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Thread: Noah Smith's sweeping theory of modern history







Post#1 at 11-28-2015 06:49 PM by Dan '82 [at joined Mar 2014 #posts 349]
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Noah Smith's sweeping theory of modern history

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2...n-history.html


Here's a Big Sweeping Theory that I've been toying with. There are lots of theories of the cycle of rise and decline of empires in the agricultural, premodern world. I'd like to create a parallel theory of low-frequency cycles (or, more accurately, long-term impulse responses to stochastic technology shocks) in the modern, industrialized world.


It's possible to see the convulsions of the World Wars and the Great Depression as a one-time event - part of the growing pains of the industrial revolution, not to be repeated. But what if some of the core features of those events are actually part of a cycle? Here's a sketch of how that cycle might work:


Phase 1: Technological Change. A huge burst of new stuff gets invented. Growth accelerates.


Phase 2: Globalization. New tech and growth create new global supply chains. Trade and migration accelerate.


Phase 3a: Inequality. New tech and globalization offer lots of opportunity for rich people to deploy their capital. New supply chains, products, and markets allow entrepreneurs to evade incumbents, vested interests, and governments. First movers make fortunes. Rich people deploy their wealth to restrain government attempts at regulation and redistribution, to keep the party going. Meanwhile, workers are forced to compete with foreigners and immigrants, and are also forced to pay the costs of reskilling in response to tech changes and globalization. Widespread inequality results.


Phase 3b: Cultural Change. New economic opportunities allow previously disempowered groups to gain power and status. Tech disrupts traditional family structures. Culture changes rapidly.


Phase 3c: Financialization. The need to finance new tech industries and new global supply chains expand the size of the finance sector. This results in large asset bubbles.


Phase 3d: Geopolitical Shifts. New supply chains and new tech mean some previously poor countries are now able to become rich. With wealth comes power. New great powers destabilize the geopolitical order.


Phase 4: Rise of Extremism. Economic inequality precipitates the rise of "leveling" (leftist) movements. Anger at cultural change and fear of competition with immigrants, mixed with displaced anger over inequality, precipitate the rise of reactionary (rightist) movements. Rightists and leftists feed off of each other, each portraying the other as an existential threat in order to frighten the populace into turning to the opposite extreme. Extremist politicians abuse veto points in political systems to paralyze governments and make countries effectively ungovernable.


Phase 5: Economic Slowdown. The collapse of a global bubble (from 3c) begins a protracted worldwide economic slowdown. For whatever reason - overhang of debt? extrapolative expectations? hysteresis? secular stagnation? some weird disruption to trade networks? - the economy does not recover quickly to previous growth rates. Because of extremist control of veto points, policy is unable to respond to the slowdown. Centrists on both the left and right are discredited and toppled.


Phase 6: War. Extremists may fight each other in civil wars. Alternatively, geopolitical disruptions may lead to international conflict between new and incumbent powers. Extremists push their governments toward fighting external enemies, assassinating or toppling moderate leaders who refuse to fight. If a country is too weak to fight external enemies, or if no such enemies are close by, civil war results instead.


Phase 7: New Order. Out of the chaos and destruction of the wars emerges a new stable geopolitical order. Left-right extremist conflicts cause society to be exhausted by violence, and moderates slowly return to power. The exigencies of war cause governments to reestablish control over their economies, creating a new set of vested interests and protected incumbents. Inequality is dramatically reduced by destruction of wealth in wars. New incumbents provide a new "social model" that creates economic security for the masses.




This is basically a description of what happened in the late 19th and early 20th century, along with a number of assumptions about why it happened. Obviously there will never be enough data to confirm or refute this complex, slow, and sweeping of a theory - not in our lifetime, anyway.


But it's interesting to think about recent events as possibly corresponding to this sort of cycle. Here's how the modern world fits into the pattern:


Phase 1: Technological Change. The IT revolution, computers, the internet, automation, mobile communication.


