This thread is about techniques to use in generational research.  The thesis is as follows.  The Strauss and Howe generational cycle as a theory of history is just about dead. Strauss is dead and Howe is mostly working as a financial columnist (he's 65 and has decided to focus on those aspects of his ideas that have had acceptance) there will be no further work from him, and when he dies the idea will die with him.

However S&H made an important contribution.  The basic process (generations create history and history creates generations) that we attribute to them was not invented by them.  It's all in Karl Mannheim's 1928 essay, but you have to have to really go deep to see it (unless having read S&H you know what to look for). Others have derived the same mechanism from Mannheim that S&H did.  But as far as I know none have combined the political cycles observed by others with the religious cycles observed by McLoughlin and others. 

A far as I know, Dave Krein is the only historian to have seriously considered the ideas of S&H and has extended their paradigm.  Dave turns 74 this year.  I was working on a paper on generational cycles and have lost it (corrupted file) and will be rewriting it over the next few years.  I have another paper (intact) I plan to submit first so I am at least a year away from submitting the generational paper (it references the earlier paper which is why there is an order).  Plenty of time to rewrite it.  I will probably do it differently (might as well) hence this thread.

In the subsequent posts I plan to give an example of a technique and show how I apply it.  Other T4Ters have proposed theories.  How do you do it?  And how would you seek to make a case in a peer-reviewed situation?

History does not repeat but it rhymes.

Looking out at the geopolitical situation, we seem to be rhyming with the Great Power Saec 4T.

Let us examine without emotion what the next Great War will bring us.

Thermonuclear war will not be the sole means, but it will dominate the experience. Here's the earlier fission version:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pzdpt...des/player

Rebroadcast 70 years after the initial series. Available at the BBC site for another 23 days from the date of this post.

Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?

"Many parents who grew up playing outdoors with friends, walking alone to the park or to school, and enjoying other moments of independent play are now raising children in a world with very different norms.

"In the United States today, leaving children unsupervised is grounds for moral outrage and can lead to criminal charges.

"What's changed?

"One possibility is that the risks to children have changed. What was safe in the past may be unsafe today, placing children in genuine danger. But, for the most part, the data don't support this. Statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey, for example, suggest that violent crime rates have decreased since the 1970s (and not only when it comes to children, whom one could argue are benefiting from the increased oversight)."

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/08...nreal-risk

So snow the Washington Post is running clickbait headlines ugh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-...&tid=ss_tw

Quote:Over the weekend, I wrote a piece breaking down Donald Trump's remarkably poor performance among Catholics. Some folks disagreed with the premise, arguing that there isn't really even a "Catholic vote" at all — that it's not homogeneous enough to consider it a voter bloc.
But every voter group has significant differences within it. And in fact, new data suggest that there's a little-publicized and rather large difference if you look closely at one of the most-discussed demographics of the 2016 election: Hispanics.
A Gallup poll shows that Hillary Clinton maintains a very big advantage among Hispanic voters — just as you might expect. Democrats, after all, have won this group by increasing margins in presidential elections, and that's a major GOP sore spot, given how quickly the U.S. Hispanic population is rising....



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-...&tid=ss_tw

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...um=twitter

Quote:For the past few decades, presidential elections have been dominated by voters of the Baby Boom and previous generations, who are estimated to have cast a majority of the votes. But their election reign may end this November, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data.



Baby Boomers and prior generations have cast the vast majority of votes in every presidential election since 1980, data from the Census Bureau’s November Current Population Survey voting supplement show. In 2012, Boomers and previous generations accounted for 56% of those who said they voted. And these generations dominated earlier elections to an even greater degree.... 



http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...um=twitter

In case you haven't heard, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem before Friday night's exhibition game at home against the Green Bay Packers, basically declaring his solidarity with Black Lives Matter as his motive for doing this.

It has been a rough time for Kaepernick of late: He is battling an injury to his left shoulder that he sustained in mid-season last year, and throughout this summer's training camp new 49ers head coach Chip Kelly has been broadly hinting that he is leaning toward starting Blaine Gabbert, who is 8-27 lifetime as an NFL starter, over Kaepernick, whose 31-22 record therein includes a 4-2 mark in the postseason, in which Gabbert has never participated, in the team's regular-season opener, at home against the newly-rechristened Los Angeles Rams at the 49ers' Santa Clara home in a Monday night game on September 12.  Kelly, for his part, is no stranger to race-based controversy, engineering the running off from the team of wide receiver DeSean Jackson during his stint as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, while coddling fellow Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper after Cooper regaled a black security guard with the N-word at a Kenny Chesney concert.

