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Political Cycle Model for Saeculum
#1
One of the reasons S&H do not get serious attention from scientifically-inclined social scientists might be because they gave little for scholars to work with.  S&H never game an explicit cause for their cycle. They outlined some causal concepts and proposed a partial verbal model that goes something like this:

 Basically their generations are like those Mannheim discussed.  They are formed by the experience of like-aged persons to history-shaping times that they call social moments.  The define like-age as occupation of a specific phase of life.  In the appendix of Generations they provide an example of an event, a war, that causes people occupying different phases of life to be imprinted into different generations. 

An example is the GI generation, in which the experience of depression and war over 1929-1946 imprints a certain set of attributes (what they call the Civic peer personality or Hero archetype) on those who were in the rising adulthood phase of life forging them into what is known as the Greatest Generation.  So those in the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period become members of the GI generation.  Persons born between 1903 and 1907 inclusive would fully occupy the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period, and so would constitute “core” GIs.  People born between 1895 and 1915 would spend at least 10 of the years when they were in the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period.  Yet the 1895 to 1900 cohorts are considered as Lost, even those they spend more than half of their rising adult years in a 4T.  Similarly the cohorts born 1916-1924 spent more than half of their rising adult years in a 1T, yet they are considered as GIs. 

This problem emerges with all the generations.  If we narrow the formative period we can get something closer to the S&H dates.  Suppose we only consider the period of mobilization 1941-1946.  Now the 1903-1919 years become the core years.  S&H also assert that the coming of age experience is particularly important so let’s assert that anyone who comes of age during the war (i.e. serves) is automatically a member of the GIs and so we add the 1920-24 cohort (who were 22 over 1942-1946) and get GSs as 1903-1924.  This is close enough.

If we do the same thing for the Boomers, we find that if we use formative years of 1982-84 we can construct a Boomer gen born 1941-1960, which is close enough.  The problem is whereas the idea that WW II “forged” the greatest generation makes sense, the idea that the early 1980’s was when the Boomers were forged does not.  In fact this period falls outside of the 1967-1980 2T social moment S&H proposed in Generations. This makes no sense. One has to conclude that their generation-creating process does not work to produce the generations they found.
 
As far as I know, S&H never explored these ideas any further than the cursory treatment they gave in Generations.

Another way to look at this is to flip it around. Instead of having “generational imprinting” occurring over a long period of time (a phase of life) having it occur over a shorter one, say a single year instead.  If we assume that generations are imprinted at their coming of age (which S&H put at age 22) then we simply subtract 22 from their social moments to get the “core years” for their dominant generations to obtain the table below. The portion of the S&H generations outside the core are considered as cusps.
 
Formative moment     Generation      “Core” generation      S&H generation

1967-1980                       Boomers             1945-1958                   1943-1960

1932-1945                       GIs                       1910-1923                    1901-1924

1913-1922                       Lost                      1891-1900                   1883-1900

This way of construction generations works pretty well, but why? To get answer this I turn the focus to politics, in which the formative events are political moments are the generations are political generations, that function very similarly to the core generation concept as we shall see.  I shift to politics for two reasons.  The first is a discussion I had with marc Lamb, whom some of you remember as a troll.  He was that, but he was more and he and I had productive discussions in his early years over 2001-2003.

I came to this site from the longwaves forum, a discussion group (long gone) about economic long cycles or Kondratieffs.  At that time I thought of the saeculum as primarily an economic cycle because there were strong parallels between the two cycles, which I wrote about in a book.  Marc liked my economic stuff, but argued that politics, not economics was the key to the saeculum because all facets of the social world, economics, politics, religion, morals, in short, culture, are represented in one’s politics.

The second reason is that political sciences/historians have done the most work with generations.  Here’s a paper on how the political environment (measured by presidential approval in a given year) shapes people’s party voting preferences as a function of age.  That is, how the experience of a low or high-rated presidential affects your opinion of their party as a function of age.  This opinion-forming caused by historical experience is generational imprinting or “history creates generations”.  Figure 4 shows a plot of how strongly history impacts your political opinions.  The figure shows that generational imprinting happens mostly between the ages of 14 and 30.  If you calculate the cumulative effect of past experience on people in their fifties (when they occupy positions of power) from that figure you find that 50% of their opinion is formed by the age of 22.