Phase 2: Globalization. The huge wave of global growth between 1990 and 2008. Globalized supply chains. A huge Latin American immigration flow into the U.S., and a huge Middle Eastern immigrant flow into Europe.


Phase 3a: Inequality. Rising income and wealth inequality everywhere. Stagnating wages in rich countries. An explosion in the number of billionaires. Soaring college tuition as workers desperately try to get skills.


Phase 3b: Cultural Change. Greater economic opportunity and equality for women, due to the service economy. A rise in divorce and single parenthood, and a drop in marriage. Sex culture spreading via the Internet. The decline of religion.


Phase 3c: Financialization: The explosion of financial profits and output as percentages of the total.


Phase 3d: Geopolitical Shift: The rise of China and the recovery of Russia, and (most importantly) the de facto alliance between the two.


Phase 4: Rise of Extremism. The steady polarization of American politics. Skyrocketing use of the filibuster. The Tea Party. The debt ceiling crisis. Trump. Sanders. Fox vs. MSNBC. Le Pen. The British National Party. Syriza and Golden Dawn. The Zaitokukai. Campus anti-speech movements. Online wars between leftist "SJWs" and rightists (GamerGate, etc.). The normalization of the terms "fascist" and "socialist". Illiberalism on both sides of the political spectrum.


Phase 5: Economic Slowdown: The 2008 crisis and the Great Recession, the Euro crisis and the China slowdown and the emerging markets slowdown.


Phase 6: War. Let's hope not...




I know this big sweeping theory, like all such theories, is untestable hand-waving and blatant overfitting. But it's kind of interesting, isn't it? And also disturbing.






http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2...n-history.html







Post#2 at 11-28-2015 08:21 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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The whole idea of technological innovations occurring in waves that in turn drive phases of economic growth and social change, and eventually leading to periods of conflict was handled much more ably by Thompson and Modelski's Leading Sectors and World Powers.

Looked at the rest of his blog and the guy seems like an idiot. Just saying.







Post#3 at 11-28-2015 11:07 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed View Post
The whole idea of technological innovations occurring in waves that in turn drive phases of economic growth and social change, and eventually leading to periods of conflict was handled much more ably by Thompson and Modelski's Leading Sectors and World Powers.

Looked at the rest of his blog and the guy seems like an idiot. Just saying.
Once you've had a taste of generational theory, everything else looks idiotic.







Post#4 at 11-29-2015 12:36 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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I really hope you're talking about generational theory in general and not yours in particular. You seem like such a nice old man, I'd hate to have to come down to Cambridge and slap some humility into you.







Post#5 at 11-29-2015 12:56 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed View Post
> I really hope you're talking about generational theory in general
> and not yours in particular. You seem like such a nice old man,
> I'd hate to have to come down to Cambridge and slap some humility
> into you.
Oh crap. I was trying to be nice, but you had to go and start another
fight, didn't you.

Just two days ago you wrote that Russia is in a 2T. That's a complete
contradiction to S&H's theory, which has the world on a common
timeline.

In other words, you've abandoned S&H's original theory, and you've
adopted the more modern and historically correct Generational
Dynamics.

In other words, when you criticize me, then you're completely, totally
full of crap, and have no idea what you're talking about.

At any rate, you children should have more respect for people who are
older and more intelligent than you are. You Gen-Xers may believe
that you're God's gift to humanity, but the truth is that you have a
lot to learn.







Post#6 at 11-29-2015 01:01 PM by nihilist moron [at joined Jul 2014 #posts 1,230]
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Jordan is a Millie ... that's the God's gift generation.
Nobody ever got to a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first.
- Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment







Post#7 at 11-29-2015 01:27 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by nihilist moron View Post
> Jordan is a Millie ... that's the God's gift
> generation.
That's good to know. Thank you!







Post#8 at 11-29-2015 01:47 PM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by nihilist moron View Post
Jordan is a Millie ... that's the God's gift generation.
Yeah, and he reminds me of my parents.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.







