Various studies have questioned the existence of K-Waves and even Kondratiev sees himself ("The Long Waves in Economics Life," Review of Economics and Statistics, 1935) as providing evidence for the "longwave hypothesis," viz., the existence of long waves. This approach, I argue, is methodologically flawed. Longwaves are not "out there" in the world for us to find or not find. This point is a straight forward application of Alfred North Whitehead's fallacy of missplaced concreteness or false objectification. A longwave is a conceptual category for interpreting the data. The easier it is to see such waves in the data, the more compelling the category. But the real test of this theoretical construct concerns whether is facilitates predictive power.

In the name of Kondratiev waves, a number of scholars (eg., Geoffrey Barraclough (1974) and J.W. Forrester (1978)) predicted a major depression/deflation after the 1974-75 recession due to the 1973-74 quadroupling of oil prices. The magnitude of depression they expected was not realized. But with friends like this Kondratiev hardly need enemies. One has to have a theory of K-waves in order for it to have predictive power -- one can not substitute the counting of years (since the depression of the early 'thirties) as a substitute for theory.

The theory advanced here gives more weight to (post-war) monetary policy than given by Kondratiev and others. A test of this theory, a test of the similarity of the post-1980 period with the three great deflationary waves identified by Kondratiev is whether the deflations in China and Japan and depressions in other parts of the world will move to the wealthy countries in the early part of the 21st century.