The controversy that Kaepernick's actions have generated is so hot that the NFL has disabled the comment feature in the article about the incident that appears on the league's web site.

But of course we don't believe in censorship here.

So opine away!

I'd like to take the temperature of the forum on the issue.

From personal experience with two War Baby grandparents ('41 and '43), I'd consider the '43 grandmother to have a basically Boomer disposition, while my '41 grandfather was very much a Silent. So I'm convinced the earliest Prophets can be born during a Crisis.

And based on that personal experience (my Boomer-esque War Baby grandmother's being born in 1943, fourteen years after Black Tuesday), and holding to a 2006 Fourth Turning start date, I'd bet that the cohort of 2020 will look awfully Prophet-like when they've grown up.

Assuming that the GC has any validity as a concept as outlined in The Fourth Turning, it isn't applicable to either Clinton or Trump. 

The Book (doesn't one feel like a Friend of Bill, discussing it that way?) is pretty specific that what makes a Grey Champion a Grey Champion is overwhelming support from the ascending generation. It is the rising Hero generation, after all, that enshrines a Grey Champion's exploits in the annals of Valhalla and records their deeds in the Book of Life &etc. &etc. 

Abraham Lincoln certainly had huge majorities among the rising Gilded in the non-seceded States (he very likely was not a Grey Champion of the Confederacy); the 'Lincoln Shouters' were a paramilitary organization consisting of nothing but male youths in the Union states. And while I haven't been able to find any primary documentation on the demographics of the 1932 election, the overwhelming impression I get from secondary sources is that Franklin Roosevelt was the overwhelming favorite of the G.I. Generation at the time, not the least because of the Democratic promise to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.

You notice my repeated use of the word "overwhelming"?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump runs a serious risk of coming in fourth place in the youth vote, while Hillary is struggling to match the youth enthusiasm Obama had in his two elections. If we judge potential Grey Champions on the support they muster from the newly-minted Heroes, neither of the two nominees this year qualify. Indeed, it's increasingly plausible that Obama will look very much like a traditional Grey Champion in hindsight. The difference may be something as simple as a reverse Civil War crisis - where many observers include most or all of the 1850s in the Fourth Turning of that Crisis (creating a lengthy head in front of the emergence of the Grey Champion), this Crisis may simply have seen a Grey Champion leave office with a tail of Crises behind him, with nothing really resolved.

Surprisingly - at least according to some here - not me!

It's a massive improvement over the Ayn Rand Right.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29...alt-right/

The label’s become too big to be useful, and tech could suffer for it.

Quick: What do an auto leasing provider, a condiment company and the producers of a serious TV drama have in common? If your answer is “almost nothing”, then you’re right. If your answer is “they have such similar roles in society that they should be regulated and reported on the same way”, then congratulations—you still believe there’s “tech industry”.


Uber is providing predatory sub-prime leases to its drivers through its subsidiary Xchange. Mayonnaise startup (yes, ?) Hampton Creek is under SEC investigation for buying back its own mayo. Amazon is going toe-to-toe with companies like HBO with a prestige series like Transparent. And absurdly, we’re expecting lawmakers, the media and average consumers to understand these wildly different offerings—and countless more ranging from mattresses to medical testing—as part of one single, endlessly complex, industry.
That’s an impossible task, and a bad way to think about technology’s role in society. Perpetuating the myth of a monolithic “tech industry” overtaxes our ability to manage the changes that technology is making to society, and that overload threatens to have increasingly negative impacts.

Once upon a time, it made perfect sense to talk about “the high tech industry” in America — pioneering companies like Intel or Fairchild Semiconductor or IBM or Hewlett Packard made computer processors and related hardware, and most of the companies in Silicon Valley dealt with actual silicon from time to time. These companies offered competing products that shared a market, a set of customers, and sometimes even had employees in common when talent would move from one company to another.

But today, the major players in what’s called the “tech industry” are enormous conglomerates that regularly encompass everything from semiconductor factories to high-end retail stores to Hollywood-style production studios. The upstarts of the business can work on anything from cleaning your laundry to creating drones. There’s no way to put all these different kinds of products and services into any one coherent bucket now that they encompass the entire world of business.