Post#9 at 11-29-2015 01:50 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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Jesus, John, settle down. Didn't the bit where I described you as "a nice old man" clue you in to the fact that I was joking?







Post#10 at 11-29-2015 01:55 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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Quote Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon View Post
Yeah, and he reminds me of my parents.


And the notion that I'm probably going to have children like you guys is equally disturbing.
Last edited by JordanGoodspeed; 11-29-2015 at 06:01 PM.







Post#11 at 11-29-2015 02:01 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed View Post
> Jesus, John, settle down. Didn't the bit where I described you as
> "a nice old man" clue you in to the fact that I was joking?
>
Sorry if I overreacted, Jordan, but over the years I've developed a
VERY thin skin. I'm also pretty touchy about my age. Have you ever
told your wife/girlfriend a joke about her weight?







Post#12 at 11-29-2015 02:14 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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Sorry for the trouble, but it was hard to resist. Can't say I've made the mistake of commenting about a girl's weight, but I recently called my girlfriend"Jenny", which is a much closer approximation of her Korean name than "Jean", and she flipped the fuck out. Go figure.







Post#13 at 11-29-2015 02:50 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed View Post
> Sorry for the trouble, but it was hard to resist. Can't say I've
> made the mistake of commenting about a girl's weight, but I
> recently called my girlfriend"Jenny", which is a much closer
> approximation of her Korean name than "Jean", and she flipped the
> fuck out. Go figure.
Poor boy! Poor boy!
Down-hearted and depressed and in a spin
Poor boy! Poor boy!
Oh, youth can really do a fellow in!

How lovely to sit here in the shade
With none of the woes of man and maid
I'm glad I'm not young anymore

The rivals that don't exist at all
The feeling you're only two feet tall
I'm glad that I'm not young anymore

No more confusion
No morning-after surprise
No self-delusion
That when you're telling those lies
She isn't wise

And even if love comes through the door
The chance that goes on forevermore
Forevermore is shorter than before
Oh, I'm so glad that I'm not young anymore

The tiny remark that tortures you
The fear that your friends won't like her too
I'm glad I'm not young anymore
The longing to end the stale affair
Until you find out she doesn't care
I'm glad that I'm not young anymore

No more frustration
No star-crossed lover am I
No aggravation
Just one reluctant reply
"Lady, goodbye!"

The Fountain of Youth is dull as paint
Methuselah is my patron saint
I've never been so comfortable before
Oh, I'm so glad that I'm not young anymore

I'M GLAD I'M NOT YOUNG ANYMORE
From "Gigi" (1958)
(Lyrics : Alan Jay Lerner / Music : Frederick Loewe)








Post#14 at 11-29-2015 03:03 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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Really doubling down on the whole "old" thing, aren't you?







Post#15 at 11-29-2015 03:37 PM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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Don't worry, Jordan, John is wrong a lot. He still hasn't recovered from the butt-whooping he got from an old poster here (Sean Love, AKA Zarathustra).
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#16 at 11-29-2015 03:48 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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I appreciate the support, Odin, but I am well aware of John's opinions and where they differ from mine (and where he is accordingly wrong ). I was less interested in having that argument here and more in simply needling him for being a bit ridiculous.

All in good fun, of course.







Post#17 at 11-29-2015 04:35 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by Odin View Post
> Don't worry, Jordan, John is wrong a lot. He still hasn't
> recovered from the butt-whooping he got from an old poster here
> (Sean Love, AKA Zarathustra).
Once again, the famous Mr. Odin, the father of an endless, unlimited
stream of brainless posts and meaningless gibberish.

Yeah, whatever happened to that jackass Love anyway? He invaded the
Generational Dynamics forum for a while under a couple of aliases,
spouting your kind of nonsense, and I can assure that it was his butt
that was thoroughly whooped. Apparently he's completely turned tail
and run from both forums. You and he could be Laurel and Hardy.

