(05-26-2018, 01:41 PM)TheNomad Wrote: You said: Finally a 4T is supposed to restructure the government. That hasn't happened either.
But didn't the restructuring happen after the G.I.s returned from war?
Did you read the link? The restructuring started in the 1930's, and massively accelerated during WW II. In 1940 the federal government had 500K employees. By 1945 it had 3 million, and today it also has 3 million. The last 4T created big government that was fully in place in 1946 when the 4T ended.
Quote:The restructuring of public institutions on a massive scale did not happen until the Axis was laid waste.Oh no it didn't. The government expanded to perform a new role of economic manager, using a combination of tax, fiscal, monetary and "safety set" programs all designed to damp out extreme economic oscillations of the sort that got us the Great Depression. This management function was tested to a greater extent that it would be afterward during the war when agencies like the Office of Price Administration, the National War Labor Board, and the War Production Board fundamentally restructured the economy to provide strong, widely shared income of all income quintiles in the decades after the war. It was quite deliberate and it worked remarkably well.
We had the same inequality problem going into the 4T last time as we have now. They were able to figure out the cause of it and then solve it in the last 4T. The reason why they did this was it had become a PROBLEM (it created the Depression, which gave us a 4T).
We started to have an inequality problem again in the 1990's. We know the cause the problem and how to solve it then. Nothing was done about it because it wasn't a PROBLEM (i.e. not an economic 4T). When the specter of Depression arose in the stock bubble collapse of 2002, the Fed laid out what their response would be. Basically if "it" (deflation) threatened to happen, they would break open the dams and flood the system with oceans of money. And when we we actually had a panic in 2008 that is just what they did (in fact the guy who gave the speech in 2002 was in charge). They managed to prevent the panic from becoming a PROBLEM. Thus, nothing needed to be done about the structural issues that created these bubbles and crashes in the first place (and nothing was--they just papered it over and kicked the can down the road, standard 3T stuff). So far, it has worked. The economy continues to putter along without seriously derailment.* That is, we haven't had a 4T in economics yet.
Quote:Dude they are only getting older. How old were G.I.s when entering WWII? I may be mistake with the age ranges, but if I'm right, they were in their 20s respectively. That fits. Millennials are simply too old to serve in a future war. It doesn't fit the overall model of a saeculum.
First of all, generations do not exist independently of the turning. The constellation model S&H proposed as a possible mechanism for the cycle does not work. You can see this for yourself by calculating when constellations arise. The constellation appears *well before* when the new generation starts being born.
With this result we have to go to the second idea they proposed, which is that coming of age has a big effect on forging generations. I described this concept before as a generational model. Thus, which cohorts are millennial depends on when the 4T started. And when the millennials end, and the new artists begin, depends on when the 4T ends. So if you favor 2001, then you might include 1980 and 1981 in with millies. If you favor 2008, then you would have those early and mid-1980's cohorts still Gen X.
But here generations are being used as a *social* category, like race or class or religion. Social generations are different from the psychological generations that Pew talks about, for example. You can see this for yourself by looking at the length of the Pew generations (ca 15 years) and the historical S&H generations (ca 25 years) They have radically different lengths.
S&H sort of blurred these two senses of generations together: psychological generations (like Pew) have peer personalities; social generations create history and history creates social generations. By doing so, they created the sense that can define generations using surveys like Pew does, and then used them as a social generation (i.e. the type that the historical generations belong to) to make turning predictions. That is using apples for oranges.
The take home message is you cannot use millies to make conclusions about when the 4T happened, because they are created by the 4T, not the other way around.
On the other hand you can look at the generational composition of the societal leaders. Today's leaders collectively came of age in a time where major changes were being achieved by political action. A decade from now those in power will have come of age in a time of political quiescence. Today's leaders have paradigms which hold that big changes (i.e. the kind of stuff that happens in a 4T) are politically possible. Those in power a decade hence will not have this belief. This shifting leader generational paradigm is what helps bring about turnings (assuming the idea that generations have anything to do with historical cycles is true) But maybe its not true, which may be why this era is not seeming like much of a 4T.
*serious derailment happens when the nation's financial elites experience what ordinary citizens did in 2008-2009.