ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to define the complexity of the cyclical process in history. Long demographic cycles, spanning centuries, belong, thus far in experience, to the pre-modern history of societies. The rate of housing construction is, basically, related to the rate of family formation, corrected for the rate of urbanization and, where relevant, public policies bearing on housing construction. Like other forms of investment, housing construction has followed a cyclical path. Inventory cycles of 3-4 years can be traced in the British data as far back as the eighteenth century and persist into the post-1945 years in the advanced industrial economies. A group of non-economic complexities which both leave their impact on the timing, amplitude, and character of cycles and have, additionally, an independent non-cyclical role in shaping economic history: the luck of the harvests, wars, and the responsiveness of societies to the economic challenges history places before them.
