Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(11-05-2019, 05:52 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(11-04-2019, 11:45 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 04-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and population growth

(11-02-2019, 09:11 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: >   Why does generational dynamics imply that generational crisis wars
>   reduce the population?  Or are we talking about some extension to
>   that theory?  

(11-02-2019, 09:39 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: >   Because the population grows faster than the food supply.

(11-03-2019, 09:24 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: >   That only implies that there has to be population reduction, or at
>   least population growth reduction, at some point.  It doesn't have
>   to be linked to the generational cycle.  

That's a good point, and it's one of the reasons that I've been
puzzled by this issue for years.

I'd suggest that the cycles are not linked, just as the generational cycle is not linked to the 58 year echoes.

Rather, when the population peaks, the form the culling takes depends on the time in the generational cycle.  If it's the crisis period, maybe you get a deadly war where women and children are killed along with the men, or a war that takes out infrastructure and results in lots of civilian casualties.  If it's a high, maybe you get executions of whoever the leadership doesn't like - Ukrainians under Stalin, whoever it was that Pol Pot was executing, prisoners taken by Aztec military raids.  In unravelings, perhaps you get market redistribution of food away from the poor, as with the Irish Potato Famine.  Maybe in an awakening, old people are left to starve - a lot of Lost didn't have social security to fall back on.

Actually, I think the empirical evidence suggests that during crisis periods, population limitation tends to be connected to reproductive limitation.  There were scads of people starving to death in the Great Depression, but there were plenty of people not having kids.  In the current crisis, the percentages of nonreproductive "genders" is increasing.

It would be interesting to take a wider look to find more data.

Good explanation, except that I interpret the Russian and Soviet history from about 1915 (when World War I started going badly for Imperial Russia) to 1945 (end of the Great Patriotic War) as a protracted Crisis. The mass death involved with the collectivization of Soviet agriculture looks like a Crisis in its results. I see NEP (New Economic Policy, an attempt to mitigate the harmful nature of Bolshevism) as an abortive High much as the late 1930's were in America. Forced collectivization killed more people than the Great Purge whose lethality is better known because the victims are well known. The Great Patriotic War came as the Crisis of other countries. Other countries that seemed to be headed to Highs got full-blown Crises, too. 

It might be possible to see generational cycles in ancient societies such as Rome, Greece, Persia, India, and China that have good record-keeping, but not so obvious in pre-literate societies or those whose record-keeping is spotty or destroyed. 

1T killings are either victors' retribution (leftists and liberals under Franco), punishment of outright criminals of the previous Crisis war (people responsible for Buchenwald or Bataan), or suppression of dissidents who have shown overt disloyalty (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). 2T killings are hard for me to define unless by terrorists that the society thinks that it can co-opt. 3T mass death is often, as with the Irish potato famine, poor people that an increasingly-plutocratic society finds expendable.  In a 4T -- all Hell can break loose, and people have thought themselves model minorities for their successes suddenly become pariahs as alleged exploiters, rakes,  and violators of cultural traditions.  Also note well: the criminal justice system is particularly harsh in a 4T. The peak year for executions in the United States was 1935, which is about when American law enforcement found the tools for hounding the likes of John Dillinger and the Barrow-Parker gang to their doom.