Looking at it another way one can consider that people will at some point choose their side and this will likely happen between the ages of 14 to 30, or on average at age 22 with a standard deviation of 4-5 years or so.  That is, people “come of age” politically sometime between 14 and 30, but mostly in the years around age 22.   If we wish to consider a birth cohort, we are talking about large numbers of people.  For the birth cohort the age at which they collective come of age is 22 with a standard error of the mean equal to the standard deviation of the individual divided by the square root of the number of individuals.  For groups of a 100 or more, the standard error will be less than a tenth of the standard deviation and so the age at which a cohort comes of age will be a constant equal to 22.

These arguments justify the generation-creating mechanism outlined above.
How do generations create history?  Well for politics, history would be created by the “history makers”: statesmen, government officials and legislators.  Neil how has collected age data for congressmen, senators, governors and Supreme Court Justices for each year since 1789.  His site provides average ages for the first three for each Congress.  He has a tool from which it is easy to obtain the average age of the fourth groups as a function of time.  I then average these four means for each year and get a parameter I call leader age AL.  This is the average age at which politicians exercise their mature adult role of leadership.  A generation then creates history over the years at which they are age AL. 
 
Simply take a generation and add AL to it and you get their time of history creation.  Or take a period and subtract AL from it and you get the generation that created that history.  Subtract 22 from it and your get that generation created by that history.  What this means is generations create new generations.  A generation born over the specific span then “begets” a generation born AL- 22 years after that span.  That is, generational “replication time” (length) is AL-22.  So back in medieval times when elite lifespans were shorter than today AL was lower, or about 49 (more later about where this value comes from, but for now just bear with me), generational length was 25 years and the saeculum ran about 100 years.  During early modern times lifespans were a bit longer and AL was able 52 or so, and generational length about 28 years.  With the coming of representative government, legislators became important and AL would have to take into consideration their (generation younger ages than the king’s high ministers) and so AL drops to about 45 or 46 and generation length to 23 or 24 years in the 18th century. The saeculum shortens to around 90 years in the 1700’s.
 
So far so good.  But now look at today.  In 2008  AL was 62 giving a replication time of 40 years.  Thus, the youth who went clean for Gene (McCarthy), thrilled to Robert Kennedy and were inspired by MLK and scarred by their deaths of the latter two, begot a generation 40 years later who went in droves for Barrack Obama.  The 2T over 1964-1984 created the Boomer generation (b 1942-1962) who begot the Millennium generation born over ca. 1980- 2002.  This makes sense, but what about this gap between 1962 and 1980.  S&H created a new category of generation.  A less active, recessive generation that we know as GenX.  Similar gaps are found going back, in which sit other recessive generations.
 
The same mechanism that has Boomers begetting Milles, has the Silent begetting GenXers.   Now Boomer and Milles are dominant political generations and COA/create political moments, which roughly correspond to Schlesinger liberal eras.  Recessive political generations, like the Silent and Gen X,  come of age in conservative eras, create the next conservative era and beget a new recessive generation. And so you have two parallel “family trees”.  As you got back AL declines with shorter lifespans, generational replication times shorten and so do the length of political eras and generations.  This shortening is best shown by spacing between critical elections in 1774, 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968 and 2008.  This spacing rises from 24 to 40 years right in line with rising replication time. (Note 2008 will likely be confirmed by a Dem victory in the fall, which seems likely).
 
If you go back further you find AL dropped to 44 at points in which replication time is 22 years, and you start to have the same generation coming of age (being created) and creating history at the same time.  A generation cannot create itself!  So some time before AL gets this short we have to shift from having a recessive and dominant generations to just having dominant ones.   In other words the modern system (called by saeculum II by Sean Love) that I have been discussing turns into the system I discussed earlier, which Love calls saeculum I.  I place the split at the American Revolution 4T, which has an unusually long liberal era in Schlesinger’s scheme.  He has the 1765-1787 period as one liberal era.  I extend this period to 1765-1789 and split it into two at the 1774 break point: 1765-1774 and the 1775-1789.  The first of these creates the recessive generational line and the latter creates the founders of the dominant line.
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Political Cycle Model for Saeculum - by Mikebert - 05-06-2016, 04:53 AM

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