But hey look, idiots like you really don't have the guts to actually
discuss anything because you don't really understand a thing about
EITHER S&H's methodology or the Generational Dynamics methodology.
Both of them are above your intelligence level. But if you want to
prove me wrong, then go into the "Generational Dynamics World View"
thread, and have it out with me. I don't think that you have anything
like the guts to try, but we'll see.







Post#18 at 11-30-2015 03:19 PM by nihilist moron [at joined Jul 2014 #posts 1,230]
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Now that's what I'd call a butt-whooping!
My only suggestion is that someone who doesn't like being called an old man might not want to reference Laurel and Hardy.
Nobody ever got to a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first.
- Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment







Post#19 at 11-30-2015 03:49 PM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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The sequence of events in the summary given in the opening post is a bit jumbled, since the economic slowdown happened before the rise of the Tea Party.

I agree that the leftist activists and purifiers on campus are verging on illiberal, and it could get worse, but the original qualification he made that these folks are not equivalent in power and influence yet to the Trump campaign is correct. Sanders is the comparable figure, and he is not illiberal at all.

The cycle of the late 19th to mid 20th century is of course the 2T to the 4T of the previous saeculum. The account of our unfinished cycle leaves out the 2T altogether, but otherwise is comparable. So the cycle which you and Noah Smith mention is the saeculum, but without the 1T and without much of the 2T, with those years between our saeculum and the previous one just left blank.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

Eric A. Meece







Post#20 at 11-30-2015 03:55 PM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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Quote Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis View Post
Poor boy! Poor boy!
Down-hearted and depressed and in a spin
Poor boy! Poor boy!
Oh, youth can really do a fellow in!

How lovely to sit here in the shade
With none of the woes of man and maid
I'm glad I'm not young anymore

The rivals that don't exist at all
The feeling you're only two feet tall
I'm glad that I'm not young anymore

No more confusion
No morning-after surprise
No self-delusion
That when you're telling those lies
She isn't wise

And even if love comes through the door
The chance that goes on forevermore
Forevermore is shorter than before
Oh, I'm so glad that I'm not young anymore

The tiny remark that tortures you
The fear that your friends won't like her too
I'm glad I'm not young anymore
The longing to end the stale affair
Until you find out she doesn't care
I'm glad that I'm not young anymore

No more frustration
No star-crossed lover am I
No aggravation
Just one reluctant reply
"Lady, goodbye!"

The Fountain of Youth is dull as paint
Methuselah is my patron saint
I've never been so comfortable before
Oh, I'm so glad that I'm not young anymore

I'M GLAD I'M NOT YOUNG ANYMORE
From "Gigi" (1958)
(Lyrics : Alan Jay Lerner / Music : Frederick Loewe)

Great! Maybe time to make it my theme song. Well, maybe not ????

Lerner and Lowe; tough to beat 'em.

But, really belongs in our 1T music thread.

Quite a contrast to Jimmy's angst I posted in the Great Music from the 2T thread (but Pete Townshend can beat L&L!, in some ways at least). And polls show people are happier when they get older. Adolescence in a 2T is high pressure stuff, compared to elderhood in a 1T!

I reckon the singer is Maurice Chevalier, since I clicked on a 1963 What's My Line appearance video that came up after the Gigi one. John Daly said he looks as young as he did in 1945, and Arlene says so do you John.
https://youtu.be/8VG9WoCrb_c

Sing this one, says Arlene:
https://youtu.be/2TqSyvdqn9c

I guess we all remember this one.
https://youtu.be/GQxM5rJ-uiY
The past is calling.....
Last edited by Eric the Green; 11-30-2015 at 04:35 PM.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

Eric A. Meece







Post#21 at 12-01-2015 12:29 PM by XYMOX_4AD_84 [at joined Nov 2012 #posts 3,073]
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Phase 6 ....

At 0400 on the day of the attack, a small group assembles a UAV in a supermarket parking lot near central Washington D.C. The UAV powers on then becomes airborne. Flying inches above the rooftops, the craft flies a course for the White House. A small nuclear explosion rings out. Where the White House once stood, now lies a crater, with a zone of complete destruction for blocks and blocks surrounding it. A real Ground Zero.

