(02-05-2017, 12:26 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Look, it's clearly an analogue-process between generations, with wide variance within each one. That doesn't mean there isn't anything there. I was born in 1986, the youngest child of parents born in 1951. My brothers were born in 1976 and 1979 (I was an accident). I have five cousins, who were born between 1979 and 1984 or so. I also have a second cousin (my grandma's younger brother had a child late in life) and two... half uncles? (my grandfather's kids from his second marriage) who were all born in the mid-70s. So, everybody in my "generation" roughly straddled the Xer/Millie divide. There are naturally similarities between me and my oldest brother, despite being 10 years apart on either side of the dividing line, because we are related and share the same parents. But there are also differences between me and him, or my cousin and his oldest sisteshis oldest sisters, etc. that are very similar across the families and reflect the predicted gnerational differences. The ones born in the 70s were way more fucked up when they were in their 20s, had much worse relations with their parents, and now in their late 30s to mid 40s have all become extremely conservative, risk-adverse, and overly protective and controlling of their children where they have had them. It was one of those things that made me go, "AHA! That's why that happened!" when i first read S & H.I didn't say there wasn't anything there. There is a difference between the question of the existence of generations along the lines of what S&H describe and the mechanism that S&H proposed to explain how they are formed and how they create history. One can be correct while the other is not. In particular the generational constellation is problematic for the earlier turnings because the generation/turning length is considerably longer than the phase of life length. If you go with longer phases of life you running into the problem that people did not live long enough to occupy all the phases. For example if phase of life is 27 years long (to accommodate 27-year gens in the 17th century) then mature adulthood began at age 54. At that time elite life expectancy at age 20 averaged 52. That is, most elites died during rising adulthood. The elder phase of life began at 81 and was essentially unoccupied.
Contrast this situation with the modern one with 20-year generations and elderhood beginning around 60. Half of the ruling elite are this age or older. In today's society, elders (Boomers) play leadership roles. We call these gray champion roles because they identified Lincoln and FDR (both presidents--i.e. leaders) as GCs. It is clear that S&H conceived the constellation model in regard to the modern. They apparently never tried to apply it to the earlier period with the much longer cycles.
But if you keep the shorter phase of life length you find the constellation showing up way before the turning it is supposed to herald begins. It then fails to predict the turnings, whereas it does a much better job with the recent period (which has the shorter generation/turning length).