(02-07-2019, 10:17 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: I mentioned this in some other threads already - or hinted at it - but here's the theory in full:
Currently, we have five generations alive and kicking - Silents, Boomers, Xers, Millennials, and Homelanders. (I left out the G.I.s because only a tiny minority of them is still alive.)
Theoretically, the old Artists should be out of power, except for some very old intellectuals and some judges. As it was during the last Crisis.
People are living longer and staying physically and mentally active. Staying active means that one can press one's concerns. The pattern that began with GIs has continued with the Silent -- and Boomers. Should I start to see the pattern hold with X, then we see a pervasive change in human nature that greatly changes how the generational cycle operates.
Quote:That's why I made the "Powerful Silents" thread - to show how they're still influencing US society from the background. Billionaires like Buffett or Soros and many others doing lobbyism to make sure the laws stay complicated enough they can abuse loopholes and keep their billions. (About one in three people with a net worth >4 billion $ is a Silent!) Old politicians like Pelosi who fight Trump wherever they can.
Don't forget the Koch brothers!
Quote:Originally, Strauss & Howe predicted that the Crisis was supposed to start around 2005! Obviously something went wrong. FDR was able to start reforms in 1933, only four years after the Crisis started - even ten years after the Financial Crisis, we haven't fixed anything, not even in our gut feelings.
As early as 2005 I saw signs of collapse due to the rating fraud in the packaging of fecal loans as an investment. Solid economics depend upon fiduciary integrity, with people refusing to deal in scams. The stock market reached its peak in late 2007 and endured a 1930-style crash (the real crash was in 1930 after a partial recovery)
... and the system stopped the equivalent of destructive bank runs of 1931 and 1932.
The problem? We solved nothing. We backed the shaky survivors but got no major reforms of the financial system. We got a long recovery under Obama and shady economics under Trump. Trump's economics are simple; as much as possible is to go to elite gain, indulgence, and power -- which has never sustained itself in a market economy.
Quote:Seems to me that S&H didn't consider that people live longer and stay healthier. How many octogenerians did run hedgefunds and administrate fortunes of several billions in the 1930s?
FDR could bully the SCOTUS by threatening to appoint six more pliable younger judges, and they gave in. But how do you get rid of powerful, cunning old billionaires? In a legal way, that is?
People don't do raw labor for more than short spurts into their eighties (a poor laborer's life is often 'nasty, short,and brutish'), but if they keep in reasonably-good shape they can do much white-collar work. If one is eighty and capable of operating a hedge fund successfully, then you keep doing so as long as possible. So it is with law, medicine, art, writing, composing, conducting, directing, acting, consulting, politics, preaching... one might do it only part time, but one gets paid well. Raw labor wears one down in one's sixties at the latest.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.