Fifty-year pulsation in human affairs: Analysis of some physical indicators

Long business cycles have been a subject of controversy between economists for the past hundred years. In this article a fresh approach is taken, forgetting money indicators, and looking instead at physicals and patterns of social behaviour. This new perspective very clearly reveals cyclic or pulsed behaviour in many areas with a period of about 55 years for at least two centuries. The patterns can be expressed in close mathematical form permitting quantitative forecastings to be made.