The discipline of price history, which flourished during the 1930s, is now in the early stages of revival.

The third assignment is consider the consequences of price-movements, or more precisely the consequences of movements that prices represent. These

Cycles must be teased from the data, commonly by statistical inferences in which the evidence is “filtered” and “detrended” by various techniques.

One must learn to look the evidence in the face, without fixed ideological, theoretical or epistemological preconceptions. We are sometimes told that this is impossible. So it is—for some people.9

Today, we are living in the late stages of the price revolution of the twentieth century. Disaster does not necessarily lie ahead for us. This book does not predict the apocalypse. It does not attempt to tell the future. To the contrary, it finds that uncertainty about the future is an inexorable fact of our condition.

The purpose of this inquiry is to stimulate growing interest in this subject, by studying each price-revolution in turn, and then by comparing one with another. We shall describe the four great waves in their most important aspects: first, their timing, magnitude, rhythm, volatility, and the sequence of secular change in price levels; second, the p

of these periods of equilibrium were marked by fluctuations of high complexity. None experienced long-term price-inflation.

This alternating rhythm of price-revolutions and price-equilibria was discovered as early as the eighteenth century.

Before we begin to study these relationships, a caveat is necessary. It should be understood clearly that the movements we are studying are waves—not cycles. To repeat: not cycles, but waves.