Basic Innovations and the Next Long Wave of Productivity Growth: Socioeconomic Implications and Consequences

Abstract

It is not surprising that the debate on the economic long wave started again at the end of a period of rapid economic growth (1950–1973), after more than 25 years of lack of interest. At this time the prevailing overoptimism in the market economies about future economic growth had changed to deep pessimism; the most important sign of this change in public mood was the first report to the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972; Maier, 1977). At the end of the economic upswing in the early 1970s the economic debate about the long-wave phenomenon started with the same questions that were posed earlier this century (Parvus, 1901; Kautsky, 1901/2; van Gelderen, 1913; De Wolff, 1921; Kondratieff, 1926; Schumpeter, 1912, 1939), to which we still have no satisfactory answers: (1) What are the causes of changes in the periods of long-term fluctuations in economic growth? (2) Are economic upswings and downswings with periods of 50–60 years the result of endogenous changes in the economy or are they the result of exogenous factors, such as wars, revolutions, extreme forms of class struggle, etc.? (3) Does the emergence of these upswings and downswings that have occurred over the last 200 years mean that there is a strict law of economic development that we have to accept fatalistically without being able to influence its speed or socioeconomic consequences?