PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

8. A COSMIC HEARTBEAT
according to the plan, as if it had a program, a will, and a clock. I had
access to this knowledge early enough. My error was due to human
weakness; I had not been scientific. The clock was rather precise, but I
should have allowed for an uncertainty of a few percent.
Years later while driving I was listening to a musicologist at the radio
discussing Johann Srauss’ Die Fledermaus. Strauss completed this
operetta in 1873 but postponed its debut for a year and even then the
public did not appreciate it. The reason, a crash in Vienna’s stock market
in 1873 that cast a veil of economic gloom over society, at odds
with the operetta’s gleeful and carefree content. It was only later that
Die Fledermaus was recognized as a masterpiece. I found the story
mildly interesting, but the date 1873 grabbed my attention. At that time,
Vienna was at the heart of Europe whose economy dominated the world
(the Dow Jones had not yet been conceived) and 1873 is exactly fiftysix
years before 1929 when New York’s stock market crashed. It was
natural to ask at this point whether another crash took place fifty-six
years further upstream, namely around 1817.
It turns out that Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in June 1815 touched
off a speculative boom that ended in credit collapse and failures by autumn.
At that time the state of the economy was not best represented by
activities at the rudimentary stock exchange. But commodity prices declined
across the country, money tightened, and many country banks
failed. By 1816 England was in a deep recession that lasted through
1825. 12 One more confirmation that Kondratieff’s cycle can predict
market crashes.
The flares in energy prices in Figure 8.3 can be seen as banners indicating
the beginning of an economic downtrend. Stock market crashes
have generally followed six to ten years later. The timing for next energy
price flare-up is estimated as 2037; therefore we should not expect
to see a bona fide market crash before 2040.
MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
There are other human activities that coincide with the fifty-six-year
cycle. In Chapter Seven I noted that increases in life expectancy come in
waves. While life expectancy is growing all the time, that growth
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