RationalWiki's article on the Theory

[pbrower2a]

(05-30-2021, 08:41 PM)X Marks the Spot Wrote:

(05-29-2021, 07:58 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: 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The USA is not going to have a war to gain independence, establish whether the US have a slave system entrenched or be repealed; if it ends up in war with Evil Empires those will not be Germany or Japan.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)

Great comment, pbrower2a! Yes, sociological cycles don't have rocket-science timing. Although if you look at what "cyclical theory" links to, it seems the people at RationalWiki think all sociological cycles are pseudoscience.

Nobody here has a definitive final answer here to much of anything. We all have our disagreements (I see this Crisis Era approaching its end within five years; Crisis Eras, if handled competently, can be short. But even on that I am nearly alone).

Nobody here claims that we have a science. I would have made no economic advice based on Howe and Strauss except to get the Central African Republic out of the financing of real estate around 2005  and to suggest that early 2009 would be a good time to buy into the stock markets that had taken a beating for no good reason. 

The COVID-19 plague has shown that the American economy over-centralized its opportunities, which was great for enriching urban landlords in a few places but hurting everyone else. I'm not saying that places like Detroit, Flint, or Gary will rebound.