Wheels within wheels.

[Mikebert]

(12-06-2018, 11:14 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-05-2018, 03:55 PM)Mikebert Wrote: ... Although not complete the change in direction was enough for FDR to add to his Congressional majority in 1934 and 1936 so that it became so large that even after he was hammered worse than Obama in 2010 in 1938, Democrats still held a majority. His victory in 1940 and his decade-long Congressional majority made FDR the unquestioned commander in chief going into WW II. The result was a degree of political domination for 48 years after 1932 than was similar to what Lincoln had achieved for his party.

This is not and most probably will not happen this 4T.  Add the unbridled effect of money due to Citizens United, and a rising aspirational majority in the larger cities, stalemate seems most likely.  Yet things are degrading though neither side seems to have a solution that will swing the supporters of the other side to their cause.  Assuming I'm right here, what will lit take to break the stalemate, and what will it look like when it does?  The aspiring urbanites are not going to accept a retrenchment, and the rural opposition seems to be in the foulest mood I've seen.  

Assuming the T4T theory still applies, then we should be a lot further along the crisis path than we are.

I completely agree.  We actually did what FDR did with the gold standard after the financial crisis. And the effect was similar, we did not get deflation and a weak recovery began. Obama did not get the benefit of favorable comparisons that FDR got. What matters in politics is the trend. In 1934, unemployment was *very* high, but it was 3 points lower than it had been when FDR took office.  In 2010 unemployed was more than a point *higher* than it had been when Obama took office.

The 2010 narrative was Democrats addressed the crisis with a stimulus they said would prevent unemployment from reaching 10% (the level it was at in 2010) and spend most of their time passing this bad health plan.  FDR waited until AFTER the 1934 elections had locked him into power to pass Social Security. Once they had power, Republicans focused on trying to bring the economy down with stunts like the 2011 budget showdown.

[David Horn]

(12-08-2018, 09:27 AM)Mikebert Wrote:

(12-06-2018, 11:14 AM)David Horn Wrote: Assuming the T4T theory still applies, then we should be a lot further along the crisis path than we are.

I completely agree.  We actually did what FDR did with the gold standard after the financial crisis. And the effect was similar, we did not get deflation and a weak recovery began. Obama did not get the benefit of favorable comparisons that FDR got. What matters in politics is the trend. In 1934, unemployment was *very* high, but it was 3 points lower than it had been when FDR took office.  In 2010 unemployed was more than a point *higher* than it had been when Obama took office.

The 2010 narrative was Democrats addressed the crisis with a stimulus they said would prevent unemployment from reaching 10% (the level it was at in 2010) and spend most of their time passing this bad health plan.  FDR waited until AFTER the 1934 elections had locked him into power to pass Social Security. Once they had power, Republicans focused on trying to bring the economy down with stunts like the 2011 budget showdown.

Perhaps we've seen the end of Democrats acting on pure motives that lead nowhere … or not. There seems to be a defect in the party's DNA that causes the party collectively toward goals that simply can't be achieved without overwhelming support among the people. Instead, they count votes in the Senate, votes in the House -- then they get blindsided, again and again.

None of this would be all that important if the stakes were not as high as they are. We have inequality approaching the highest ever recorded in the US, global warming now emerging as a current, rather than a future, problem, while all this occurs under ever greater autocracy both here and abroad. The opposing forces are in disarray. It's hard to see how this gets reconciled.

I would prefer to be optimistic, and believe that the public is awakening from a trance. I just can't at the moment. Gains have been made, but they are small in comparison to the collective mass of the problems that need addressing. The one interesting side note: the stock market is finally beginning to wobble. Mike, this is more your domain: will we finally see the Bear that's been hiding in the shadows for so long?

[pbrower2a]

(12-08-2018, 10:59 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-08-2018, 09:27 AM)Mikebert Wrote:

(12-06-2018, 11:14 AM)David Horn Wrote: Assuming the T4T theory still applies, then we should be a lot further along the crisis path than we are.

I completely agree.  We actually did what FDR did with the gold standard after the financial crisis. And the effect was similar, we did not get deflation and a weak recovery began. Obama did not get the benefit of favorable comparisons that FDR got. What matters in politics is the trend. In 1934, unemployment was *very* high, but it was 3 points lower than it had been when FDR took office.  In 2010 unemployed was more than a point *higher* than it had been when Obama took office.

The 2010 narrative was Democrats addressed the crisis with a stimulus they said would prevent unemployment from reaching 10% (the level it was at in 2010) and spend most of their time passing this bad health plan.  FDR waited until AFTER the 1934 elections had locked him into power to pass Social Security. Once they had power, Republicans focused on trying to bring the economy down with stunts like the 2011 budget showdown.

Perhaps we've seen the end of Democrats acting on pure motives that lead nowhere … or not.  There seems to be a defect in the party's DNA that causes the party collectively toward goals that simply can't be achieved without overwhelming support among the people.  Instead, they count votes in the Senate, votes in the House -- then they get blindsided, again and again.

The political math is as obvious to the Other Side as well. Get enough supporters in the right places, and you will prevail. Such apples whether one operates on the noblest of principles or if one is a fascist pig. Democrats need to persuade people that their best interests are in an America that does well for all and not for a selfish and arrogant few. The selfish and arrogant few will always find ways to convince people -- through grinding poverty. Let us strip you of your union protection, and instead of paying union dues you will be able to put some presents under the tree and a turkey in the oven. Then after the Christmas cheer is over, the plutocrats and executives tighten the economic strictures even harder and compel people to compete for the privilege of survival. After all, no human suffering in the name of elite indulgence and power can ever be in excess.

Quote:None of this would be all that important if the stakes were not as high as they are.  We have inequality approaching the highest ever recorded in the US, global warming now emerging as a current, rather than a future, problem, while all this occurs under ever greater autocracy both here and abroad.  The opposing forces are in disarray.  It's hard to see how this gets reconciled.

 
In the last Crisis Era the alternatives were freedom or fascism. In this one the alternatives may be much the same,
the difference being that the fascists aren't so easy to transform into ludicrous caricatures like "Adenoid Hynkel".

Quote:I would prefer to be optimistic, and believe that the public is awakening from a trance.  I just can't at the moment.  Gains have been made, but they are small in comparison to the collective mass of the problems that need addressing.  The one interesting side note: the stock market is finally beginning to wobble.  Mike, this is more your domain: will we finally see the Bear that's been hiding in the shadows for so long?

We have solved little in this Crisis Era. We will need radical reforms, and many fear that such reforms will mean that their beloved (white) daughter might start dating some black fellow and bear black children who will disgrace the family. The Right knows well how to play to primal fears. What it cannot do is to create anything other than an impoverished society in economics and creativity.

[Mikebert]

I have a theory about why nothing has happened.  You aren't gonna like it. 

