Well, I just commented on Sornette, I guess.
I have defended long waves on this list before,
but I do not think Sornette's methods prove they
exist. Yes, these kinds of predictions are the sort
of stuff for hyping sales of the book.
Again, indeed the power law stuff that is the
main point of his book is for real. But he neither
discovered nor is the main student of it, maybe
just the guy getting to the bookshelves with the
first really hypy book coming out of it. I know the
very knowledgeable reviewer I have looking at
it does not think all that much of it, although he
is very respectful of the papers Sornette has
published in the journal, Quantitative Finance.
I would note that the power law stuff can
also be used to study city size distributions
(often under the name "Zipf's Law") and
income and wealth distributions (the original
Pareto distribution, which is more skewed than
just your old garden variety lognormal). Duncan
Foley has some of his students at the New
School looking at this latter sort of stuff,
which I have a good deal of respect for.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "Renato Pompeu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 10:10 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] Complexity
> >What's your view on Didier Sornette and log-periodic
> power laws? Another intellectual bubble developing?
> I've got his "Why Stock Markets Crash" and there is
> some good stuff there, but he appears to be trying to
> extend his theory into a general principle of stock
> market movements. HE's also predicted economic
> collapse somewhere around 2050, which is usually the
> economic iconoclast's equivalent of jumping the shark.
>
> dd
>
> Well, Kondratieff in the 1920s spoke about 50-70 years cycles. This would
> give, for instance, 1929-1999-2049...
> Renato Pompeu
>
