(12-13-2018, 03:24 PM)Mikebert Wrote: [ -> ]I think my post was misunderstood. What I said was I am increasingly of the opinion that the S&H generational theory is wrong. This is NOT to say that we are doomed to have a "failed crisis". S&H is not the only cycle theory that deals with crisis issues.
The secular cycle initially described by UConn prof Peter Turchin is an alternative that has a number of strengths over S&H. One big advantage is its is the secular cycle is an ongoing creation of a school of researchers, as opposed to just two. Once S&H finished T4T in 1997 (mostly a rehash of material presented in Generations in 1991) nothing further has been done. Nobody has developed a primer for using their system, so it remains closed to other workers. People like John Xenakis and myself, who sought to do something along these lines had to guess at how the S&H cycle works. We came up with radically different approaches. There is no way to know if any of us were on target or not.
Some of us are best described as 'hobbyist-scholars' who not only lack access to the peer-reviewed journals but also have no idea of which journals to use as sources. I am disappointed that there is little new material, and that contributions are by people like you and me. I feel capable of discussing the theory and testing its consequences. Our emphases are different, and I see causes for the model fitting the past but contradictory explanations. We have the lengthening of adulthood with kids establishing their culture earlier than used to be the case -- and people living longer lives. Even if young adults are not achieving economic viability as quickly as they used to (the Master Class of heirs and bureaucratic elites want it that way, with masses being overworked and underpaid but subjected to monopolistic pricing to fleece them even more -- remember: no matter how destructive peonage is, it is supremely profitable) they are achieving cultural identity earlier than they used to. Cultural identity reflects itself in politics, and I can easily see the Millennial Generation turning against elites that have betrayed their generation.
Quote:On the other hand, Turchin and Nefodov's initial offering in Secular Cycles (2009) was eight cycles in four polities: England, France, Russia and ancient Rome. In his exposition, sufficient information was provided so other people can learn to do what Turchin did, and write up their results for publication. Shortly after the journal was founded an independent worker added another Roman cycle. Another academic describe nine Chinese cycles and a third did a long multi-millennial outline of scores of such cycles. I myself added two English cycles to Turchin's two in a 2016 paper. All these are peer-reviewed articles. This is how science is supposed to work.
A worthy effort. Other countries, including Spain, Germany, Italy, India, and Japan would be relevant too. If some Russians have an effort analogous to those of Howe and Strauss, then maybe their list of generations includes "Bolshevik" and "Soviet" generations. Who knows?
We have evident signs of Crisis. We have a great contrast between people tied to the economic boons (for them) of the 3T and people who want to take the gravy train. We also have the generational cycle operating very differently from how it operated in the crises of the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and Great Depression/WWII. We have plenty of octogenarian Silent in roles of political power and cultural definition -- and in previous Crises, the Crisis ended with such people off the stage. Add to this, the worst Boomers have so far prevailed in politics and economics, the sorts who remind me of the Southerners who insisted that people outside the South recognize the slave-owning planters as the best thing possible for the slaves that they so exploited and brutalized. Maybe the timing is off, and we have a protracted Crisis Era slower to develop and get settled. Maybe this Crisis will end with a new Adaptive generation already on the scene. The dynamics still operate, but the underlying reality is different.
Maybe the academics are just as confused as we hobbyist-historians are.
Quote:The secular cycle can be identified by simple plots of historical data. Some of you may be familiar with David Fisher's The Great Wave,(1996) which describes the English secular cycles (before Turchin coined the term) simply by a price plot. Price and wage data (both of which are available for England back to medieval times) can be used to calculate real wage. The reciprocal of real wage is a called "the misery index" and is a measure of inequality (higher is worse). Inequality cycles can be used to map out the secular cycle in modern-day America.