 As a result of the Civil War 4T the Democratic economic elite were decimated financial and they ceased to play a major role in national politics.  The did manage to regain dominance of the South, a region falling further and further behind the North in wealth as the industrial revolution took off. To retain some degree of political relevance, the Democrats added working class immigrants in the North to their base, and urban Democratic machines provided another source of Democratic political elites. Democrats also began to warm towards organized labor as a means to gain yet more additions to their base. So there was a hodgepodge of special interests and their leaders who made up Democratic elites, but no overarching wealthy establishment like the antebellum Southern aristocracy. 

Meanwhile, the new industrial rich were beginning to develop a sense of class consciousness, with social registers were established in 19 major cities between 1888 and 1918. Elite boarding schools flourished with enrollment in the top twelve increasing fivefold over 1886-1926. The period saw the rise of the "policy-planning network" comprised of organizations like the Carneige Corporaton, US Chamber of Commerce, Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute, NBER, and the Conference Board over 1911-23. Thus, by 1929 there was a wealthy elite "Establishment" of people who socialized with each other, educated their children at elite institutions isolated from the riff-raff, and who had created a network of policy experts to advise them on how best to run the country in order to maintain peace and order and the continuation of a "Progress" that, not surprisingly, benefited them.

Most of the establishment were Republicans, and so when the Democrats took power in 1933, they were free to advance policy that was anathema to the Establishment, without discomfiting Democratic political elites too much.

Democratic success created a new category of elite, what I call "the mandarins", who supplemented the Republican establishment.  The mandarins were (and are) technocrats whose livelihood is not dependent on a capitalist elite's patronage, so they are independent. But over time they have gained wealth, their sons and daughters have sometimes done well in business and so become capitalists, and so the two classes have become intertwined dynastically. Hence today the 1% are pretty much evenly split between Democratic and Republican elites.  The old urban machine bosses and labor leaders have been displaced as party leaders by the mandarins.

The result is that neither party can enact any sort of economically transformative policy without goring the ox of their own leaders.

[Eric the Green]

Polls I have seen though show that the wealthy still voted and favored Republicans until recently, at least. This margin may be evening out in the most recent elections, though. The more Establishment Democrats are less likely to enact very transformative policies, and they seem to have a majority of Democrats behind them. This centrist wing may be shrinking, but most Democrats elected are still center-left at best. The USA is a conservative country, and this is mainly because of the rank and file who accept the elites' point of view, rather than the elites themselves. The best we can hope for is gradual progress such as occurred under Obama and Bill Clinton, generally speaking. If this 4T gets more drastic, though, all bets are off. I predict a positive progressive outcome for this 4T, but it's not guaranteed by any means.

We won't know until 2028. The 4T didn't begin in 2001, since a crisis mood did not begin them. The Pew Research dating of Generation Z fits with a 2001 4T start date. But Pew is not based on Strauss and Howe, and Mr. Howe dates the current 4T as 2008-2029.

[Eric the Green]

(12-06-2018, 11:14 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-05-2018, 03:55 PM)Mikebert Wrote: ... Although not complete the change in direction was enough for FDR to add to his Congressional majority in 1934 and 1936 so that it became so large that even after he was hammered worse than Obama in 2010 in 1938, Democrats still held a majority. His victory in 1940 and his decade-long Congressional majority made FDR the unquestioned commander in chief going into WW II. The result was a degree of political domination for 48 years after 1932 than was similar to what Lincoln had achieved for his party.

This is not and most probably will not happen this 4T.  Add the unbridled effect of money due to Citizens United, and a rising aspirational majority in the larger cities, stalemate seems most likely.  Yet things are degrading though neither side seems to have a solution that will swing the supporters of the other side to their cause.  Assuming I'm right here, what will lit take to break the stalemate, and what will it look like when it does?  The aspiring urbanites are not going to accept a retrenchment, and the rural opposition seems to be in the foulest mood I've seen.  

Assuming the T4T theory still applies, then we should be a lot further along the crisis path than we are.

This last statement refers to the civil war anomaly. If we add the 1848-60 period to the civil war 4T, then in 1855 it would have seemed that the 4T should have been a lot farther along than it was. Our 4T is a cold civil war, and the stalemate of our time is a repeat of the stalemate of that time. Many parallels exist between them, including the great recession and famine of 1845-48/2008-10, leading to a chain of revolutions in 1848/2011 (which were also years in which a USA war of conquest ended).

It will take a civil war climax to break the stalemate, but whether this civil war is hot or remains a cold one remains to be seen. But the essence of the crisis is how this stalemate is to be broken, so that reforms and redistribution can proceed again after the 50-year block.

[pbrower2a]

(12-08-2018, 02:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I have a theory about why nothing has happened.  You aren't gonna like it. 

 As a result of the Civil War 4T the Democratic economic elite were decimated financial and they ceased to play a major role in national politics.  The did manage to regain dominance of the South, a region falling further and further behind the North in wealth as the industrial revolution took off. To retain some degree of political relevance, the Democrats added working class immigrants in the North to their base, and urban Democratic machines provided another source of Democratic political elites. Democrats also began to warm towards organized labor as a means to gain yet more additions to their base. So there was a hodgepodge of special interests and their leaders who made up Democratic elites, but no overarching wealthy establishment like the antebellum Southern aristocracy.

Basically the Democratic Party became a reactionary party in the South, standing for agrarian interests against everything else. If it ever made alliances outside the South, it made them with Northern industrial workers who shared a similarly0intense disdain for Northern industrial elites (if for very different  reasons)!

Quote:Meanwhile, the new industrial rich were beginning to develop a sense of class consciousness, with social registers were established in 19 major cities between 1888 and 1918. Elite boarding schools flourished with enrollment in the top twelve increasing fivefold over 1886-1926. The period saw the rise of the "policy-planning network" comprised of organizations like the Carneige Corporaton, US Chamber of Commerce, Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute, NBER, and the Conference Board over 1911-23. Thus, by 1929 there was a wealthy elite "Establishment" of people who socialized with each other, educated their children at elite institutions isolated from the riff-raff, and who had created a network of policy experts to advise them on how best to run the country in order to maintain peace and order and the continuation of a "Progress" that, not surprisingly, benefited them.

For them, profit was the definitive expression of progress, and anything that got in the way was suspect.

Quote:Most of the establishment were Republicans, and so when the Democrats took power in 1933, they were free to advance policy that was anathema to the Establishment, without discomfiting Democratic political elites too much.

Note that the industrial ownership of the 1920s had been so stripped of wealth in the economic meltdown of 1929-1932 that they had to concentrate on survival and regeneracy instead of political power. This may have prevented  any fascistic movement in America, including the once-powerful (and dangerous) KKK, from gaining political power in a time of great social distress. (So did Jewish ownership of the film studios, and they made clear that both Nazism and Bolshevism were to be avoided). The Right was as concerned about a Commie takeover, and it was best that America have leadership that improved things for workers while allowing capitalism to recover.

