Markets are saturated by technological products – (market saturation – everybody has a mobile phone, every small town has a railway station) and new capital investment in this originally new sector will not bring any above-average profit (e.g. the first railways connected the biggest cities with many potential passengers, later ones had ever smaller and smaller customer potential, and the level of profit from each new railway was therefore lower than from the previous one).
Unlike other scholars he believed that it is possible to find similar technological revolutions and long-term economic waves dependent on them even in pre-modern ages.
[9][10][11][12] As Smihula published his theory in the time of revived interest in long economic cycles and when a link between economic cycles and technological revolutions was generally accepted (e.g. in works of Carlota Perez), it did not evoke strong criticism or opposition.
On the other side it has the same problem as the other long-cycles theories – it is sometime hard to support them by exact data and the potential curve of a long time development is always modified by other short-time factors – therefore its course is always only a rather abstract reconstruction.
Smihula's theory of long waves of technological innovations and economic cycles dependent on them is more popular in Russia, Brazil[13] and India[14] than in Europe.