🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug11.143846.24840@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:

>     This certainly was not dogmatic.  It was simply the recognition
>     that the 'great currents' idea seems to be held in common by
>     both Marx and the previous poster.  I believe that the 'great
>     currents' idea has pretty much fallen by the wayside in 
>     Economics (though there are always holdouts).

The idea is a lot older than Marx, of course.  Its modern economist
exponent is Kondratieff, whose exposition was considered sufficiently
unmarxist to earn him a long paid vacation in Siberia.

One dividing line that splits the "great currents" people into two
camps is the issue whether the currents are linear or cyclic.  Marx
and the Victorians believed in linear, irreversible progress, as do
modern liberals.  The other camp, from Giambattista Vico through to
Spengler, believe in cycles - for each flow, there is an ebb.

Kondratieff thought that the motive force for each cycle ("long wave"
in his terms) was the application of new discoveries to human
society; in other words, technology - which perhaps links this
thread to the discussion on sci.physics of big science and its
spin-offs.