Quote:Democratic success created a new category of elite, what I call "the mandarins", who supplemented the Republican establishment.  The mandarins were (and are) technocrats whose livelihood is not dependent on a capitalist elite's patronage, so they are independent. But over time they have gained wealth, their sons and daughters have sometimes done well in business and so become capitalists, and so the two classes have become intertwined dynastically. Hence today the 1% are pretty much evenly split between Democratic and Republican elites.  The old urban machine bosses and labor leaders have been displaced as party leaders by the mandarins.

But much of this split is the private-public split. Elites in manufacturing, real estate, agribusiness, banking, insurance, and much of retailing remain decidedly right-wing. Public employees and people in creative activities are heavily left-leaning. I would guess that the medical industry is well-split between Left and Right; many physicians have welfare and Social Security as their biggest vendors. The Right has tried to take over the public sector, but seems to have failed.

Quote:The result is that neither party can enact any sort of economically transformative policy without goring the ox of their own leaders.

It may take another Great Depression or an apocalyptic war to force a transformation that does not fully satisfy one side at the expense of the other.

[David Horn]

(12-08-2018, 02:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I have a theory about why nothing has happened.  You aren't gonna like it. 

 As a result of the Civil War 4T the Democratic economic elite were decimated financial and they ceased to play a major role in national politics.  The did manage to regain dominance of the South, a region falling further and further behind the North in wealth as the industrial revolution took off. To retain some degree of political relevance, the Democrats added working class immigrants in the North to their base, and urban Democratic machines provided another source of Democratic political elites. Democrats also began to warm towards organized labor as a means to gain yet more additions to their base. So there was a hodgepodge of special interests and their leaders who made up Democratic elites, but no overarching wealthy establishment like the antebellum Southern aristocracy. 

Meanwhile, the new industrial rich were beginning to develop a sense of class consciousness, with social registers were established in 19 major cities between 1888 and 1918. Elite boarding schools flourished with enrollment in the top twelve increasing fivefold over 1886-1926. The period saw the rise of the "policy-planning network" comprised of organizations like the Carneige Corporaton, US Chamber of Commerce, Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute, NBER, and the Conference Board over 1911-23. Thus, by 1929 there was a wealthy elite "Establishment" of people who socialized with each other, educated their children at elite institutions isolated from the riff-raff, and who had created a network of policy experts to advise them on how best to run the country in order to maintain peace and order and the continuation of a "Progress" that, not surprisingly, benefited them.

Most of the establishment were Republicans, and so when the Democrats took power in 1933, they were free to advance policy that was anathema to the Establishment, without discomfiting Democratic political elites too much.

Democratic success created a new category of elite, what I call "the mandarins", who supplemented the Republican establishment.  The mandarins were (and are) technocrats whose livelihood is not dependent on a capitalist elite's patronage, so they are independent. But over time they have gained wealth, their sons and daughters have sometimes done well in business and so become capitalists, and so the two classes have become intertwined dynastically. Hence today the 1% are pretty much evenly split between Democratic and Republican elites.  The old urban machine bosses and labor leaders have been displaced as party leaders by the mandarins.

The result is that neither party can enact any sort of economically transformative policy without goring the ox of their own leaders.

Solid analysis, and it supports my own impressions unfortunately.  It becomes more obvious that things won't change until the system is really broken, and that may include a grand failure to manage and mitigate global warming.  I don't see that particular calamity happening in the next few years, so the 4T, such as it is, will very likely not be the corrective needed to establish a new 1T.  If the cycle continues, it will be in an altered form yet again.   At some point, anomalies become the model.

Of course, stupidity can alter the ongoing paradigm too.  We elected Donald Trump, against all logic and reason.  It's like reading Asimov's Foundation series, where careful planning failed to anticipate the Mule.  Given the weirdness we're experiencing, life might copy art.

[Mikebert]

I am increasingly of the opinion that the S&H theory is probably wrong. 27 years ago they wrote in Generations about the test of the theory. They said that the next few years or a decade would tell little, but in thirty years we should know.  In the time I have been at one of the T4T sites several dates for a 4T start have been floated, 2001, 2005, 2008, and I will now add 2016. I spent a long time identifying a handful of markers for progress though the cycle. Based on these markers I eliminated 2001 as a candidate in 2012, when Obama won a second term.  

One of the things that happens in a social moment turning is a critical election that signals a shift towards on or another party. In 2001 there was an opportunity to establish Republican ascendency for the next generation. Initial it looked like this was happening. Republicans passed a tax cut, started a war and won the 2002 election (which is unusual). They then did the same thing again, passing another tax cut, starting another war and winning the 2004 election. They were riding high, and then they gave all their gains back in 2006 and 2008. After Obamas victory in 2012 that ended any chance for Bush's  victory in 2000 to have started anything.

Now it was Democrats turn. After winning big in 2006 and 2008, Democratic were crushed in 2010 losing the House. They won the 2012 election but then lost the Senate in 2014. Finally, they lost in 2016 against an inferior candidate. Just as the final nail in the coffin for a 4T start under Bush came with Obama's reelection, the same will be true for Democrats if Trump wins in 2020.

This pushes the next most likely 4T start to 2016, 32 years after the 3T start in 1984. This essentially invalidates the theory.

Consider, it has been ten years since 2008 and 17 years past 2001. In all three American 4Ts it was crystal-clear than there had been huge, radical changes 10 (and especially 17) years into the 4T. This alone makes anything other than a 2016 start sketchy, and that date invalidates the theory by the too-long 3T.

[David Horn]

(12-09-2018, 05:47 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I am increasingly of the opinion that the S&H theory is probably wrong. 27 years ago they wrote in Generations about the test of the theory. They said that the next few years or a decade would tell little, but in thirty years we should know.  In the time I have been at one of the T4T sites several dates for a 4T start have been floated, 2001, 2005, 2008, and I will now add 2016. I spent a long time identifying a handful of markers for progress though the cycle. Based on these markers I eliminated 2001 as a candidate in 2012, when Obama won a second term.  

One of the things that happens in a social moment turning is a critical election that signals a shift towards on or another party. In 2001 there was an opportunity to establish Republican ascendency for the next generation. Initial it looked like this was happening. Republicans passed a tax cut, started a war and won the 2002 election (which is unusual). They then did the same thing again, passing another tax cut, starting another war and winning the 2004 election. They were riding high, and then they gave all their gains back in 2006 and 2008. After Obamas victory in 2012 that ended any chance for Bush's  victory in 2000 to have started anything.

Now it was Democrats turn. After winning big in 2006 and 2008, Democratic were crushed in 2010 losing the House. They won the 2012 election but then lost the Senate in 2014. Finally, they lost in 2016 against an inferior candidate. Just as the final nail in the coffin for a 4T start under Bush came with Obama's reelection, the same will be true for Democrats if Trump wins in 2020.

This pushes the next most likely 4T start to 2016, 32 years after the 3T start in 1984. This essentially invalidates the theory.

