do kondratiev waves really exist 
the existence of kondratiev waves is not generally accepted by economists the somewhat arbitrary and often conflicting views on the timing and nature of kondratiev s theory leads to a lack of consensus even among it s proponents as to what a kondratiev wave actually is and where the economy is on the supposed wave at any given point in time the relatively long period of the waves compared to the length of the data available only a few full waves in length makes firm conclusions on their characteristics inherently murky moreover a well known mathematical property of random time series data known as the slutsky yule effect shows that transforming the data by taking successive moving averages and rates of change between data points as kondratiev did with his raw price data creates spurious wave like patterns that do not reflect any underlying trend in the data themselves this can easily be demonstrated with any series of random numbers it means that results like kondratiev s are almost certainly inadvertent artifacts of statistical massaging of the data with no actual explanatory or predictive power outside the transformed data which are necessarily backward looking by the definition of a moving average 6