Spetsnaz who've infiltrated into the US via the porous borders seize various television, radio and internet outlets. Bogus "news" starts to be broadcast. An imposter of the Vice President goes on the air to declare there has been a coup and that the President is dead. In fact, the President was not in the White House at the time of the attack, and, upon learning of it, immediately moved to Andrews and got into the airborne command facility, took off, and is now on a classified course.

The infiltrating Spetsnaz attack C4I throughout North America.

Massive Red Army ground forces move West into Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. Meanwhile, the PLA similarly blitzes into Thailand through the Mekong Gap, en route for Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia.

A barrage of cruise missiles and ICBMs destroy US missile silos, air bases, remaining C4I, submarine bases, naval bases and armament plants.

The Joint SCO Island Hopping force crosses from the Russian Aleutians into the US Aleutians. The invasion of the USA has officially commenced.
Last edited by XYMOX_4AD_84; 12-01-2015 at 12:34 PM.







Post#22 at 12-01-2015 12:48 PM by JordanGoodspeed [at joined Mar 2013 #posts 3,587]
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You really need to up your meds, dude.







Post#23 at 12-05-2015 12:19 AM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by Eric the Green View Post
Great! Maybe time to make it my theme song. Well, maybe not ????

Lerner and Lowe; tough to beat 'em.

But, really belongs in our 1T music thread.

Quite a contrast to Jimmy's angst I posted in the Great Music from the 2T thread (but Pete Townshend can beat L&L!, in some ways at least). And polls show people are happier when they get older. Adolescence in a 2T is high pressure stuff, compared to elderhood in a 1T!

I reckon the singer is Maurice Chevalier, since I clicked on a 1963 What's My Line appearance video that came up after the Gigi one. John Daly said he looks as young as he did in 1945, and Arlene says so do you John.
https://youtu.be/8VG9WoCrb_c

Sing this one, says Arlene:
https://youtu.be/2TqSyvdqn9c

I guess we all remember this one.
https://youtu.be/GQxM5rJ-uiY
The past is calling.....
It is the inimitable Maurice Chevalier, one of comparatively few Lost who aged gracefully. A truly great international performer.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#24 at 12-05-2015 12:17 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by Dan '82 View Post
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2...n-history.html

Here's a Big Sweeping Theory that I've been toying with. There are lots of theories of the cycle of rise and decline of empires in the agricultural, premodern world. I'd like to create a parallel theory of low-frequency cycles (or, more accurately, long-term impulse responses to stochastic technology shocks) in the modern, industrialized world.

It's possible to see the convulsions of the World Wars and the Great Depression as a one-time event - part of the growing pains of the industrial revolution, not to be repeated. But what if some of the core features of those events are actually part of a cycle? Here's a sketch of how that cycle might work:


Phase 1: Technological Change. A huge burst of new stuff gets invented. Growth accelerates.


Phase 2: Globalization. New tech and growth create new global supply chains. Trade and migration accelerate.


Phase 3a: Inequality. New tech and globalization offer lots of opportunity for rich people to deploy their capital. New supply chains, products, and markets allow entrepreneurs to evade incumbents, vested interests, and governments. First movers make fortunes. Rich people deploy their wealth to restrain government attempts at regulation and redistribution, to keep the party going. Meanwhile, workers are forced to compete with foreigners and immigrants, and are also forced to pay the costs of reskilling in response to tech changes and globalization. Widespread inequality results.


Phase 3b: Cultural Change. New economic opportunities allow previously disempowered groups to gain power and status. Tech disrupts traditional family structures. Culture changes rapidly.


Phase 3c: Financialization. The need to finance new tech industries and new global supply chains expand the size of the finance sector. This results in large asset bubbles.


Phase 3d: Geopolitical Shifts. New supply chains and new tech mean some previously poor countries are now able to become rich. With wealth comes power. New great powers destabilize the geopolitical order.