Consider, it has been ten years since 2008 and 17 years past 2001. In all three American 4Ts it was crystal-clear than there had been huge, radical changes 10 (and especially 17) years into the 4T. This alone makes anything other than a 2016 start sketchy, and that date invalidates the theory by the too-long 3T.

I'm not completely convinced that we understand the modern political paradigm.  If we look worldwide, we see a rise in authoritarianism that's both widespread and deepening.  Yet, we also see a rising progressivism in urban areas that's likewise widespread and deepening, and appears to be outside politics, or parallel to it at the very least.  If reactive forces are marshalling political forces to forestall societal changes unwelcome to more traditional folks, how do we evaluate that using T4T tools?  You may be right, and it's simply impossible -- yet it's happening nonetheless.  Worse, almost all political systems have a conservative bias that's amplified by a rural (geographically diverse?) bias as well.

So playing this out to its logical end, how do we address AGW if it's taboo to in the conservative/reactionary sphere?  Likewise, can big business form an alliance of convenience with the religious and social right, and use it to stymie economic egalitarianism -- as they have up to this point?  Assuming that we fail to address either, when do those twin crises emerge in earnest, and how do they get resolved?  My guess: the 2050-2060 time frame, and resolution won't be pretty in either case.

[Eric the Green]

(12-10-2018, 02:12 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-09-2018, 05:47 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I am increasingly of the opinion that the S&H theory is probably wrong. 27 years ago they wrote in Generations about the test of the theory. They said that the next few years or a decade would tell little, but in thirty years we should know.  In the time I have been at one of the T4T sites several dates for a 4T start have been floated, 2001, 2005, 2008, and I will now add 2016. I spent a long time identifying a handful of markers for progress though the cycle. Based on these markers I eliminated 2001 as a candidate in 2012, when Obama won a second term.  

One of the things that happens in a social moment turning is a critical election that signals a shift towards one or another party. In 2001 there was an opportunity to establish Republican ascendency for the next generation. Initial it looked like this was happening. Republicans passed a tax cut, started a war and won the 2002 election (which is unusual). They then did the same thing again, passing another tax cut, starting another war and winning the 2004 election. They were riding high, and then they gave all their gains back in 2006 and 2008. After Obamas victory in 2012 that ended any chance for Bush's  victory in 2000 to have started anything.

Now it was Democrats turn. After winning big in 2006 and 2008, Democratic were crushed in 2010 losing the House. They won the 2012 election but then lost the Senate in 2014. Finally, they lost in 2016 against an inferior candidate. Just as the final nail in the coffin for a 4T start under Bush came with Obama's reelection, the same will be true for Democrats if Trump wins in 2020.

This pushes the next most likely 4T start to 2016, 32 years after the 3T start in 1984. This essentially invalidates the theory.

Consider, it has been ten years since 2008 and 17 years past 2001. In all three American 4Ts it was crystal-clear than there had been huge, radical changes 10 (and especially 17) years into the 4T. This alone makes anything other than a 2016 start sketchy, and that date invalidates the theory by the too-long 3T.

I'm not completely convinced that we understand the modern political paradigm.  If we look worldwide, we see a rise in authoritarianism that's both widespread and deepening.  Yet, we also see a rising progressivism in urban areas that's likewise widespread and deepening, and appears to be outside politics, or parallel to it at the very least.  If reactive forces are marshalling political forces to forestall societal changes unwelcome to more traditional folks, how do we evaluate that using T4T tools?  You may be right, and it's simply impossible -- yet it's happening nonetheless.  Worse, almost all political systems have a conservative bias that's amplified by a rural (geographically diverse?) bias as well.

So playing this out to its logical end, how do we address AGW if it's taboo to in the conservative/reactionary sphere?  Likewise, can big business form an alliance of convenience with the religious and social right, and use it to stymie economic egalitarianism -- as they have up to this point?  Assuming that we fail to address either, when do those twin crises emerge in earnest, and how do they get resolved?  My guess: the 2050-2060 time frame, and resolution won't be pretty in either case.

It may be that one political party does not establish dominance in this 4T. But I still think that may very well happen. The Republicans have gone so far off the deep edge that it is destined to fall into impotence and maybe even disappear in the next decade. Again, since the 1850s were part of the civil war 4T, one would have thought the Democrats had not been dislodged over 2/3 of the way through the turning. You might have said then, oh well, the generations theory (sans anomaly) is in error. The same is true with the Republicans today, who represent the same folks that the Democrats represented in 1854, and who have been dominant throughout the 2010s, with the Democrats holding none or at most only one branch of the federal government and very few of the states.

It is certainly not true that authoritarianism is diminishing during a 4T, if you look at fascist and Nazi ascendancy late into the previous one, and the Dred Scott decision far into the civil war 4T, and the power of the Dixie aristocracy then and its dominance of politics right up to Lincoln's election, with similar authoritarian rule in Europe, and King George III's reign in the USA up until 1781. The 4T is not a condition of unity, with reformers in power; it is a condition of battle between two sides or factions, which in previous anglo-american 4Ts has eventually been won by the more-progressive side near the end.

We're right on schedule. The takeover of the USA by such an unqualified, destructive, incompetent, authoritarian fool is itself enough to label our times as a crisis. Our nation as we knew it is under severe threat today just from that.

My cosmic crystal ball says the 2050s will be a relaxed, energetic and optimistic period, with lots of innovation and advances in communication. It will be an awakening era following a revolutionary time in which people will be enjoying the liberation which it achieved. That of course will depend on a positive outcome to this 4T, in which progressive folks must overcome and transform the built-in advantages for stagnant conservative rule in the USA by 2028-29. There will be no awakening in the USA if a positive outcome to this 4T is not achieved. Such an awakening will happen elsewhere instead in that case. Instead we will be a banana republic, in a condition akin to that of Dixie in the 1890s, with increasing oppression and poverty, without any northern half of ourselves to power us into an eventual partial recovery after the 1960s. Come to think of it, a declining USA may be better for the climate, as other nations take the needed steps to address the issue and the declining USA produces less CO2 because of its stagnant economy.

[David Horn]

(12-10-2018, 11:24 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It may be that one political party does not establish dominance in this 4T. But I still think that may very well happen. The Republicans have gone so far off the deep edge that it is destined to fall into impotence and maybe even disappear in the next decade. Again, since the 1850s were part of the civil war 4T, one would have thought the Democrats had not been dislodged over 2/3 of the way through the turning. You might have said then, oh well, the generations theory (sans anomaly) is in error. The same is true with the Republicans today, who represent the same folks that the Democrats represented in 1854, and who have been dominant throughout the 2010s, with the Democrats holding none or at most only one branch of the federal government and very few of the states.

Barring a repeat of the ACW, why is today's parallel with the 1850s a potential positive. For that matter, why would a 2nd ACW be a net positive, even if the nation survived as an open and vital democracy? At the moment, we're still the hegemon, but a brutal internal war would eliminate that immediately -- and not to our benefit. China is waiting for us to stumble, and the stumblebum in charge is doing all he can to oblige them. An American internecine war would be more than they could hope for.

