Edward R. Dewey

Dewey first became interested in cycles while Chief Economic Analyst of the Department of Commerce in 1930 or 1931 because President Hoover wanted to know the cause of the Great Depression.

The foundation was set up with a board that included distinguished scientists and industrialists to act as a central clearing house of cycles studies from diverse areas.

[citation needed] The Foundation made studies of natural and social sciences as well as business and economics, and new methods were devised for isolating significant cycles present in time series.

Robert Gale Woolbert wrote that they "adduce interesting second-hand statistics to the effect that cyclical tendencies have been observed in industrial, biological and solar phenomena.

"[3] Milton Friedman dismissed their theory as pseudoscience:[4] [Cycles: The Science of Prediction] is not a scientific book: the evidence underlying the stated conclusions is not presented in full; data graphed are not identified so that someone else could reproduce them; the techniques employed are nowhere described in detail.