10-27-2016, 04:25 PM
(10-24-2016, 08:40 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I've finished reading and digesting Turchin's new book and am finishing up my paper that tries to fix some of the problems. The driver for the classical agrarian secular cycle was population growth. As a population biologist he was at home with this. Having success with it he tried to apply demographic concepts to industrial cycles to explain rising inequality. In my paper I show he made a simple error that invalidates the analysis. I show the differential rate between return to capital and wage growth is a better candidate. This is Piketty's idea. I show that it implies a shorter cycle length (about 90 years) than the older agrarian cycles (about two centuries).
The key difference is that Turchin does not see the Civil war as a secular cycle boundary conflict (a conflict shortly before a secular cycle border). I see the secular cycle and the saeculum as essentially the same cycle since the Revolutionary war. I also see boundary conflicts (BC) as 4Ts. All BC's are 4T but not all 4T (e.g. the Armada crisis) are BCs.
This means I expect this 4T to be a BC, which means the trend in inequality must shift from rising to falling before the 4T is over. Turchin does not think this, I believe.
I sincerely hope you're right. allowing inequality to rise beyond a certain point is guaranteed to create havoc. I would be nice to avoid it.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.