Eric the Green Wrote:It is certainly not true that authoritarianism is diminishing during a 4T, if you look at fascist and Nazi ascendancy late into the previous one, and the Dred Scott decision far into the civil war 4T, and the power of the Dixie aristocracy then and its dominance of politics right up to Lincoln's election, with similar authoritarian rule in Europe, and King George III's reign in the USA up until 1781. The 4T is not a condition of unity, with reformers in power; it is a condition of battle between two sides or factions, which in previous anglo-american 4Ts has eventually been won by the more-progressive side near the end.

We're right on schedule. The takeover of the USA by such an unqualified, destructive, incompetent, authoritarian fool is itself enough to label our times as a crisis. Our nation as we knew it is under severe threat today just from that.

It's not just Trump. Look at the neo-Fascist activities in Europe, then look at the same activities in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina, to name the most obvious few. Today's tools of repression are infinitely better than the tools of the mid-20th century. A Viktor Orban has had little trouble undoing the nascent democracy in Hungary, and doing it without firing a shot. Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey and now Bolsonaro in Brazil are just the leading edge of a movement that will grow even faster if the Orange One continues in office.

Eric the Green Wrote:My cosmic crystal ball says the 2050s will be a relaxed, energetic and optimistic period, with lots of innovation and advances in communication. It will be an awakening era following a revolutionary time in which people will be enjoying the liberation which it achieved. That of course will depend on a positive outcome to this 4T, in which progressive folks must overcome and transform the built-in advantages for stagnant conservative rule in the USA by 2028-29. There will be no awakening in the USA if a positive outcome to this 4T is not achieved. Such an awakening will happen elsewhere instead in that case. Instead we will be a banana republic, in a condition akin to that of Dixie in the 1890s, with increasing oppression and poverty, without any northern half of ourselves to power us into an eventual partial recovery after the 1960s. Come to think of it, a declining USA may be better for the climate, as other nations take the needed steps to address the issue and the declining USA produces less CO2 because of its stagnant economy.

The 2050s will be addressing the AGW issue head on. Assuming no other hangover occurs, it will still be a trying time worldwide. I admire your optimism, but fail to find any reason to share it.

[Eric the Green]

(12-11-2018, 11:27 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-10-2018, 11:24 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It may be that one political party does not establish dominance in this 4T. But I still think that may very well happen. The Republicans have gone so far off the deep edge that it is destined to fall into impotence and maybe even disappear in the next decade. Again, since the 1850s were part of the civil war 4T, one would have thought the Democrats had not been dislodged over 2/3 of the way through the turning. You might have said then, oh well, the generations theory (sans anomaly) is in error. The same is true with the Republicans today, who represent the same folks that the Democrats represented in 1854, and who have been dominant throughout the 2010s, with the Democrats holding none or at most only one branch of the federal government and very few of the states.

Barring a repeat of the ACW, why is today's parallel with the 1850s a potential positive. For that matter, why would a 2nd ACW be a net positive, even if the nation survived as an open and vital democracy? At the moment, we're still the hegemon, but a brutal internal war would eliminate that immediately -- and not to our benefit. China is waiting for us to stumble, and the stumblebum in charge is doing all he can to oblige them. An American internecine war would be more than they could hope for.

Those are good points. Another civil war would not do us well. However, our 4T is predominantly a cold civil war, with some problems with terrorists thrown in. Our track record at avoiding violence in 4Ts is not good, to say the least. We may have graduated to better behavior in our new age, but maybe not. So I expect more violence in the 2020s. It depends on the scale of it whether or not we emerge from it positively, and of course it depends on which side wins most of all. The ACW 4T was the usual victory for the progressive side, and out of it the USA emerged more powerful and more united in the long run. A full scale civil war today might not have that result, though. It's quite possible that other countries might intervene and interfere in a civil war in the 2020s. I've thought of that possibility myself too. It almost happened in 1862 as well.

Quote:

Eric the Green Wrote:It is certainly not true that authoritarianism is diminishing during a 4T, if you look at fascist and Nazi ascendancy late into the previous one, and the Dred Scott decision far into the civil war 4T, and the power of the Dixie aristocracy then and its dominance of politics right up to Lincoln's election, with similar authoritarian rule in Europe, and King George III's reign in the USA up until 1781. The 4T is not a condition of unity, with reformers in power; it is a condition of battle between two sides or factions, which in previous anglo-american 4Ts has eventually been won by the more-progressive side near the end.


We're right on schedule. The takeover of the USA by such an unqualified, destructive, incompetent, authoritarian fool is itself enough to label our times as a crisis. Our nation as we knew it is under severe threat today just from that.

It's not just Trump. Look at the neo-Fascist activities in Europe, then look at the same activities in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina, to name the most obvious few. Today's tools of repression are infinitely better than the tools of the mid-20th century. A Viktor Orban has had little trouble undoing the nascent democracy in Hungary, and doing it without firing a shot. Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey and now Bolsonaro in Brazil are just the leading edge of a movement that will grow even faster if the Orange One continues in office.

Indeed I am seeing those things as well.

Quote:

Eric the Green Wrote:My cosmic crystal ball says the 2050s will be a relaxed, energetic and optimistic period, with lots of innovation and advances in communication. It will be an awakening era following a revolutionary time in which people will be enjoying the liberation which it achieved. That of course will depend on a positive outcome to this 4T, in which progressive folks must overcome and transform the built-in advantages for stagnant conservative rule in the USA by 2028-29. There will be no awakening in the USA if a positive outcome to this 4T is not achieved. Such an awakening will happen elsewhere instead in that case. Instead we will be a banana republic, in a condition akin to that of Dixie in the 1890s, with increasing oppression and poverty, without any northern half of ourselves to power us into an eventual partial recovery after the 1960s. Come to think of it, a declining USA may be better for the climate, as other nations take the needed steps to address the issue and the declining USA produces less CO2 because of its stagnant economy.

The 2050s will be addressing the AGW issue head on. Assuming no other hangover occurs, it will still be a trying time worldwide. I admire your optimism, but fail to find any reason to share it.

I'm not sure I'm so optimistic, if I don't see the USA as being able to experience a Second Turning Awakening if we don't emerge from the 2020s with a progressive victory and new consensus. My main point is that we cannot wait for the 2050s. AGW and all the current problems must be addressed in THIS turning, or we won't be ABLE to address them in the future. That's not to deny that problems like AGW won't still need further attention and mitigation in the future as well. CO2 will be up there a while and more global warming is baked in. But we must turn around the trajectory in this 4T, and remove the 40-year block to all progress. This will be tough, so optimism alone won't be enough. We can't underestimate the task that lies ahead of us in the next 10 years, nor just put it off until a 2T that never comes. I always said back on the old forum that this 4T would be a literal winter, meaning climate change will be upon us as the crucial issue of the 4T, and so it is.

