Wheels within wheels.

[Eric the Green]

(12-13-2018, 03:24 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I think my post was misunderstood. What I said was I am increasingly of the opinion that the S&H generational theory is wrong. This is NOT to say that we are doomed to have a "failed crisis".  S&H is not the only cycle theory that deals with crisis issues.

The secular cycle initially described by UConn prof Peter Turchin is an alternative that has a number of strengths over S&H. One big advantage is its is the secular cycle is an ongoing creation of a school of researchers, as opposed to just two. Once S&H finished T4T in 1997 (mostly a rehash of material presented in Generations in 1991) nothing further has been done.  Nobody has developed a primer for using their system, so it remains closed to other workers. People like John Xenakis and myself, who sought to do something along these lines had to guess at how the S&H cycle works. We came up with radically different approaches. There is no way to know if any of us were on target or not.

On the other hand, Turchin and Nefodov's initial offering in Secular Cycles (2009) was eight cycles in four polities: England, France, Russia and ancient Rome. In his exposition, sufficient information was provided so other people can learn to do what Turchin did, and write up their results for publication. Shortly after the journal was founded an independent worker added another Roman cycle.  Another academic describe nine Chinese cycles and a third did a long multi-millennial outline of scores of such cycles. I myself added two English cycles to Turchin's two in a 2016 paper.  All these are peer-reviewed articles.  This is how science is supposed to work.

The secular cycle can be identified by simple plots of historical data. Some of you may be familiar with David Fisher's The Great Wave,(1996) which describes the English secular cycles (before Turchin coined the term) simply by a price plot. Price and wage data (both of which are available for England back to medieval times) can be used to calculate real wage. The reciprocal of real wage is a called "the misery index" and is a measure of inequality (higher is worse). Inequality cycles can be used to map out the secular cycle in modern-dat America. 

A plot of the misery index and other data series can identify a set of "Anglo-American" secular cycles as follows: the Anglo-Saxon cycle (880-1070),  the Plantagenet cycle (1070-1485), the Tudor-Stuart cycle (1485-1690), the British mercantile cycle (1690-1870?), the American colonial cycle (ends 1780), the American republican cycle (1780-1930), and the American imperial cycle (1930-present). The American cycles are presented in Turchin's Ages of Discord (2016). The Anglo-Saxon and mercantile cycle are my additions (2016) the other two are from Turchin and Nefodov's Secular Cycles  (2019). Note that the cycle lengths are not regular. This is because they are based on real data, not subjective assessments of generations by S&H which cannot be replicated. Evidence for subjectivity is the three very different sets of turnings T4Ters came up for the Roman saeculum. If turnings are a real thing how is it possible to come up radically different results?

The big advantage of the secular cycle is it has a causal theory that works (that is others can use it and get similar results and apply it to new areas expressed in papers than can meet peer review).  We all note the rising polarization in recent decades. This is a phenomenon that can be tracked by a measure called the political stress indicator(PSI) that was invented by Jack Goldstone in 1991 to measure the political stresses leading to European revolutions in the early modern period. It was applied to the English and French revolutions and an Ottoman crisis. Turchin used Goldstone's invention and the theory behind it, plus a number of other ideas, to construct a theory for how secular cycles work. Other's have applied Turchin & Goldstone's work to the Arab spring. 

Now the way Goldstone and Turchin use PSI is empirically, by finding the empirical data that go into the model and grinding out the results. I took PSI and constructed a simplified version of it and then used Turchin's secular cycle model equations to calculate theoretical versions of the necessary data to give a value of PSI in the early 20th century America, where the necessary empirical data were missing. My formulation only requires inequality data, for which I dug up a lot of economic data to construct a good empirical series for that variable. Turchin's PSI work in his 2016 book shows a strongly rising trend in PSI (indicative of a coming political crisis) in the 1850's and the 2010's. The fact that political observers today are noting similarity between these too periods is reflected in that rising PSI.  But my simplified version of PSI *also* shows a PSI peak in 1929, suggesting the country was ripe for major political change in 1929.  Of course WE know that was the case, but it doesn't show up in Turchin's work because he has no PSI values for that period.

But here's the deal. Secular Cycle theory suggests a crisis is coming and may unfold sometime in the 2020's to 2040's. S&H's system argues that this crisis already began at least a decade ago and should end in the 2020's, the earliest it could get started under secular cycle theory. S&H would have the forces leading to crisis already peaking in 2008 when the first financial crisis of the 21st century happened. Yet the way Democrats addressed this crisis (by passing a Republican bailout) and Obama's efforts at compromise with conservatives in 2009-2010 is fully consistent with the LOW value of PSI in 2008. PSI is much higher now.  One direct prediction that can be made based on this model output is that Democrats will not cooperate with Trump like they did with Bush in the event of another financial crisis. That financial markets are in a bubble is revealed by the fact that asset value relative to GDP is higher than ever before, even higher than in 2000 and 2006. We have had 8 such bubbles, four of which ended with financial crises., suggested a 50% probability that this bubble will end as a financial crisis. The most recent two bubbles (2000 and 2006), show the same 50% probability, so this rule apparently still works. 

Most likely, either THIS asset bubble (or the one that associated with the next business cycle, which would peak in the late 2020's) will end with a crisis. PSI is high now, and will be even higher a decade from now. That means this cycle's 1929 event is either in the near future or a decade away, strongly implying a 4T-like crisis in the 2020's or 2030's, that will NOT be do to a generational mechanism along the lines of what S&H proposed.

That's all good, and a high PSI in the 1850s, 1930s and 2010s is spot on with S&H theory and the Uranus cycle too. And if the crisis breaks in the 2020s, it will still be in accord with the S&H cycle very strongly. Political polarization has been unprecedented in the 2010s, if you go by how the parties are polarized in congress rather than just the fact that some makeshift compromises were arrived at. Charts of political opinions which I'm sure we all have seen also show the high polarization of our time. 

So I think the crisis is right on schedule starting with the severe financial crisis of 2008, which almost sent our economy into a full-scale depression, and is set to climax in the 2020s just as the 4T did in the 1940s and 1860s before. This time it will stretch to the end of the decade, and that would be right on schedule and is what is predicted by Howe. A 1T is scheduled to begin in the 2030s, so if a crisis climax is put off until that decade, only then will the Strauss and Howe theory be disproven, along with the Uranus cycle that corresponds with it. Even so, my prediction is that the 2030s 1T will be akin to that of the 1870s, in that a calm consensus like that of the 1950s will be less calm, some basic divisions will still obtain, and some continued activism will happen.

Perhaps the peer review and further developments to the Strauss and Howe theory don't happen because it was not an academically-respected theory, and Turchin's and others were. But Generations was based on a lot of scholarship and research. Their term "Millennials" became part of our language, and their predictions (such as they were) have been proven correct. Perhaps if it is noticed how correct their predictions are, it will gain more peer review by researchers. But absent that, here on these forums their theory has received a lot of valuable extensions, such as cusps, the double rhythm, micro-turnings, revisions to their anomaly, etc. These may also become part of the theory as it develops by more researchers in the future.