About the risk of wave prediction.
And what capito has to do with it.

The image of a wave is often used in connection with change. After all, we all experience that changes and developments do not usually proceed according to plan or in a straight line.
Whether Nikolai Dmitrijewitsch Kondratjew (also: Kondratieff) liked to sit by the sea is not known. In any case, the economist from the central Russian village of Galuyevskaya was preoccupied with the very big waves, the long-term business cycles. His observations on their regularity were so interesting that today we like to talk about ‘Kondratjev cycles’ in connection with the ‘long waves of the economy’.

When I sit on the shore as a wave analyst, I regularly fail with my diagnosis and the forecast based on it. Apparently, too many factors affect the decision of how far the next wave will actually run up the beach to me. My consolation: Kondratjev first dealt with past waves, so it is easier to make a prognosis.
The steam engine, the railroad and electricity were the determining factors of the three waves that he observed during his lifetime and on which he based his theory of the ups and downs in the free-market capitalist economic system. Even if Schumpeter and others disagreed with the Russian in detail, those waves that were later shaped by petrochemistry or mass transport and by the development of electronics were and are apostrophized as the fourth and fifth ‘Kondratjev’. The regularity of the waves – they came and went at 50-year intervals – may have contributed to this. We all like simple, memorable calculations, and then it does not matter crucially if the more recent cycles do not adhere to them to the letter.
In fact, Kondratyev’s prediction was his undoing. For following his theory, he predicted a recovery of capitalism after the crisis-ridden 1920s, not considering that the ruling doctrine of Stalinism au contraire firmly assumed its demise. This cost him his job and later his life.