Generational Dynamics World View

[David Horn]

(01-13-2021, 04:16 PM)mamabug Wrote:

(01-13-2021, 04:09 PM)David Horn Wrote: A bit off topic, but the art of prediction is getting rusty on many fronts.  Economic models don't work any more either. The sainted Phillips Curve is all but totally worthless, yet is was the primary tool used by economists as recently as 10 years ago.  Modernity has finally changed the rules ... all of them.

As we STEM graduates like to point out - social science is 90% the first and 10% the other.  Many models are only as good as the assumptions put into them and the data set they are mining.  What works in explaining past behavior can seem perfectly true and logical right up until you hit actual behavior.  Yeah, I am aware there is an irony to saying that on this particular forum.

Thing is, about 2004ish I actually started thinking the Strauss-Howe model didn't work because the generations didn't look like what they were supposed to. I totally missed that the collective and increasingly intolerant nature of Millenials would be played out online because I never got involved in social media.

We're in a newish world -- newish because it's similar to the past, but unique in being tech-dominated.  Bob Butler is in the newish camp too. None of us see true continuity from a fractured past, because, unlike the Agricultural Age, the paradigm has changed quickly, in historical terms at least.  Does that invalidate the S&H model, or merely force us to apply it less aggressively?  I, for one, think the model is still valid: a saeculum seems to be a  reasonable separation between similar recurring events, because lived experience can never be totally replaced by other means.  That said, our ability to see into the past, through film and now digital means, is unprecedented. It must have an effect, but not one we can quantify at this early date.

Yet here we are in a faux-ACW between the rational and the irrational, and I have no idea how it plays out.