(10-27-2016, 04:25 PM)David Horn Wrote:(10-24-2016, 08:40 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I've finished reading and digesting Turchin's new book and am finishing up my paper that tries to fix some of the problems. The driver for the classical agrarian secular cycle was population growth. As a population biologist he was at home with this. Having success with it he tried to apply demographic concepts to industrial cycles to explain rising inequality. In my paper I show he made a simple error that invalidates the analysis. I show the differential rate between return to capital and wage growth is a better candidate. This is Piketty's idea. I show that it implies a shorter cycle length (about 90 years) than the older agrarian cycles (about two centuries).
The key difference is that Turchin does not see the Civil war as a secular cycle boundary conflict (a conflict shortly before a secular cycle border). I see the secular cycle and the saeculum as essentially the same cycle since the Revolutionary war. I also see boundary conflicts (BC) as 4Ts. All BC's are 4T but not all 4T (e.g. the Armada crisis) are BCs.
This means I expect this 4T to be a BC, which means the trend in inequality must shift from rising to falling before the 4T is over. Turchin does not think this, I believe.
I sincerely hope you're right. allowing inequality to rise beyond a certain point is guaranteed to create havoc. I would be nice to avoid it.
If by havoc you mean violence, I'm afraid we probably aren't going to avoid that. These turnarounds are always accompanied by significant violence. It is possible, even likely, that the predominant form of this violence will be the spree shooting with which we are already familiar. Last time the turnaround occurred over 1907-1941. There was a major spike in deadly sociopolitical instability over the 1912-1922 period that I call the "Red Panic" from its 1919 peak called Red Summer, and the hysteria of Leftist (or "red") terrorism that led to the Palmer raids at the same time. This 11 year period contains 219 separate episodes of group violence with over 1300 dead in total.
Immigration restriction over 1921-24 was a response to this violence. Over 2009-2016 we have seen an (ongoing) spike in violence with 125 episodes of mass shootings with over 600 dead (and counting). One of the presidential candidates has called for a complete shutdown of Muslim (read terrorist) immigration. The same candidate has called Mexican immigrants rapists, murderers and the worst people, and wants to build a wall to keep them out. Seems like history repeating.
Turchin believes that immigration restriction was the actual policy that brought about the inequality trend reversal (this is in line with what Anthony '58 thinks). I disagree and believe instead that it was the brought about by policies that reduced the after-tax return on investment (mostly high taxes and pro-worker policies).
It was not until 1932 that these policies started to be introduced and so I believe that a lot of the heavy-lifting on the inequality reversal occurred in the 1930's and early 1940's. That said, I also believe that immigration restriction (1924) and high tariffs (1930) also played a role. Hence I supported Sanders in the primary and I have some (but not much) sympathy for anti-immigration folks. The centerpiece of any inequality trend reversal is confiscatory taxes on very high income Americans with significantly higher taxes for folks farther down the income ladder (including me). Should this happen I will resent it mightily. But, sigh, for us to go on it must be so.
If we don't do this (and I am pretty sure we won't) the bear will start the process. Hence the forecast for more great devaluations. We may never learn. Look the bear rose up in Japan in 1989 and he still rules, nearly 30 years later. We could easily be having this same discussion in 2030 should we both still be living. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, America will always do the wise thing, but only after trying all the foolish things first.
This is how great nations and empires fall. When folly becomes the only acceptable course of action.