07-18-2019, 08:03 AM
(07-18-2019, 04:27 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(07-17-2019, 09:02 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Meanwhile, kids are making their cultural influence known earlier as markets for music and video. The voting age is down to 18, which may have some influence upon voting patterns.
I think socially childhood is now longer than ever. Kids live with their parents longer than ever, marriage is also postponed. That's why I expect voting age or age of consent to go up eventually, especially given the fact young adults don't make responsible choices. The psychologist Robert Epstein talks about extended childhood disorder, but it's not clear to be that is indeed a disorder. Maybe a longer childhood is optimal for growth of personalities. In the past people had to grow up early only because death could happen at any moment due to epidemics, war and hunger. Now we can have children at 35, and still be in good health when our grandchildren arrive. If there is radical extension of lifespans, even a very long childhood won't be an obstacle for anything. Stapledon's Fifth Men had a childhood that lasted 200 years, but they lived up to 3000 years so childhood was less than a tenth of their lifespan.
As economic actors, youth are often in economic childhood much longer than they used to be. Because most desirable jobs requite at the least a bachelor's degree and the really-desirable jobs require a graduate degree, and college education comes with huge debt, it could well be that people will often not be economically mature until their mid-thirties.
It is easy to imagine our elites seeking to limit political activity such as voting to people who own property -- which of course disenfranches the poor, but also most of the young adults still in debt for college educations.
Quote:Quote:Maybe 90 is now a better guess on the length of a saeculum.
For the time being, yes. A turning is defined by a new generation coming of age, so longer childhoods mean longer turnings and saeculums. If future people are considered adults at 30, a saeculum will last about 120 years.
On the other hand, the tools of entertainment have gotten incredibly cheap, and those disseminate the youth culture. I see no cause to believe that American culture will ever fossilize. I expect that the Homeland Generation will replace the brashness of X mass culture with whimsy much as the Silent did with Lost culture, and that such will still define generations. I also expect the next Idealist generation to chafe under a sanitized, corporate mass culture in entertainment and robotic politics -- not at age 30 but at age 18 or so.
Culture distinction between generations and economic maturity may simply coincide. But let us think of all the child laborers of the early twentieth century: did they mature fast and become self-reliant? Hardly. They were completely dependent upon the owners and bosses, and the parents typically took the money that those kids could not sneak into a candy shop.
The tendency toward more education seems unlikely to reverse. We may see a need not only for technical education to get people into entry-level jobs, but also to get people to learn some liberal arts so that they can seek and to some extent achieve meaning in life. The expansion of K-12 education from K-8 as a norm in America occurred in part as a means of getting ill-paid children out or the workforce when jobs were scarce during the Great Depression. Besides, many employers are finding that subsidizing a college education is one way to retain good, if still underpaid, workers instead of having high turnover -- and having a chance of making those workers better fit a culture that might be less materialistic. Besides, people with more and better education are less likely to fall for demagogues of any kind, Left or Right.
One clear reality: we are producing all the material stuff that we need far more easily than we used to. We do not need as many people doing manufacturing work because we have machines doing much of the dangerous or body-wrecking work. It is also questionable that we need more stuff; except for new households especially with children on the way, most people are buying material goods either for one-time use or are simply replacing what is broken, torn, or grossly obsolete. When electric ranges were novelties, one could make huge profits by getting the first ones to people who did not have one. Today the market for them is either new housing, commercial use, or replacement. If one uses the Keynesian model for the overall economy in which Y=income, C =consumption, I =investment, G = government spending, and Y = C + I + G (which is a crude oversimplification), then one sure way to increase the measure of C is to raise costs through monopolization and gouging -- hardly how people want to spend more.
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.