In today's episode Buddhist podcaster Mahabodhi interviews David Murrin global forecaster, investment advisor and author. In 2010 David published Breaking the Code of History, building on the work of the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev.
Kondratiev noticed how capitalist economies experienced long-term economic cycles in agricultural commodity and copper prices, lasting about 54-56 years, later termed Kondratiev or long waves. Such cycles, indicated by periods of evolution and self-correction, were brought about by technological innovation that results in a long period of prosperity. Economists have identified the following Kondratiev Waves and their associated technological advances.
1. The first coincided with the invention of the steam engine, which particularly benefitted Great Britain and its advance to empire and ran from 1780 to 1830.
2. The second cycle arose because of the steel industry and the spread of railroads that ran from 1830 to 1880.
3. The third cycle, which ran from 1880 to 1930, resulted from electrification and innovation in the chemical industry, which benefitted the German Empire.
4. The fourth cycle was fueled by autos and petrochemicals and lasted from 1930 to 1970.
5. The fifth cycle was based on advanced manufacturing and information technology and began in 1970 and ran through the present and flows into quantum computing and AI, benefiting China.
Kondratiev's views were anathema to Josef Stalin, because they suggested that capitalist nations were not on an inevitable path to destruction; he ended up in the Gulag in Siberia and was shot by a firing squad in 1938. (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/...)
David trained as a physicist then worked in Wall Street. After 9/11 he developed the theory that every empire passes through five stages, that certain types of war correlate with those stages, and that major wars usually manifest just before peaks in the Kondratiev cycle. As a result he thinks, unfortunately, that we are already in World War Three and he offers how we might best respond to the fact.
0:00 Intro
3:28 David tells his origin story
7:01 Wall Street, predicting markets through price and emotional behaviour, setting up hedge fund
8:00 Was 9/11 the beginning of the end for the Western world?
8:50 Originating the theory of ‘Five Stages of Empire,' wars being ‘the clocks of empire’
10:02 Lateral versus linear thinking
11:00 Western Christian Super Empire
12:05 War and entropy, life--and empire building--as anti-entropy
12:57 Buddhism as the Middle Way
14:46 Anti-entropy as the anomaly
15:48 Two subsets of humans: lateral hunter gatherers and linear systematizers
17:14 In decline phase linear people take over. Money printing doesn’t help.
18:15 Victor Davis Hanson on great generals
18:46 David on advising senior UK army officers
20:14 New book: Breaking the Code of Wars
21:43 GRAPH: Kondratiev Waves of Innovation. David reviews K-waves since 1798
23:52 World War Three started with invasion of Ukraine.
24:41 Major wars happen every 112 years (two K-cycles.) The last was the First World War
26:00 How David warned the defense establishment in 2015, then published ‘Now Or Never’ in 2020, as quoted by Boris Johnson
26:35 Book: ‘Led By Lions’ on British Expeditionary Force in WW1
27:24 Book: ‘Red Lightning’ on hegemonic challenge of China. Carrier killers
31:50 Pax Americana, denial about WW3, money printing as dopamine hit, Biden and Sunak leadership
33:16 How to respond as a Buddhist
33:46 Being nice doesn’t work with predators, discussion around Buddhist Shaolin monks and Tibetan wrathful deities
38:42 Knowing when to act, good generals save lives
40:55 GRAPH: Roman Super Empire
41:45 GRAPH: Western Christian Super Empire
44:54 GRAPH: Five stages of Empire basic model
45:57 GRAPH: Correllations of major wars with the Kondratiev cycle
46:34 Projected war with China
47:04 GRAPH: Wars and the Empire Cycle
48:45 GRAPH: Wars of the Western Christian Super Empire
50:10 GRAPH: American Empire
52:21 GRAPH: Asian Super Empire
53:31 GRAPH: Polarisation
54:25 Narcissism and unproductivity in a declining empire
55:34 Westerners need greater insight into what is happening
55:59 Why Nero came early in the Roman Empire
58:06 Woke culture
1:01:19 Benefits of a physics education
1:02:28 Importance of consciousness / mindfulness
1:04:04 Credits
© David Murrin 2024. All images courtesy of Getty Images. |