Phase 4: Rise of Extremism. Economic inequality precipitates the rise of "leveling" (leftist) movements. Anger at cultural change and fear of competition with immigrants, mixed with displaced anger over inequality, precipitate the rise of reactionary (rightist) movements. Rightists and leftists feed off of each other, each portraying the other as an existential threat in order to frighten the populace into turning to the opposite extreme. Extremist politicians abuse veto points in political systems to paralyze governments and make countries effectively ungovernable.


Phase 5: Economic Slowdown. The collapse of a global bubble (from 3c) begins a protracted worldwide economic slowdown. For whatever reason - overhang of debt? extrapolative expectations? hysteresis? secular stagnation? some weird disruption to trade networks? - the economy does not recover quickly to previous growth rates. Because of extremist control of veto points, policy is unable to respond to the slowdown. Centrists on both the left and right are discredited and toppled.


Phase 6: War. Extremists may fight each other in civil wars. Alternatively, geopolitical disruptions may lead to international conflict between new and incumbent powers. Extremists push their governments toward fighting external enemies, assassinating or toppling moderate leaders who refuse to fight. If a country is too weak to fight external enemies, or if no such enemies are close by, civil war results instead.


Phase 7: New Order. Out of the chaos and destruction of the wars emerges a new stable geopolitical order. Left-right extremist conflicts cause society to be exhausted by violence, and moderates slowly return to power. The exigencies of war cause governments to reestablish control over their economies, creating a new set of vested interests and protected incumbents. Inequality is dramatically reduced by destruction of wealth in wars. New incumbents provide a new "social model" that creates economic security for the masses.






This is basically a description of what happened in the late 19th and early 20th century, along with a number of assumptions about why it happened. Obviously there will never be enough data to confirm or refute this complex, slow, and sweeping of a theory - not in our lifetime, anyway.


But it's interesting to think about recent events as possibly corresponding to this sort of cycle. Here's how the modern world fits into the pattern:


Phase 1: Technological Change. The IT revolution, computers, the internet, automation, mobile communication.


Phase 2: Globalization. The huge wave of global growth between 1990 and 2008. Globalized supply chains. A huge Latin American immigration flow into the U.S., and a huge Middle Eastern immigrant flow into Europe.


Phase 3a: Inequality. Rising income and wealth inequality everywhere. Stagnating wages in rich countries. An explosion in the number of billionaires. Soaring college tuition as workers desperately try to get skills.


Phase 3b: Cultural Change. Greater economic opportunity and equality for women, due to the service economy. A rise in divorce and single parenthood, and a drop in marriage. Sex culture spreading via the Internet. The decline of religion.


Phase 3c: Financialization: The explosion of financial profits and output as percentages of the total.


Phase 3d: Geopolitical Shift: The rise of China and the recovery of Russia, and (most importantly) the de facto alliance between the two.


Phase 4: Rise of Extremism. The steady polarization of American politics. Skyrocketing use of the filibuster. The Tea Party. The debt ceiling crisis. Trump. Sanders. Fox vs. MSNBC. Le Pen. The British National Party. Syriza and Golden Dawn. The Zaitokukai. Campus anti-speech movements. Online wars between leftist "SJWs" and rightists (GamerGate, etc.). The normalization of the terms "fascist" and "socialist". Illiberalism on both sides of the political spectrum.


Phase 5: Economic Slowdown: The 2008 crisis and the Great Recession, the Euro crisis and the China slowdown and the emerging markets slowdown.


Phase 6: War. Let's hope not...




I know this big sweeping theory, like all such theories, is untestable hand-waving and blatant overfitting. But it's kind of interesting, isn't it? And also disturbing.
History is no benign force. Human vices and virtues both drive it.

