A very brief introduction to Secular cycles.
Prophecies of doom are nothing new. A particularly well-known such prophet was Thomas Robert Malthus. The storybook fable is that he predicted that, due to the rising number of horses, by the end of the 19 th century London would be under 5 feet of horse manure. Though Malthus never made such a prediction (that such a prediction was ever made at all seems to be apocryphal), what he did predict was rather more dire: a lowering of real wages as surplus resources diminished to nothing. This is a rather bleak model of human existence, and one which makes a concrete prediction: population rises until it has reached the carrying capacity of the available land. At this stage, population remains stable. If some external factor (such as poor harvest) lowers the population, we’d expect real wages to immediately recover as the supply of available labor falls. If population somehow crosses this threshold, we’d expect the lack of resources to force population back towards the equilibrium value. ...