Of course, although I happen to see the 2050s as pretty smooth, euphoric and cheerful, just looking at the cycles, things will get stormier in the 2060s and 70s as we move into 3T with another 4T looming. And that cheerful 2T will also depend on whether we emerge from the preceding revolutionary era of the early 2T in the late 2040s in a positive way. Positive times are ahead of us IF we do the right things. If we don't, then we can't expect that outcome.

[David Horn]

(12-11-2018, 01:08 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I'm not sure I'm so optimistic, if I don't see the USA as being able to experience a Second Turning Awakening if we don't emerge from the 2020s with a progressive victory and new consensus. My main point is that we cannot wait for the 2050s. AGW and all the current problems must be addressed in THIS turning, or we won't be ABLE to address them in the future. That's not to deny that problems like AGW won't still need further attention and mitigation in the future as well. CO2 will be up there a while and more global warming is baked in. But we must turn around the trajectory in this 4T, and remove the 40-year block to all progress. This will be tough, so optimism alone won't be enough. We can't underestimate the task that lies ahead of us in the next 10 years, nor just put it off until a 2T that never comes. I always said back on the old forum that this 4T would be a literal winter, meaning climate change will be upon us as the crucial issue of the 4T, and so it is.

Of course, although I happen to see the 2050s as pretty smooth, euphoric and cheerful, just looking at the cycles, things will get stormier in the 2060s and 70s as we move into 3T with another 4T looming. And that cheerful 2T will also depend on whether we emerge from the preceding revolutionary era of the early 2T in the late 2040s in a positive way. Positive times are ahead of us IF we do the right things. If we don't, then we can't expect that outcome.

The latest guess from the IPCC, based on the current retrenchment in the US and waffling in Europe, is a gain of 3.3 degrees C by 2100.  Let's say that's pessimistic, but not that pessimistic.  It's still way beyond the 1.5 degrees C that will allow for mitigation, and much of that will be present by the 2050s.   By then, we'll actually see real climate effects on  food production and coastal erosion, among a host of other horrors.  That will be panic time, but will it be productive panic (all oars in the water and everyone pulling) or everyone for him/herself?  I don't know.  The youth today are woefully undereducated in civics, and this is a civic response at best or chaos at worst.

[pbrower2a]

(12-09-2018, 05:47 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I am increasingly of the opinion that the S&H theory is probably wrong. 27 years ago they wrote in Generations about the test of the theory. They said that the next few years or a decade would tell little, but in thirty years we should know.  In the time I have been at one of the T4T sites several dates for a 4T start have been floated, 2001, 2005, 2008, and I will now add 2016. I spent a long time identifying a handful of markers for progress though the cycle. Based on these markers I eliminated 2001 as a candidate in 2012, when Obama won a second term.

...and I am tempted to believe that either

(1) we are approaching the definitive end of a Crisis Era, with the response to the despotic tendencies of Donald Trump forcing such;
(2) a lengthening of the saeculum due to the increased length of human lifespans
(3) the weakening of the basis of the generational cycle because we typically have four active adult generations at once instead of three

If I am to make any analogue to a leading figure in American history to Donald Trump, then it is George III, who tried to micromanage American politics when such was unnecessary or even counterproductive. Donald Trump is the most intellectually-unfit person to be President since at least Andrew Johnson. He tries to exercise powers that the Constitution denies him, and he acts with a combination of cruelty, corruption, and incompetence that most people here would never do.

The late William F. Buckley said that he would rather be governed by a similar number of people picked at random from the New Haven telephone book than a similar number of Yale faculty... well, here is someone picked at random from the Social Register.

Quote:One of the things that happens in a social moment turning is a critical election that signals a shift towards on or another party. In 2001 there was an opportunity to establish Republican ascendency for the next generation. Initial it looked like this was happening. Republicans passed a tax cut, started a war and won the 2002 election (which is unusual). They then did the same thing again, passing another tax cut, starting another war and winning the 2004 election. They were riding high, and then they gave all their gains back in 2006 and 2008. After Obamas victory in 2012 that ended any chance for Bush's  victory in 2000 to have started anything.

Now it was Democrats turn. After winning big in 2006 and 2008, Democratic were crushed in 2010 losing the House. They won the 2012 election but then lost the Senate in 2014. Finally, they lost in 2016 against an inferior candidate. Just as the final nail in the coffin for a 4T start under Bush came with Obama's reelection, the same will be true for Democrats if Trump wins in 2020.

This pushes the next most likely 4T start to 2016, 32 years after the 3T start in 1984. This essentially invalidates the theory.

Consider, it has been ten years since 2008 and 17 years past 2001. In all three American 4Ts it was crystal-clear than there had been huge, radical changes 10 (and especially 17) years into the 4T. This alone makes anything other than a 2016 start sketchy, and that date invalidates the theory by the too-long 3T.

If the election of Donald Trump constitutes the beginning of the end, then (1) is true. Political tendencies that began in the Third Turning and that powerful people tried to implement even as they proved rotten can implode, compelling Americans to find a new consensus. That consensus will imply the complete repudiation of Reaganomics, neoconservatism, the Tea Party, and above all, Donald Trump. For (1) to be true we will need to choose far better and stick with genuine progress instead of letting the Perfect be the enemy of the good.

If (2), we could be on course for a protracted nightmare until the Boom generation is basically knocked out. Should elite Boomers follow the same pattern of remaining mentally and physically active past retirement age as did GIs and the Silent, then we could have the Trump agenda being entrenched until some calamity (an apocalyptic war or a depression as severe as that of the 1930s) forces change or solidifies the right-wing dream of a society in which religious fundamentalism sets the moral agenda and a profits-first economy transforms most people into near-serfs. Few of us want such an America... but we can still have a 1T as sanctimonious but soulless, and as mind-numbing as Spain under Francisco Franco. America might be a nice place to visit on a holiday for cheap ski vacations, gambling junkets, and beach parties much more expensive in places in which people aren't so overworked and underpaid -- but the sort of country that smart people want to get out of.

If (3), then historical patterns will show that where people commonly live into their nineties and have their cultural values set in stone in their teens, which applies to the GI Generation and the Silent, and that Boomers are beginning to show, then a certain tendency in history in which a generational void (practically no Idealist adults in a High, similarly few Reactive adults in an Awakening Era, precious few Civic adults in an Unraveling, and much the same number of Adaptive adults in a Crisis. We just had Bernie Sanders running for President in 2016 and have much talk of Joe Biden doing so in 2022 -- and we are about to have Nancy Pelosi as the second-most powerful person in American politics in a month.

Maybe Donald Trump wants to invade Cuba or Venezuela in a war for his glory and gain -- but Nancy Pelosi can stop him.

