" There are waves in history, as we have seen, including some vast tsunamis. But the idea that those waves are like waves of light and sound is an illusion. In the 1920s, the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff sought to show that there were such patterns in capitalism, inferring from British, French, and German economic statistics the existence of fifty-year cycles of expansion followed by depression.114 For this contribution, which continues to be influential with many investors today, Stalin had Kondratieff arrested, imprisoned, and later shot. Unfortunately, modern research dispels the idea of such regularity in economic life. The economic historian Paul Schmelzing’s meticulous reconstruction of interest rates back to the thirteenth century points instead to a long-run, “supra-secular” decline in nominal rates, driven mostly by the process of capital accumulation, punctuated periodically but randomly by inflationary episodes nearly always associated with wars.115 Yet "

― Niall Ferguson , Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe