Grand Supercycle - Controversy About The Elliott Wave Grand Supercycle

Controversy About The Elliott Wave Grand Supercycle

Many controversies surround the concept of the Grand Supercycle:

• Stock transactions did not occur during the first years of the United States and price data is thus not available. The notion of the Grand Supercycle was thus implied by R. N. Elliott by concatenating gold prices, British stock market prices, and later U.S. stock market prices, as the U.S. economy surpassed the U.K. It is not clear that this methodology is scientifically robust.
• The hypothesised Grand Supercycle is conjectured to span more time than a human life, which some say means it cannot exist. Followers of Saeculum Theory take this view and align instead around a belief that defined sequences of generations relearn approximately the same lessons as their forebears. Similar ideas can be found in the Bible. The Saeculum might map to the Kondratiev cycle.
• If a social cycle of such large degree does indeed exist, then present-day scientific and economic understanding is insufficient to explain how it would propagate or what causes it, or even the smaller-degree waves that the theory suggests.
• The idea of a Grand Supercycle bear market implies that mankind will never learn from its past mistakes, or become self-aware in a macro-economic sense. The historical study presented in David Hackett Fischer's The Great Wave (Oxford University Press, 1999), however, presents a meticulously argued case that the periodic crises in human history are becoming steadily less volatile, which suggests that some kind of species-wide learning is occurring. This could be consistent with Rupert Sheldrake's controversial theory of "morphic resonance."