Long-cycles

There has been some confusion between the terms long-cycle and long-waves. Long-waves date back to Nikolai Kondratieff, the Russian economist whose name now represents the cycles that he expounded on, that is the Kondratieff Waves. Long-cycles properly belongs to Simon Kuznets, the second American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, (the first being Paul Samuelson). Long-cycles, also known as long-swings, originally referred to the cycles that Kuznets expounded on, now known as Kuznets cycles or simply Kuznets. With much confusion about these terms over the last 30 years, long-cycles is used almost interchangeably to refer to long-waves by economists, sociologists and writers alike and few really know the difference.