05-29-2021, 07:58 AM
(05-28-2021, 11:52 PM)X Marks the Spot Wrote: The wiki RationalWiki has an article on the S&H theory, which you can read here:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_St..._Neil_Howe
Like a lot of people, it calls the theory pseudoscience. Some of their points sound as if the editors on that wiki don't understand the theory at all. For example, this part:
Quote:The "crises" chosen also lend themselves to confirmation bias. The Depression and World War II period was a time of drastic societal change, but so was the Vietnam War and 1960s. Why is one a "crisis" and the other an "awakening"?
It's not just how "drastic" it is that makes a turning a turning, it's the national mood! During World War II the mood was patriotic; during the Vietnam War the youth zeitgeist was "let's burn a flag". During World War II the coming-of-age generation was a patriotic, obedient, socially conformist generation of social conservatives that fought for Mom and apple pie and questioned nothing; during the Vietnam War the coming-of-age generation was an unpatriotic, rebellious generation of social liberals that refused to fight Communism and questioned EVERYTHING.
For the same reason, World War I wasn't a Crisis. The mood was one of dreary fatalism. The coming-of-age generation was a bunch of scrappy, raw cads and nihilistic bohemians. Totally different from the Great Depression and World War II!
Here is something that I wrote in the talk page in 2015:
Quote:Timing need not be precise. The economic meltdown of late 2007-early 2009 looks much like the the first year and a half of the economic meltdown that began late in 1929. The cause in both cases was a speculative boom that imploded after it devoured huge amounts of capital.
Eighty years is a good estimate for the average death of the collective memory of childhood. People with even a child memory (Howe and Strauss' GI Generation) of the wild economics that preceded the 1929 crash remained influential in American life until about 2000. Then the temptations of a speculative boom faced practically no resistance.
OK, one Crisis is not like the other. The American Revolution and pre-Constitutional chaos would be very different from the Civil War. World War II and the preceding Great Depression were very different from the American Civil War and the American Revolution. Today? The USA is not going to have a war to gain independence, establish whether the US have a slave system entrenched or be repealed; if it ends up in war with Evil Empires those will not be Germany or Japan.
Howe and Strauss have an open-ended prediction with much vagueness of result. That said, many of the historical realities result from random and unlikely events.
So maybe there is something to it, but not much potential for specific prediction of events. Pbrower2a (talk) 22:58, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
An obvious update: in 2015, Donald Trump had yet to become President. Political reality seemed to support a placid sort of compromise in which nothing gets done. The consensus on respiratory infections was that that they could no longer scourge an advanced industrial society with crippling illness and mass death. Well, here we are. COVID-19 has killed more Americans than did Hitler and Tojo combined. A country that makes far few deaths a cause for outrage killed more people on some days than did hijackers who turned jetliners into weapons of mass destruction on 9/11.
The rationalwiki page on the topic is terribly obsolete. It does not mention speculative booms as the last stage of pre-Crisis "prosperity". Neither did Howe and Strauss in either Generations or The Fourth Turning. Three times (really two because the economic mess before the American Revolution was not so well known) is coincidence. Four (the Crash of 2008 is much like the Crash of 1929 and the Panic of 1857) may suggest a firm cause for sequelae.
Arch-conservative economist Friedrich Hayek explains it: speculative booms are much like Ponzi schemes that devour wealth without creating it. Capital that in more normal times goes into such investments as plant and equipment that can create jobs and the working-class incomes that make a strong economy instead goes into hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes. Job-creation stalls, and people with any semblance of competence and work ethic end up in this activity for the lack of anything better.
When there are no more buyers, the Ponzi-like schemes fail practically at once, Unemployment soars, and because of recent under-investment in plant and equipment the industrial jobs are gone. Construction is halted as no more funds for the building of speculative projects flow toward investments. Welcome then to the biggest economic meltdowns. Welcome also to political backbiting, family breakdowns, and the closure of businesses.
Hayek was not looking into the eighty-year gap between the worst boom-and-bust times of capitalist societies because such was not his focus. His was on the money supply, to which I say that governments choose the level of money supply to fit their agendas. A speculative boom usually causes the political leaders of the time to ride the tiger. The speculative bubble for a time is the only thing going right until it morphs into a panic. Then nothing goes right. Welcome to the depression, when political expressions become extreme. Demagogues flourish to exploit mass distress.
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.