Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via Of Two Minds,
This is Essay #8 in the series Truth Be Told.
A great many phenomena in both Nature and human history follow cyclical patterns, while others form waves. Author David Hackett Fischer (The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History) described the difference between cycles and waves:
"Cyclical rhythms are fixed and regular. Their periods are highly predictable. Great waves are more variable and less predictable. They differ in duration, magnitude, velocity, and momentum. One great price wave lasted less than ninety years; another continued more than 180 years. The irregularities in individual price movements make them no more (or less) predictable than individual waves in the sea.
Even so, all great waves had important qualities in common. They all shared the same wave-structure. They tended to have the same sequence of development, the same pattern of price relatives, similar movements of wages, rent, interest rates; and the same dangerous volatility in later stages. All major price revolutions in modern history began in periods of prosperity. Each ended in shattering world crises and was followed by periods of recovery and comparative equilibrium."
As Fischer observed, waves of human history share characteristics with ocean waves, which can accrete energy and become giant rogue waves that cannot be predicted even as they can be foreseen as recurring phenomena.
Two cycles have attracted much commentary over the past decade: The Fourth Turning posited by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1997 book The Fourth Tu
