and Robert A. Denemark, eds., World System History, UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Oxford: EOLSS Publishers, 2007. http://www.Eolss.net and “k-waves, Technological Clustering and Some of Its Implications,” in Leonid E. Grinin, Tessaleno C. Devezas, and Andrey V. Korotayev, eds., Kondratieff Waves: Juglar, Kuznets- Kondratieff, Vol. 2. Volgrograd, Russia: Uchitel.
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Notes
- 1.
To be accurate, the spatial concentration facet is not shared by all long wave analysts.
- 2.
By no means do the three paths exhaust the ways in which long waves have been studied.
- 3.
See, among many, Freeman and Perez (1988), Ayres (1990a, b), Berry (1991), Modelski and Thompson (1996), Berry et al (1998), Grubler (1998), Mallman and Lemarchand (1998), Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000), Freeman and Louca (2001), Devezas and Modelski (2006), Hirooka (2006), Thompson (2007b), Rennstich (2008), Perez (2009), Korotayev and Tsirei (2010), Korotayev (2011), Korotayev, Zinkina, and Bogevolnov (2011), Archibugi and Filippetti (2012), Edmonson (2012), Linstone and Devezas (2012), Korotayev and Grinin (2016), Modis (2017), and Grinin, Grinin, and Korotayev (2017). More recently, Coccia (2017, 2018) has picked up on general-purpose technologies and Schuelke-Leech (2018) has added disruptive technologies to the list as cores of the process. Yet these “GPTs” are merely other disciplines’ versions of radical technologies/ technologies with radical impact.
- 4.
- 5.
In the last thousand years, there have been multiple challengers of a lead economy but only one former non-leader manages to surpass the incumbent. Lead economies are quite rare.
- 6.
The new rules are sure to privilege the incumbent lead economy but that does not preclude compromises designed to maintain the unity of the winning coalition.
- 7.
On land, the Mongols, who had defeated the Southern Song, also assisted the process by encouraging and policing East–West trade over the land Silk Roads during the Yuan Dynasty.
- 8.
This interest in K-waves is not restricted to the leadership long cycle research program. A similar preoccupation is found in world systems analysis and often the two programs generate similar and reinforcing findings. Boswell and Chase-Dunn’s (2000) world system synthesis puts.
- 9.
Mason (2015) resurrects the profit motor, in combination with labor resistance, for his K-wave interpretation.
- 10.
More is said about energy in Chap. 5.
- 11.
The Western Offshoots are Maddison’s term for the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
- 12.
Some caution should be exercised in using CHAT. Entries are not always comparable because they have been taken from sources that use different metrics (e.g., some data are reported in thousands while others are reported in millions). There are missing data and data reported cover the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century but all of the twentieth century. Data for some countries, however, only are reported after World War II.
- 13.
This could be an artifact of the very few African countries for which there were pertinent data in the 1950 s.
- 14.
Railroads provide an excellent example. First introduced in the 1820 s and 1830 s in places such as Britain and the United States, it took decades for them to dominate transportation networks in these countries. Should we focus on their high growth rates in the early mid-century or their increasing predominance later in the century and into the next one?
- 15.
Comin and Hobijn also start their diffusion clocks from the point of invention which can add a number of decades to the diffusion of some technologies, especially in the nineteenth century.
- 16.
While some assumptions do not and it is the assumptions that differ that help explain Gordon’s pessimism. He starts with the assumption that nothing fundamentally changed before 1750 and the advent of a series of overlapping Industrial Revolution. Where he sees one revolution that lasts from 1870 to 1970, the long cycle model and most K-wave arguments see at least two revolutions. While Gordon recognizes three revolutions, he does not seem to anticipate a Fourth Industrial Revolution any time in the foreseeable future. Rather, he sees diminishing intervals of revolution with variable impacts, both initially and over time. From his perspective, the weakness of the third revolution is apt to be with us for some time to come and aggravated by a number of problems characterizing the.
- 17.
But that date is hardly carved in stone. There could be something about IT that makes its application more protracted than some other industrial innovations. For instance, most radical innovations do not have a high potential for making toys and video game distractions. These types of innovations have tended to come first while the really radical changes are still forthcoming. Yet students of IT would likely argue that we have to work through the game applications to get to the equally radical industrial applications.
- 18.
By no means am I denigrating the search for temporal periodicities in K-wave phenomena. That activity must continue and is highly valuable. But we also need to spend more time with the theoretical and conceptual dimensions as well.
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Thompson, W.R. (2020). Clusters of Technological Change in Pioneering Economies. In: Power Concentration in World Politics. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47422-5_4
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