Always examine the assumptions in a theory that predicts history. The assumptions that fit the Crisis of 1940 do not quite fit the reality of the countdown to 2020.  even if the usual 80 years has nearly passed. I saw the early and middle Double-Zero decade as an  analogue to the Roaring Twenties complete with the bad behavior, the dumbed-down culture, and the Devil-take-the-hindmost politics and economics. I saw the Crash of 2008 as an analogue to that of 1929, and I saw the equivalent of the twelve years of harding, Coolidge, and Hoover telescoped into eight years of Dubya. Sure, Obama is not quite the new FDR  -- but Trump is about as far from being another FDR as any President could be.

[Mikebert]

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.

[pbrower2a]

(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.

Some of us are best described as 'hobbyist-scholars' who not only lack access to the peer-reviewed journals but also have no idea of which journals to use as sources. I am disappointed that there is little new material, and that contributions are by people like you and me. I feel capable of discussing the theory and  testing its consequences. Our emphases are different, and I see causes for the model fitting the past but contradictory explanations. We have the lengthening of adulthood with kids establishing their culture earlier than used to be the case -- and people living longer lives. Even if young adults are not achieving economic viability as quickly as they used to (the Master Class of heirs and bureaucratic elites want it that way, with masses being overworked and underpaid but subjected to monopolistic pricing to fleece them even more -- remember: no matter how destructive peonage is, it is supremely profitable) they are achieving cultural identity earlier than they used to. Cultural identity reflects itself in politics, and I can easily see the Millennial Generation turning against elites that have betrayed their generation.

Quote: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.

A worthy effort. Other countries, including Spain, Germany, Italy, India, and Japan would be relevant too. If some Russians have an effort analogous to those of Howe and Strauss, then maybe their list of generations includes "Bolshevik" and "Soviet" generations. Who knows?

We have evident signs of Crisis. We have a great contrast between people tied to the economic boons (for them) of the 3T and people who want to take the gravy train. We also have the generational cycle operating very differently from how it operated in the crises of the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and Great Depression/WWII. We have plenty of octogenarian Silent in roles of political power and cultural definition -- and in previous Crises, the Crisis ended with such people off the stage. Add to this, the worst Boomers have so far prevailed in politics and economics, the sorts who remind me of the Southerners who insisted that people outside the South recognize the slave-owning planters as the best thing possible for the slaves that they so  exploited and brutalized. Maybe the timing is off, and we have a protracted Crisis Era slower to develop and  get settled. Maybe this Crisis will end with a new Adaptive generation already on the scene.  The dynamics still operate, but the underlying reality is different.

Maybe the academics are just as confused as we hobbyist-historians are.

Quote: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-day America. 

Real wages are low; elite compensation is inordinately high; costs of mandatory purchases for having some chance of living comfortably (college education and urban rents) are inordinately high. One part of the economic spectrum seems to consider its abuse and degradation of the common man a sort of charity toward those that it exploits badly. I can almost see some of them demanding, were they to fully entrench themselves in power, that the rest of Humanity suffer for their insatiable greed and indulgence and make sure to see them as if gods -- or die horribly. Hunger or concentration camps? Imperial Russia with its slow starvation or Nazi Germany with its swift descent from the privilege of bare survival to some horrible  death for anyone that the system treats as a pariah -- the worst of American elites will offer us the first, and if we do not accept it we will get the latter. With the depraved mass culture that often proves sadistic in the extreme we might see people cast into aquariums with crocodiles in a 21st-century equivalent of the Roman  damnatio ad bestiae instead of being mass-murdered in the secreted hell of a KZ-lager.   

I hope for better, but that requires that the economic elites that have been treating us badly change their way or get expelled. Maybe some of the elites will recognize that conscience is a necessity for survival in a risky world instead of an inconvenience. Do we humanize our capitalist system, overthrow it, or endorse some new horror that brings out the worst in elites as awful as the antebellum planters who saw slavery as charity toward the slaves?

As I have said elsewhere, it is up to the elites to prove or disprove Marxist critiques of capitalism. All that differs from a reactionary and a Marxist is that the Marxist sees the wonder that the reactionary considers wonderful as a great horror.

Quote: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?

National cultures? Different results of Crises as nations experienced them? Technological differences? Natural calamities that a society hanging on by a bare thread cannot meet (the French Revolution follows a volcanic eruption in Iceland that caused  great reductions in food yields on the European continent, and when the food system fails, so does the society). Human nature may not change, which explains why we can still relate to Plato. We may identify with the early Christians more than we relate to Nero -- but after Nero, the Romans largely treated Nero as a horror.

Quote: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. 

It was the best of times/it was the worst of times...

The French Revolution may have a chance of relevance in America today. Or maybe the Spanish Civil War. We have no need to overthrow colonial overlords, to abolish slavery, or to thwart the military aggression of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. This Crisis will be different from the others because the stresses are different upon our social fabric than at those other times. 

Quote: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.

I saw that -- and I recognized scary conclusions.

Quote: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. 

Economic stress rises as the rhetoric becomes more acerbic. Compromise is a lost art in American politics, and it emerges only when all else fails. If you thought the political stresses high between 2011 and 2018, wait until we see someone who acts like a feudal lord having encounters with people who believe in democracy instead of corporate rule. Obama at least is a genial and decent person; Trump is neither.

Quote: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.

Here's my explanation: the difference between Obama and  FDR is that Obama became President while the economy was in meltdown and could recover with a bail-out. FDR took over when the elites were ruined enough that they lacked the means for buying the political process. If 1929 is 2007 as an equivalent (the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was a correction from an overheated situation; 1930 and 2008 had the more destructive crashes from which the American economy could recover from if the President would back the banks. In 1931 America still had Hoover, who continued to bungle American economics into a Depression. In 2009 America had elected Obama, who promptly backed the banks, and in the spring of 2009 the economy started to recover. In 1931 the economy continued to falter, and the destructive bank runs about which Hoover did nothing gutted the financial system. In 1932 America elected FDR, and one of his first deeds was to back the banks. By then Americans were on the brink of having to barter for everything, and even the economic elites knew how bad things were. By 2010 the elites had had their system  saved and they went on to support politicians who believe what they believe: that no human suffering can  ever be in excess so long as there is a profit to derive from it. It culminates in Donald Trump, a Marxist stereotype of a plutocrat as a political boss.

Ten years after the Great Stock Market Crash, life was clearly better for most Americans than it was ten years earlier. People had more cars, washing machines, stoves, refrigerators, and radios. People wore better clothes. The elderly were largely pensioned out of jobs that they were doing badly. Stock market indices were down, and in real terms those would not recover until the 1960s. Contrast how things are today. Elite profits are as high a share of national income as they were in the Gilded Age and the 1920s. Stock market indices are at record levels. Meanwhile middle-class spending by young adults in department stores and casual-dining places is way off. The American middle class is often broke; paying as much as it does in student-loan debt  and real property rents. Executive compensation, largely gigantic rewards for treating workers badly, has never been so high in real or nominal terms. Young adults get nothing out of exe3cutive compensation unless they are still living with a parent who is an executive.

