PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
A PERIODIC OSCILLATION RECORDED OVER FIVE CENTURIES
170%
60%
40%
20%
100% 0%
-20%
-40%
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
-60%
30%
1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
FIGURE 9.4 The U.K. Wholesale Price Index smoothed over a rolling 25-year
period with respect to a 50-year moving average. This procedure washes out
small fluctuations and reveals a wave. The periodicity turns out to be 55.5
years. The little stars point out peaks and valleys. ∗
The new path is a byproduct of innovation and fundamental restructuring.
Profound social and institutional changes are inevitable. The
general saturation reached every fifty-six years is the Kondratieff “barrier”
which blocks most of the old ways and makes place for new ones.
Once that process is underway we begin to see a period of growth and
increasing prosperity.
We can look again at the history of transport in the United States for
a view of this process in action. The substitution of transport infrastructures,
discussed in Chapter Seven, showed that canals gave
way to railways, which in turn were substituted by roads that are now
yielding to airways. The data representing the length of each infra-
∗ Such a graph was first published by Nebojsa Nakicenovic, “Dynamics of Change and
Long Waves,” report WP-88-074, June 1988, International Institute of Applied Systems
Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria.
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