Real wages are low; elite compensation is inordinately high; costs of mandatory purchases for having some chance of living comfortably (college education and urban rents) are inordinately high. One part of the economic spectrum seems to consider its abuse and degradation of the common man a sort of charity toward those that it exploits badly. I can almost see some of them demanding, were they to fully entrench themselves in power, that the rest of Humanity suffer for their insatiable greed and indulgence and make sure to see them as if gods -- or die horribly. Hunger or concentration camps? Imperial Russia with its slow starvation or Nazi Germany with its swift descent from the privilege of bare survival to some horrible death for anyone that the system treats as a pariah -- the worst of American elites will offer us the first, and if we do not accept it we will get the latter. With the depraved mass culture that often proves sadistic in the extreme we might see people cast into aquariums with crocodiles in a 21st-century equivalent of the Roman
damnatio ad bestiae instead of being mass-murdered in the secreted hell of a
KZ-lager.
I hope for better, but that requires that the economic elites that have been treating us badly change their way or get expelled. Maybe some of the elites will recognize that conscience is a necessity for survival in a risky world instead of an inconvenience. Do we humanize our capitalist system, overthrow it, or endorse some new horror that brings out the worst in elites as awful as the antebellum planters who saw slavery as charity toward the slaves?
As I have said elsewhere, it is up to the elites to prove or disprove Marxist critiques of capitalism. All that differs from a reactionary and a Marxist is that the Marxist sees the wonder that the reactionary considers wonderful as a great horror.
Quote:A plot of the misery index and other data series can identify a set of "Anglo-American" secular cycles as follows: the Anglo-Saxon cycle (880-1070), the Plantagenet cycle (1070-1485), the Tudor-Stuart cycle (1485-1690), the British mercantile cycle (1690-1870?), the American colonial cycle (ends 1780), the American republican cycle (1780-1930), and the American imperial cycle (1930-present). The American cycles are presented in Turchin's Ages of Discord (2016). The Anglo-Saxon and mercantile cycle are my additions (2016) the other two are from Turchin and Nefodov's Secular Cycles (2019). Note that the cycle lengths are not regular. This is because they are based on real data, not subjective assessments of generations by S&H which cannot be replicated. Evidence for subjectivity is the three very different sets of turnings T4Ters came up for the Roman saeculum. If turnings are a real thing how is it possible to come up radically different results?
National cultures? Different results of Crises as nations experienced them? Technological differences? Natural calamities that a society hanging on by a bare thread cannot meet (the French Revolution follows a volcanic eruption in Iceland that caused great reductions in food yields on the European continent, and when the food system fails, so does the society). Human nature may not change, which explains why we can still relate to Plato. We may identify with the early Christians more than we relate to Nero -- but after Nero, the Romans largely treated Nero as a horror.
Quote:The big advantage of the secular cycle is it has a causal theory that works (that is others can use it and get similar results and apply it to new areas expressed in papers than can meet peer review). We all note the rising polarization in recent decades. This is a phenomenon that can be tracked by a measure called the political stress indicator(PSI) that was invented by Jack Goldstone in 1991 to measure the political stresses leading to European revolutions in the early modern period. It was applied to the English and French revolutions and an Ottoman crisis. Turchin used Goldstone's invention and the theory behind it, plus a number of other ideas, to construct a theory for how secular cycles work. Other's have applied Turchin & Goldstone's work to the Arab spring.
It was the best of times/it was the worst of times...
The French Revolution may have a chance of relevance in America today. Or maybe the Spanish Civil War. We have no need to overthrow colonial overlords, to abolish slavery, or to thwart the military aggression of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. This Crisis will be different from the others because the stresses are different upon our social fabric than at those other times.
Quote:Now the way Goldstone and Turchin use PSI is empirically, by finding the empirical data that go into the model and grinding out the results. I took PSI and constructed a simplified version of it and then used Turchin's secular cycle model equations to calculate theoretical versions of the necessary data to give a value of PSI in the early 20th century America, where the necessary empirical data were missing. My formulation only requires inequality data, for which I dug up a lot of economic data to construct a good empirical series for that variable. Turchin's PSI work in his 2016 book shows a strongly rising trend in PSI (indicative of a coming political crisis) in the 1850's and the 2010's. The fact that political observers today are noting similarity between these too periods is reflected in that rising PSI. But my simplified version of PSI *also* shows a PSI peak in 1929, suggesting the country was ripe for major political change in 1929. Of course WE know that was the case, but it doesn't show up in Turchin's work because he has no PSI values for that period.
I saw that -- and I recognized scary conclusions.