A century after what was then known as the Great War or the War to End All Wars -- we now call it World War I, hardly anyone can give a coherent explanation for its eruption and its pointless savagery. Military technology overpowered the innate desire of most people for peace. There is no clear-cut set of villains as in the Second World War; one can blame World War II on Adolf Hitler and his Nazi thugs in Germany, the morally-empty bluster of Benito Mussolini, and on militaristic fire-breathers in Japan. There might be a difference now; FDR and Churchill established a way in which to keep the peace after war -- give the defeated no cause to strike back, and expose the sociopaths who bring the calamity of war for their own aggrandizement to harsh judgment as gangsters.

At that I can predict the end of the infernal "Islamic" State, with its surviving leaders and brutal enforcers tried much as the US tried gangsters like Lepke Buchalter and the Allies tried Hermann Goering and Kenji Doihara. But at this I get ahead of myself.

Technological change was more physically momentous in the forty or so years going into World War I. So it was with barbed wire, electric lights, recorded sound, moving pictures, refrigerators, motor vehicles, and aircraft. Humanity could not avoid those. The military forces and their enablers exploited those to the fullest -- and exploited the newfangled machine guns with no civilian purpose but plenty of purpose in what the military does best -- mass-killing.

Technology in our time is more subtle in its effect, making information available cheaply and easily. Such a technology as the internet allows people to bypass the publishing house and printing press -- and the record company. It will not revolutionize transportation other than to allow the replacement of petroleum with other sources of power and promote electronic pickpocket for collecting tolls. Dislike the electronic pickpocket? The old roads are still available. There is a dark side of the technology of entertainment... that it can be used to spy upon us. Someone who inflicts a program that reads what we reads and decides that if "Atlanta" and "Honda" are on the same page that you might be interested in visiting a Honda dealer in Atlanta... even if you are an employee of Ford Motor Company in Chicago is a nuisance more than a menace. If your boss can spy upon the social media and personal e-mail that you have at home, then your boss can tell if you show less-than-perfect loyalty to your employer (as if you had left a copy of your resume on a company's photocopying machine). Your boss might be able to discern whether your political beliefs are consistent with those that Master Class wants you to express (basically fascism in many cases).

Phase 1 is arguably complete, and full takeover of the markets is underway. The people who have no desire to use the high technology of IT are dying out, and a majority of adults can't remember when there was no IT. I'm nearly 60, and there have been computers in personal use throughout my adulthood. To be sure, people still had to program their old Commodore 64 and use computer monitors that were monochrome and better offered text than images, and images that came off the early printers could create images only if one fashioned stock characters into images instead of creating the smooth images that we now see... but even that was a huge break from relying entirely upon ink and paper printed somewhere else.

Phase 2? There are places isolated from modernity, or places where poverty is so pervasive (parts of the Third World) that modernity is an inaccessible luxury. We underestimate the potential of Africa, so far the most underdeveloped of continents.

3a? Intensification of inequality reflects the rapaciousness of economic elites using such power as they get to get their way irrespective of any human cost. The spirit of Henry Clay Frick is alive and well in America... and the fictional Simon Legree had to have some basis in reality. The elites can punish sociopathic behavior in non-elites easily and ruthlessly, but they have little desire to correct themselves of it.

I see a parallel between Carnegie divesting himself of his great wealth toward the end of his life and Zuckerberg turning over a gigantic portion of his fortune to charity... but both incidences are comparatively rare. Plutocrats are as rapacious as ever now as they were in the Gilded Age, and their politics are generally no improvement. Human nature changes so little that we can still learn from Shakespeare -- and even Sophocles.

3b? The trend existed before any of the newfangled technologies of mass IT. Any two idiots can have sex, which may partially explain why there are so many idiots today. The "sexual revolution" of the 1960s preceded that mass IT, and the sex drive is nothing new. Bertrand Russell and Fulton Sheen (on opposite sides on the promotion of religion) have been dead for forty years, so the decline of religion has little to do with IT. What is different is that people have easier access to religions not of their cultural heritage. If anything, certain forms of Islam, not all of them benign, have been more effective at using the Internet to push themselves. ISIS, horrible as it is, must be offering some meaning and purpose in life that secular culture does not.

