| Review of Ravi Batra, The Great Depression of 1990 (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985), International Journal of Forecasting, 4 (1988) 493-502 (2007) | |||||||||||||
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| this paper (Bell and Seater, 1987), a superstar was any faculty member who published an average of at least one paper per year in one of the top economic journals from 1970-74. Batra was the third most prolific author among this list. In other words, he did have an impressive record using one of the most commonly used criteria for judging academic success. Another way to examine the fame of an academic is to examine his citation rate. Do other scientists refer to this work? According to the 1986 Annual Social Science Citation Index, Batra was cited 21 times. That is a good record, but certainly not in the superstar category. It can be said that he is the most cited of people named R. Batra (second place going to a recent graduate of Stanford who had 18 citations). Lester Thurow wrote the introduction to the book when it was an obscure monograph with a different title. He claimed that the monograph was "a novel and brilliant exposition." The current book is a revised version and Thurow was unhappy to be associated with it, according to the New York Times (August 30,1987, p. 7). Batra's predictions rely on a "theory"' by P.R. Sarkar. The New York Times (August 30, 1987, p. 7) provides background on Sarker. He is a cult figure in India who was convicted of six murders, a conviction that was overturned in 1978 after Indira Gandhi was voted from office. Many followers believe that Sarkar is the creator of the universe. Although he had not seen Sarkar since 1981, Dr. Batra is said to communicate with him through an ancient form of meditation called tantra. (2) Cycles: Batra's evidence that history repeats itself begins with a graph of the money growth per decade in the U.S. from the 1770s to the 1970s. The rate of money growth reached a peak every three decades, with one ex... | |||||||||||||
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