The “normal” average timelag betwen Schumpterian-Kuhnian upgrades in major understandings is about 70 years plus or minus 30 years (and please don’t ask me to prove that -it’s one of my unpublished obsessions).
The major investors in the UK re Watt’s “Steam Engine” waited for 70 years so they would not have to pay him royalties. That might be a major reason why the upswing of the second Kondratieff cycle of the Railway age was 70 years behind the first steam engine upswing.
One of the worst assumptions in built-on-sand neoclasical economics is that everyone has access to the same information at the same time when that’s not true even in economics.
But assuming my provisional calculations that it can take 70 years plus or minus thirty years for new innovations to change people’s mindsets, when did Investment Credit economics begin?
With Wang Anshi (generally unrecognised in the West) over nine centuries ago? The Chinese certainly think so. See
and see paras one and two of
or maybe with the 1920 upswing of the South Manchurian Railway Company? Or with FDR’s 1938–44 Economic miracle? Or with the Japanese Shimomuran economic miracle starting in 1945 and in full bloom in 1960? The dates you get, depending on which start years you accept, are
1990–2010 perhaps most relevant to the Chinese economic miracle
2008-2038 when the US economists might wake up (some have already — see the work of Kenneth Kenkichi Kurihara and others, many writers, few recognised)
2015–2045 very likely
2030–2060 too late when China is over 50% of world GDP
and see my ruminations on this topic at
and finally see my quora Answer to
What is your opinion of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari? at
where I provisionally calculate when Chinese GDP/head will exceed the US level
You raise interesting questions!