(I'd rather that it were the Quakers... pioneers of the abolition of slavery and the rejection of war. But that is a different story. Such can make good people better, but it can't make bad people good).

3c. Financialization is the bubble -- an attempt to add on questionable services to the overall economy for gigantic profits with little investment. As in the Roaring Twenties, so in the Double-Zero decade. I am tempted to believe that the pay-as-you-go ethos of the 1950s, when credit cards were products for executives and business travelers, will be revived. Such will require that people get paid appropriately for their work, generally a more commonplace reality in a 1T than in a depraved 3T that the American Right is trying to preserve at least in economics.

A joke can express my opinion of the loan-shark economy that we now have:

George W. Bush got struck by lightning while playing golf in Texas, and ended up in Eternity. But instead of meeting the likes of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR he met Leonid Brezhnev. (That's what one gets for doing aggressive warfare by starting a war for profits based upon lies). They both discovered that they had something in common in their bungling of war in Afghanistan... and finally got to discuss economics.

Brezhnev explained how the Soviet economy worked: "We pretended to pay workers who only pretended to work".

Dubya responded: "We cracked the whip and compelled people to work, but we paid workers in credit that they still had to pay off. We did better!"

That, I think, reflects the resurgence of the plantation ethic, one in which workers got paid in kind as they worked and were in debt until some settlement, fulfillment of the terms of employment were to be be judged by the employer/exploiter at the end of the term. The worker always fell short and was in debt again but no valid alternative. It's more sophisticated now, but it is no less rotten. We Americans may think that we cast off that horrible way of doing things in the 1960s in the backward parts of the South -- but it has come back with some clever raiment. As with sharecropping and other forms of rural exploitation it reduces people to their economic functions and makes life miserable. People can't simply take a ride on the Illinois Central Railroad to leave Mississippi anymore.

4. The ruling elites promote extremism -- with the Right promoting nationalism as the idea that mass hardship is the cornerstone of some prosperity beyond the sordid reality and to divide the populace along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Left is to be strident but ineffective, the equivalent of the "Goldstein" bogey in 1984. The American Right succeeds because it successfully gets poor white people to see themselves as 'culturally' or 'morally' superior to the non-white poor and to 'amoral' types who could never believe in Pie-in-the-Sky-When-You-Die. Pie-in-the-Sky-When-You-Die is the ultimate racket, one in which people pay off the plutocratic elites with their selfless toil for bare survival while those elites use the enhanced productivity solely to enrich and indulge themselves and entrench their power.

So it was with the KKK in the 1920s in America and the Nazis in Germany around 1930. (Yes, I believe that the 1915 Klan could have rivaled the Nazis in evil-doing had they seized power -- restoring slavery at great cost of life and having its own Holocaust directed at Jews. Nazis and the Klan agreed on the 'incorrigible evil' of the Jews). Today the Right would impose some Union of Christian and Corporate States in the USA... a mirror-image of the old Soviet Union. Workers would get fundamentalist Christianity imposed upon them, and corporate elites would get their plutocratic oligarchy in a single-Party state in which the Party Boss is the real power to whom even a puppet President (see the role of George W. Bush and Karl Rove) would defer.

5. Eventually, underfed people with few incentives to work... goldbrick. They quit believing in the 'Good Life' dangled before them because they realized that as they approach it it will be taken just out of reach again. The basic rule of good business -- do not hurt your customers or employees -- is ignored, and the obviousness of this rule becomes evident. Attacks on formal education ensure that although workers are more pliant, they are no more productive.

6. The military, which does not operate on the commercial principle of profit and loss, may be the only remaining institution with any effectiveness at all.

History can move much faster now than it did in pre-modern times. The last red-letter words of Jesus (in Revelation)

Surely I shall come quickly

have yet to be fulfilled, but that hardly deters Believers.
Last edited by pbrower2a; 12-05-2015 at 12:22 PM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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