Kondratieff waves to us

There's a lot to like about Kondratieff and his waves as we lurch into the deepest winter trough. The glorious computer age has come to a crashing end and civic unrest that saw its beginings in the late 60's to early 80's is on its way back as Capitalism tries to re-invent itself again. Its a remarkably well trodden path. The Russian Economist isn't celebrated in mainstream thinking for a number of reasons but I'm happy to indulge his theories as I plan my last few years of living, something Stalin prevented the good Nikolai. Saying that capitalism keeps reinventing itself wasn't a career move in 1938 when "You're Fired!" resulted in a brief stint in Siberia and then a firing squad. K-waves are Nikolai's legacy. 40-60 year cycles are apt for me as I approach 42 years mumbling on the subject. Through Y2K. 9/11 and then the 2007 crash. The bankers had already lost their way (or got so consumed by greed) the end of the boom times signalled the autumnal phase of the cycle would end soon and winter was coming. Winter is here. Covid is no great suprise as the trigger, but our economy built on sand has imploded. In the case of the UK, exiting Europe is merely an additional bit of hemlock to swallow. A look back to the roaring 20's being followed so quickly by the rise in Fascism, social unrest and genocide, its easy to challenge K-waves and talk about the genocide of the Tutsi or when Yugoslavia splintered after Tito. These however, it can easily be argued, were not part of the global capitlist cycle. The current environment, driven by social media, feels far more divisive. There's very little debate and to use the Spanish Civil War is instructive. You were either with the elected Socialist government or Franco the would be dictator. Religion was instrumental as well as some effective backing from his fellow fascists. I must ask a historian one day to tell me why Franco managed to keep Spain allegedly nuetral and didn't find himself going the same way a El Duce and Adolf. Back to the waves again and I'd argue much of Nikolai's attention is on US Capitalism and not so much European. I say this because the land mass was a virgin territory to the Capitalists. In Europe the vested interests make the market less pure. In the USA the disregard for the indigenous population ensured Capitalism was established in a purer form. Previous K-waves have been characterised by technical revolution, the steam engine 1830-1880's, steel (check out Carnegie et al- 1880's-1920s), planes trains and automobiles and more recently information processing 70's to now. I joked with my Dad that when you see the UK government spending £12 billion on a system of track and trace that failed, you know we have now lost control over the information age. What seemed like a great invention in the 70's as more and more people used calculators for tough sums people now seem to think they can believe in a computer and it will happen. I laugh at the thought of the meeting where somebody said, "We need an App", and everyone cried "Yes, great idea." It used to be "we need a solution" but now its "we need an app", as if the App will automatically be a solution. So with record numbers of old people has the cull been enough to lower the ongoing liability to society. In the UK we must be closing in on 200,000 which the bean counters in the treasury will be delighted by. I mentioned this in April 2020 when I saw the complete disregard for old people and with the collapse of care home residents, the care home sector crumbles too. I see this as the worst aspect of the K-wave winter. There's a generation of people known as millenials who will need to pay, notwithstanding the Covid-19 cull of older people, for a generation who will live to 100 in their droves. They will not just work into their 70's, they'll be obliged to work longer and for less. This inevitably has to create real tensions and Extinction Rebellion wont always be leading voice, an even more militant opposition to the climate emergency will emerge. Sat alongside this we have crypto currency coming on stream and being normalised. Financial markets need to evolve and they will. I wrote a piece on the new ways of capital raising, especially the ones that dont involve corporate bankers taking 1%-2% off the top. The new generation will not be happy with the tax dodging and assets can easily be taxed. I would think the most obvious way for the millenials to tax the wealth is through land and property taxes. They'll largely be renting still in their 40's. Buying property is still regarded highly in the UK but one prolonged depression in house prices is something that I do foresee. I think 2024 will see the imbalance in supply. Working from home is another genie out of the bottle. I think this fits beautifully into Kondratieff thinking. Houses are cheaper outside of huge metropolitan areas like London. It therefore makes sense if you can, to move to an area where you're living costs plummet and your quality rises. I'm going to wave my Kondratieff flag but I am happy to always remind everyone he was an economist. Remember, its great to get you thinking but dont believe every word! Think, what market you are in. Think, do you produce something of intrisic value. Think the next wave is a Tsunami. I dont often listen to much of the dialogue that takes place in parliaments, or even when the PM or FM are asked questions by an increasingly large number of inadequate, inarticulate journalists. I say this as I consider myself inarticulate and fairly inadequate but even I can string a sentence together and wouldn't ask the kind of question that brings twitter trolls out to defend me. When someone says its the FM job to answer questions however stupid, you know you've lost a moment of your life, unless you can convert it into a comedic, eh, um, moment. Screaming Lord Sutch would at least ask have you got your shoes on the wrong feet? Your left is point left and your right is ....ha ha made you look!! The idea that someone comes up with a question to trick a politician at an open press conference tells you all you need to know about the Winter season of Kondratieff waves. Quite simply Rome is burning and what comes next is a new bunch of rich and poor will fight with each other and the ones in the middle get squashed. They'll spend the next 40 years making up for the inadequacies of the indstitutions they've helped propogate and prosper. They'll realise they get it now and apologise. This for me is the nub of it. I think the K-waves represent the life of the species as it