The Long Waves in Economic Life
Nikolai D. Kondratieff, 1925 — cycles.
The primary source under the K-wave framework, from the director of Moscow's Conjuncture Institute: published in Russian in 1925, in German in 1926, and in English abridgment in 1935. Kondratieff assembled price, interest-rate, wage and trade series for England, France and the United States back to the late eighteenth century and found, once shorter cycles were smoothed away, long waves of roughly half a century — offered cautiously, as an empirical regularity he judged very probable rather than a law. By his dating the third wave crested around the First World War and was due to fall; the Great Depression kept the appointment. The Soviet state, disliking his implication that capitalist crises are phases rather than terminal events, arrested him in 1930 and shot him in 1938. The framework carries his name; this paper is what he actually claimed.
Marked passages
The central claim, summarized: the major economic series, freed of their shorter cycles, move in long waves on the order of fifty years — and the wave rising into the First World War had, by his reckoning, already passed its crest when he wrote.
A downswing call published in 1925 and resolved by the 1930s. The kondratieff framework in the codex inherits both the pattern and his own caution about it — the engine quotes his probability language, not his mythology.
His empirical regularities, summarized: wars and social upheavals cluster on the upswings, when expansion sharpens the contest for markets and resources; long agricultural depressions mark the downswings; and the downswing incubates the technologies whose mass deployment powers the next rise.
The observation Perez formalized as installation and deployment. Where the AI capex boom of the 2020s sits on this clock is one of the engine's standing open questions.
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