Quote:But here's the deal. Secular Cycle theory suggests a crisis is coming and may unfold sometime in the 2020's to 2040's. S&H's system argues that this crisis already began at least a decade ago and should end in the 2020's, the earliest it could get started under secular cycle theory. S&H would have the forces leading to crisis already peaking in 2008 when the first financial crisis of the 21st century happened. Yet the way Democrats addressed this crisis (by passing a Republican bailout) and Obama's efforts at compromise with conservatives in 2009-2010 is fully consistent with the LOW value of PSI in 2008. PSI is much higher now. One direct prediction that can be made based on this model output is that Democrats will not cooperate with Trump like they did with Bush in the event of another financial crisis. That financial markets are in a bubble is revealed by the fact that asset value relative to GDP is higher than ever before, even higher than in 2000 and 2006. We have had 8 such bubbles, four of which ended with financial crises., suggested a 50% probability that this bubble will end as a financial crisis. The most recent two bubbles (2000 and 2006), show the same 50% probability, so this rule apparently still works.
Economic stress rises as the rhetoric becomes more acerbic. Compromise is a lost art in American politics, and it emerges only when all else fails. If you thought the political stresses high between 2011 and 2018, wait until we see someone who acts like a feudal lord having encounters with people who believe in democracy instead of corporate rule. Obama at least is a genial and decent person; Trump is neither.
Quote:Most likely, either THIS asset bubble (or the one that associated with the next business cycle, which would peak in the late 2020's) will end with a crisis. PSI is high now, and will be even higher a decade from now. That means this cycle's 1929 event is either in the near future or a decade away, strongly implying a 4T-like crisis in the 2020's or 2030's, that will NOT be do to a generational mechanism along the lines of what S&H proposed.
Here's my explanation: the difference between Obama and FDR is that Obama became President while the economy was in meltdown and could recover with a bail-out. FDR took over when the elites were ruined enough that they lacked the means for buying the political process. If 1929 is 2007 as an equivalent (the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was a correction from an overheated situation; 1930 and 2008 had the more destructive crashes from which the American economy could recover from if the President would back the banks. In 1931 America still had Hoover, who continued to bungle American economics into a Depression. In 2009 America had elected Obama, who promptly backed the banks, and in the spring of 2009 the economy started to recover. In 1931 the economy continued to falter, and the destructive bank runs about which Hoover did nothing gutted the financial system. In 1932 America elected FDR, and one of his first deeds was to back the banks. By then Americans were on the brink of having to barter for everything, and even the economic elites knew how bad things were. By 2010 the elites had had their system saved and they went on to support politicians who believe what they believe: that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as there is a profit to derive from it. It culminates in Donald Trump, a Marxist stereotype of a plutocrat as a political boss.
Ten years after the Great Stock Market Crash, life was clearly better for most Americans than it was ten years earlier. People had more cars, washing machines, stoves, refrigerators, and radios. People wore better clothes. The elderly were largely pensioned out of jobs that they were doing badly. Stock market indices were down, and in real terms those would not recover until the 1960s. Contrast how things are today. Elite profits are as high a share of national income as they were in the Gilded Age and the 1920s. Stock market indices are at record levels. Meanwhile middle-class spending by young adults in department stores and casual-dining places is way off. The American middle class is often broke; paying as much as it does in student-loan debt and real property rents. Executive compensation, largely gigantic rewards for treating workers badly, has never been so high in real or nominal terms. Young adults get nothing out of exe3cutive compensation unless they are still living with a parent who is an executive.
We have several rapacious, exploitative elites doing what such elites have always done best: exploiting people badly. We have big landowners, whether corporate-scale farmers or urban landlords in the places that actually have jobs, financiers and industrialists, an executive
nomenklatura, political hucksters, and organized crime -- and with the possible exception of organized crime, they are all aligned in their Devil-take-the-hindmost politics and economics. Changing the system? These would take over the system. Administrators, the Communist Party apparatchiks, and senior military officers didn't have to own the collective farms and the factories, but they could live like aristocrats in the supposedly 'classless society' that Lenin established. Add to that, where there was no legitimate ownership of productive assets, the experts -- the Russian Mafia -- could fill the needs that capitalism solved in markets. Government ownership and operation of the productive assets is a non-solution.