Previous apparent trends (eg 1880 - 1910, 1910 - 1940) had all abruptly ended, there was no reason to assume things would be different in 1988 - unless you accept the model's prediction, of course... which is precisely the point.
Not exact matches
But, there now seems to be a general agreement that the
apparent signals that had been reported in the 2000s were biased by the various factors described in the
previous sections, and that
trends of the last few decades are within the bounds of natural variability, e.g., see the Knutson et al., 2010 review (Abstract; Google Scholar access).
This
trend is an
apparent shift for affluent Chinese, who in
previous years had preferred to buy overseas real estate in places like Malaysia, Singapore, Canada and Australia.