PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
the Napoleonic era (1828-1884), from the British to the Germans with
the new technologies of chemicals, automobiles, airplanes, and electric
power (1884-1940), from the Germans to the Americans with such new
technologies as plastics, transistors, antibiotics, organic pesticides, jet
engines, and nuclear power (1940-1996). Post-1992 united Europe,
aided by the collapse of Communism, can conceivably wrestle power
away from the Americans in the period 1996-2052. It is also during this
period that sustained growth will lead to more prosperous times.
CLOCKING THE TRANSPORT OF THE FUTURE
One may argue that Royston’s work is subjective; that he is choosing to
look only at those historical events that suit his theory—there is so much
in history that one may always find something interesting around a
given date. One cannot argue the same way, however, against the work
of Nakicenovic on the U.K. Wholesale Price Index documented since
the sixteenth century. In Figure 9.4 we see updated the variation of this
index, smoothed with an averaging technique, eloquently pointing out a
long economic wave with mean periodicity of 55.5 years.
Both Royston and Nakicenovic corroborate the more quantitative
results on the fifty-six-year cycle presented in Chapter Eight. All these
observations underline the fact that having reached the ceiling everywhere
does not mean we are heading toward a final end. We have
simply reached the bottom of the valley between two crests. The long
economic wave that often carries the name of Nikolai D. Kondratieff,
the Russian economist who first talked about it, can be thought of as a
chain of bell-shaped life-cycle curves. Each life cycle can be associated
to an S-curve that extends over half a century and serves as an envelope
containing many other processes. Growth generally comes to a standstill—saturation—when
its rate reaches a low point halfway between
crests.
The mid 1990s was such a low-growth period between crests, but
saturation, competitiveness and recession will not keep tightening their
noose forever. Such periods of discontinuity are characterized by
exhaustion of the old development path and transition of a new one.
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