We have several rapacious, exploitative elites doing what such elites have always done best: exploiting people badly. We have big landowners, whether corporate-scale farmers or urban  landlords in the places that actually have jobs, financiers and industrialists, an executive nomenklatura,  political hucksters, and organized crime -- and with the possible exception of organized crime, they are all aligned in their Devil-take-the-hindmost politics and economics. Changing the system? These would take over the system. Administrators, the Communist Party apparatchiks, and senior military officers didn't have to own the collective farms and the factories, but they could live like aristocrats in the supposedly 'classless society' that Lenin established. Add to that, where there was no legitimate ownership of productive assets, the experts -- the Russian Mafia -- could fill the needs that capitalism solved in markets. Government ownership and operation of the productive assets is a non-solution.

[David Horn]

(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...

My interest has never been academic.  It's more entertainment than anything serious.  That said, I've read-through some of the information on other cycle theories, Turchin in particular, and find them a bit pedantic.  That's not to say that they are wrong, just dense and turgid … and overly complex to address the material they describe.  Complex cycle theories are important in the academy, and indirectly elsewhere, but they have no application in the world we live in.  History is evolving at tremendous speed and accelerating.  We need the Cliff Notes version for hoi polloi, and that could have been T4T.  It's looking more and more like it's not.

Mike then Wrote:...  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.

This is real meat!  I agree on the time frame and focus, yet again, on finance.  The question lingering in the background: is this the first death knell of capitalism?  Is THAT model still viable?  Will AI finally eliminate the need for labor (it's already on the downward spiral), and trigger a real response?  I can't see a purely capitalistic response that doesn't make inequality much worse, and the opposing forces are about as organized as a kindergarten picnic.  

For argument's sake, let's agree that the terminal transition phase is still a long way off.  The history of elites shows no reason to suspect that they will relinquish their favored position willingly, so this next crisis will only indicate the path that will be followed later.  Add-in AGW and the emerging East, and be happy we aren't responsible for fixing that.  Leap forward a century, and the world will be radically different.  Let's hope, in a good way.

[pbrower2a]

(12-15-2018, 07:32 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(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...

My interest has never been academic.  It's more entertainment than anything serious.  That said, I've read-through some of the information on other cycle theories, Turchin in particular, and find them a bit pedantic.  That's not to say that they are wrong, just dense and turgid … and overly complex to address the material they describe.  Complex cycle theories are important in the academy, and indirectly elsewhere, but they have no application in the world we live in.  History is evolving at tremendous speed and accelerating.  We need the Cliff Notes version for hoi polloi, and that could have been T4T.  It's looking more and more like it's not.

Many of us are would-be academics; we would be such if we had the opportunity, and we would not give up the quest for knowledge for lucrative but comparatively soulless and mindless (but socially-desirable and necessary) activities such as the installation and repair of HVAC units). There are activities such as astronomy in which amateurs supply data and images for the love of the activity, people who know a tiny portion of  the constellation Corona Borealis very well and watch it closely. Can amateurs contribute to the study of history? Maybe so long as we are not unduly cranky or excessively partisan.

I have my idea of what makes history operate: the development and refinement of the memory of knowledge that serves as a guide to policy (and in a democracy such shapes voting practices) followed by rediscovery of such knowledge, often at much grief, after people who got such knowledge leave the scene due to death and debility. I look at the long a time was necessary for an economic bubble as destructive as that of the 1920s to appear again: roughly eighty years. The last people around to have any coherent memory of the cause and consequence were GIs old enough to remember the heady times going into the 1929 Crash. They got to see that the New Era of prosperity founded upon a weak foundation of speculation would disintegrate and become a time of hardship for innocent people, as they got to experience in the Great Depression. That generation put the lid on such things and kept the lid on tight as long as they were around to sway no and mean it. The temptation was around at all times from the 1940s to the 1990s, and they knew better. Around 2000 many had died off or become irrelevant.

Sure, I am a Boomer, and I listened to stories of the 1929 Crash and Great Depression. I would have concurred with the GI wisdom about the destructiveness of speculative bubbles. Had I been in politics around 2003 I would have been giving warnings about the speculative bubble -- and I would have been voted out of office because the shysters who made fortunes off rip-offs in finance and real estate would have supplied the funds to defeat me in the next election.   

Quote:

Mike then Wrote:...  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.

This is real meat!  I agree on the time frame and focus, yet again, on finance.  The question lingering in the background: is this the first death knell of capitalism?  Is THAT model still viable?  Will AI finally eliminate the need for labor (it's already on the downward spiral), and trigger a real response?  I can't see a purely capitalistic response that doesn't make inequality much worse, and the opposing forces are about as organized as a kindergarten picnic.  

For argument's sake, let's agree that the terminal transition phase is still a long way off.  The history of elites shows no reason to suspect that they will relinquish their favored position willingly, so this next crisis will only indicate the path that will be followed later.  Add-in AGW and the emerging East, and be happy we aren't responsible for fixing that.  Leap forward a century, and the world will be radically different.  Let's hope, in a good way.

Much as people with economic power who live exceedingly well would love to kill all memory of Marx, the old arch-nemesis of capitalism does not quite die. It's like Satan with the churches; he offers some undeniable realities that unsettle the true believers in capitalist plutocracy. The proletariat is always the majority, and even if employment moves steadily from manufacturing to services, much of the service business is damned to live under proletarian conditions. After all, the proletariat always has nothing to sell  but its toil, and toilers nearly always get the shaft. Maybe at some stage the capitalists decided that the industrial proletariat needed a consumer society to have cause to not rebel against the capitalist class, at least in America. In Germany the industrialists, financiers, and agrarian magnates decided that the masses could be paid the lowest wages in Europe so that the elites could live exceedingly well -- and when people started challenging hose elites those elites turned to Adolf Hitler, who would turn industrial workers into literal serfs (while doing far greater crimes for which he is better known).

It may be that as miracles of productivity, including miracles of robot-based manufacturing, require fewer people in the making of the industrial cornucopia, the only necessary proletariat is that in agricultural business that becomes increasingly dependent upon big farms and factory-like dairies and meat-packing places. But remember -- as Marx told us the proletariat has nothing to sell but its labor, and it is easy to see how successors of Donald Trump can transform the worker into a serf. Maybe those successors do so without racist genocide and apocalyptic war, but it is easy to see this time as the end of a good era and the beginning of a bad one.

Marx may have oversimplified history as a progression of slavery to peonage to capitalism to socialism to communism, with communism as the consequence of productivity that would free people from toil. He missed an era in which capitalists decided that a consumer society was better for all than was a Socialist revolution. What happens when the economic elites, not all of them industrialists and their heirs, take away the consumer society and create a world of peonage?

Maybe the world becomes a nightmare out of 1930s serials such as Flash Gordon complete with a nobility and in which the seamy side of life was hidden and power struggles within the elite are of utmost importance -- something successful in the 1930s because people feared such. Or perhaps we go from capitalism to Marx' prophesy of Communism with all that such entails. (This is heretical by Marxist standards, but historical reality fosters heresy).

[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.