wrestles with political systems. We will undoubtedly find that money and the economy become less important in the next 40-60 years. Health and happiness will pop out of the ground and with it the Vegan approach that returned in the 70's and was re-released more recently as the re-branded Plant based diet. Our ancestors knew of it as the poor person diet. We couldn't afford meat or fish, but potatoes and greens were always abundant. As time went by the allotment diet was supplemented by fish and later still by mince. A plant based diet isn't new. A desire to have a plant based diet is new. Some would brand K-waves as learning. Some would say we forget what we learn in the winters, when we have booming springs and summers. In my life time that means we forget how many people died before unions succeeded in making the workplace safer duing the 70's and 80's. Jimmy tells a great story about the foreman in the engineering plant asking the 16 year old apprentice to hold his hands up. "How many fingers have you?" "10" says Jimmy curiously. "How many have I?" he asked Jimmy, "10" he says again. "Let's keep it that way". As the young Jim went round the plant at the start of his 7 year apprentice he counted the fingers on every hand. At 23 he finished his apprenticeship and was a qualified engineer. He had 10 fingers but the only otyher employee with full digits was the man he met on his first day. That's how dangerous it was between 1961-68. Mining 'accidents' were like the care home culls of 2020. They were not accidents in the 60's they were casualties of war. Unions in this country had a fantastic role to play and despite it getting harder since 1979 they've evolved. Like the political parties sometimes its just about landing a blow. If you're an Edinburgh team going to face a Glasgow team in a football final, you'll understand the idea. Upsets do happen but its getting harder to find representation for people to ensure those working people are protected. Towards the end of my career I had to explain to staff reps that their jobs was to preserve as many jobs as possible. It ended up in a Monty Pythonesque sketch as I on the management side tried to make less people redundant. One of the staff reps was quite keen on getting rid of some of the shit staff as he saw them. I tried to explain that if they were as bad as he articulated then they would be on disciplinaries or have been marked inadequate. They weren't. They were highly regarded by some people and not by others. The idea that somebody's face didn't fit was not for anyone to say, never mind the staff representative responsible to ask management to make them redundant. This was a sign of middle management's comfort that they could get the job of representing the staff and still settle petty scores. Yes K-wave winter is coming, complacency marks the end of summer. I do like the life cycle. When I started working at WoodMAc I was 15. I was always inventing new ways of doing things. Punk Rock had kicked off outside, Fire Engines, Cubs, Scars, Josef K all that wee band stuff in Edinburgh, I loved it. Gordon was playing the sax and everyone wanted a guy with a sax. One K wave was ending and another had begun. It would be another 2 years until I was doing economics at St Andrews. Before the boom from North Sea Oil came the blast, the last yelp from the punks. The new romantics appeared, the money poured into the digital revolution and what had been a space age became a video age. Everyone was a pop up celebrity. We all had our things to say. We all had our voices and some sounded silky. If Bowie was whacked out pf his head, he'd be 'its just David' and when he wasn't he was in touch with his K-wave. He saw the digital age so clearly and so early. Genius singer and perfomer but it was his vision that did it for me and old Nikolai Kondratieff. A few people get it. A few people spot the obvious, state the obvious and finally act on the obvious. People laugh about how water will be a big thing going forward. It is going to be massive by 2035 if not before. From crops to basic necessity, what the west advertise about Africa with charity appeals needs to look in the mirror. Its not good and as property moves continuously and quietly into fewer private hands some of those watering holes will start to dry up. I dont necessarily mean in Scotland, just generally around the globe. I love the irrigation systems of Northern Spain. The Grand Canal in Castille. Its a joy to walk through and I hope the community do own the rights. One thing is for sure water harvesting might be the winter of the 7th Kondratieff wave in 2070. When you look at culture its reflected in the waves. From politics to art, even drink/drug culture. Not every county started with revolution, unless they wanted freedom from the British. From the 18th century onwards you see reflections in the waves of human rights on the working populations but this is where there is also divergence. The abolishment of slavery was not a global epiphany. Many would argue now as with women the freedom has yet to be felt in many places. The rise in the political power of the working classes through unionisation and also the vote. The vote for women is an even more recent development which again is not a single global event. These therefore distort any analysis that boxes Kondratieff's assessment of capitalism reinventing itself every 40-60 years. In a 3 dimensional matrix through time across the globe these factors would I think, coalesce. The technical breakthroughs that cause massive shift in labour requirements mean even through the basic opportuntiy cost lens that labour is available to pursue other work. Or more to the point, high unemployment, depresses labour costs, creates starvation, politcal unrest and usually a revolution. Currently we are embarking on an era where our globalisation is resulting in a very destabilised planet. Mass migration from war zones as well as the economic migration that we've always seen. The difference now is more countries are pulling up the drawbridge as they have enough poor people and some 2nd and 3rd generation migrants come from opportunistic stock, I dont include myself! The real problem isn't to do with countries now as globalisation has now happened with the giant global tech firms regularly circumventing individual country's responses. Taxation is often raised in the media but its also natural that company employees will also find easy ways around immigration rules. In short if a company claims it needs van drivers they'll find a way around immigration or any other