Fast Company has this fine piece about Roger Cass - who is apparently a hell of an augur.

"By studying the waves, Cass has compiled a perfect track record, predicting with total accuracy the big economic events of the past 30 years.

In the 1970s, when everybody said that the OPEC nations would hold the United States hostage to high-priced oil, Cass said that OPEC's power would fizzle and that the Saudis would enter decades of economic paralysis. He was right.

In the late 1980s, when everybody said that Japan's rise meant the eclipse of U.S. economic power, Cass confidently pronounced that the United States was one year away from its most robust economic recovery ever. He was right.

And as far back as the late 1970s, when everybody was still focused on the economy of the Organization Man, 30 years before anybody else had a glimmer of what would hit in the mid-1990s, Cass saw the new economy coming with the certainty of a wave headed for the shore. He named it as if it were a Hollywood movie, but it was really the most glorious wave of all: the Long Boom."

"And when you tell people that long-wave analysis is the brainchild of Nikolai Kondratieff, a Russian agricultural economist who was head of the Conjecture Institute, they tend to reject it as fantasy. But for Kondratieff, it was pure fact. In 1928, he predicted worldwide economic collapse, based on his study of history. He was denounced as "wrong and reactionary" by his government and deported to Siberia without a trial. Sentenced to solitary confinement, he became mentally ill -- never a good marketing strategy for a controversial theorist -- and died in prison, just as the Great Depression, which he had also predicted, was devastating Western economies."

"Here are Cass's projections for the fifth new economy, which began in 1994 and will run until 2020.

U.S. productivity will grow annually by an average of 3.5% over the next 10 years in the context of 1% annual employment growth.

In local broadband transmission to the home, the "last-mile" issue will be resolved, increasing information use enormously and finally delivering on the promises of the past 15 years.

The United States will shift from making investments in telecommunications to making investments in fiber-optic technology.

Japan will reemerge in a big economic turnaround, driven by a new generation of political and business leadership.

Local capital markets will emerge robustly in developing countries -- and this will be accompanied by a parallel, if not prior, development of human capital.

Economic and productivity growth will be interrupted as a result of environmental degradation. Eastern European success stories founded on environmental ravaging are not likely to persist."

Excellent stuff lets read this again in a couple of years and see what happened...