More on Paradigm Model
I am pleased you have looked into this in some detail. You have many insightful comments.
This is true, the difficulty comes from trying to develop a model that generates the 18 year timing in a plausible manner, with a minimum of "hand waving"First though, I must note that 18-year turnings seem to fit the historical really well for the United States
I considered this sort of thing. The problem is it doesn't really explain anything. What makes one generation different from the next? Different nurture one must suppose. But why should the nurture be different? Since new blood enters the political arena continuously, why should there be the discontinuity of a turning change? Yet if the change is not abrupt then a contiguous set of birth cohorts cannot be assembled into a discrete generation that can produce a consistent nurturing environment for ~18 years to imprint the next generation.For the industrial era, political participation definitely occurs by the early 20s and considering the archetype imprint can't possibly occur before 4 years of age (not enough memory capacity) That 18 year turnings work pretty well -- 18+4=22.
I toyed with this. I tried to relate educational attainment over time with the sort of Apar that would be needed. The shape isn't right. Amax rises more or less linearly for the two centuries after 1800. To keep constant turning length, Apar has to show the same type of linear rise. But education attainment doesn't extend to ages where it can affect Apar values in the 20's until well into the 20th century. Full participation in elementary education wasn't achieved until about 1930 and full participation in high schoold education until around 1970. We are fairly close to full participation in post-secondary today (i.e. those who wish to get more education after high school can do so). Mass education extending well into the 20's (i.e. that could affect Apar values in the ~25 neighborhood) is a recent phenomenon, yet the need for a rising Apar to make the turnings come out right was already there in the 19th century.Apar can be presumed to have been increasing on par with Amax. The same technological structure that is increasing Amax requires substantially more educated people in order to create and maintain the capital structure. As a result, the average age at which a person begins work (in the pivotal fields that dominate our civilization) have been steadily increasing from about 18 to 22 or 23. Thus Apar has probably gone from 21 to 26 in the same time that Amax has gone from high 40s to 55. Turning length would thus fall in a consistent 18-20 year range over the whole period.
The easiest way to fit turnings (as oppsed to critical elections) is to use a fixed Amax and Apar that gives 18 year turnings. But if Amax is to have a real interpretation, it should rise with increasing life expectancy more or less like average age in political power does. If you simply employ the regression line from the average age data to get Amax and use fixed Apar and L values, you can obtain a good fit for critical elections. This is because the spacing of critical elections has risen from 28 years to 36 years since 1800.
Actually S&H state that a generation is the time from birth to coming of age and they use 0-21. They further go with phase of life, which puts the end of mid-life at 65, the semi-official age of retirement. Their model is elegant and very plausible. Too bad it doesn't fit the data.For some time I've had a hunch (without any real data) that turning structure had to be related to when people came of age. The youth emergence concept was a pretty good stab at that concept.
No, 18-year turnings would come from the spacing between age 4 and the age of political entry 22. 26-year turnings would come from the spacing between age 4 and the coming into inheritance at age 30. There would be no 30 year turnings, just as there would be no 22 year turnings.Here's the major problem with youth emergence, however. For the industrial era, political participation definitely occurs by the early 20s and considering the archetype imprint can't possibly occur before 4 years of age (not enough memory capacity) That 18 year turnings work pretty well -- 18+4=22. However, with aristocratic societies you get something closer to 26+4 = 30 year turnings.
The model I present is not a complete one. All it does is produce a periodic social moment trigger. For example I used it to fit critical elections, which are discrete events, not periods of time. These events often trigger or reinforce a shift in political zeitgeist, roughly in accord with the cycle first described by Arthur Schlesinger. In my earlier presentation of the model I put in these cycles. I also put in associated economic cycles.Your model has some interesting implications -- one of which is that it would be difficult to have a two-part or six part cycle. I have one issue with the cycle your model presents -- what causes the social moments?
The economic cycles are connected to the political cycles. I don't have a clear cut direct mechanism for the interaction, but there is indirect evidence for it. Consider the regular financial panics associated with the cycles in land values that I call the Kuznets cycle: 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and 1929.
Notice that all seven panics occurred in odd-numbered years. Quite a coincidence, eh? The probability that all seven would be either all odd or all even is 1.6%, which is statistically significant. The only relevant commonality of odd-numbered years that I can think of is that they are non-election years. Thus, there is a statistically-significant correlation between the major depressionary panics and election years which strongly suggests involvement of politics in the real estate cycle.
Fourteen of the 21 bear market troughs since 1933 fall in non-Presidential election years, most recently in 2002. The probability of this arising from chance is 0.001%, providing strong evidence for an election-linked cycle in the stock market. I will also point out that there exist 18-year secular bull and bear markets in stocks that correspond quite well to the S&H turnings and their associated Schlesinger cycles.
Anyway, in the formulation I presented I employed the externally-provided political and economic cycles to determine the length of the era. Then given a trigger and a length, the model can spit out a set of "turnings" and generations.
There is no reason why parenting style cannot change with the turnings and produce generations with the characteristics that S&H describe. I simply don't use these. In my population model I have social moments externally produced by a different mechanism. Given regular social moments there is no reason why generations similar to those of S&H can be created. And these generations can "color" the turnings to the appropriate type. Croaker posted a figure showing this idea a couple of posts back.In S&H's model, my model and (to some extent) in GD -- the generation breaks occur right before a turning shift and thus children are affected by the change in parenting style triggered by the new turning which in turn, creates children who will cause or modify the next mood shift. In your model, it is possible to have a generation straddle two turnings and thus nurturing modes seem to be dropped from your model.
Perhaps you're right that a social moment is created by the generation that came of age during the last social moment. A similar pattern would explain alternating reactive generations. However, this doesn't explain the existence of alternating calms and storms in the first place. It seems you've solved one problem and created another. OTOH, maybe you have an explanation for alternating calms and storms.
The paradigm model produces a triggering event given a social moment. Since I have an earlier mechanism, the first social moment to be considered with the paradigm model was created by the earlier model. So I can take that social moment as a given. This social moment is the Revolution.
The paradigm model holds that a "can-do" generation paradigm was created in young people because of the great secular achievements of the Revolution. The youth holding this paradigm, when they achieved positions of power stove to "make a more perfect union" with the experiment in libertarian government launched by victory in the critical election of 1800.
This now creates a new political era that can create a new paradigm amongst younger people. The question comes how long does this era last and so how big of a generation will it make? Schlesinger settled on a 15-year timing for a mechanism based on political organization as described by Ted Goertzel:
So one can re-formulate the paradigm model by assuming that the liberal eras launched around the time a generation comes into power last 15 years. Recall that the spacing from the mid-point of a liberal era to the beginning of the next is Amax - Apar. This means the time from the beginning of one liberal era to the beginning of the next will be Amax - Apar + L/2, where L is the length of the liberal era, or 15 years. This gives the length of a political cycle as Amax - Apar + 7.5. With Apar = 25 this comes to Amax - 17.5.It seems to take about fifteen years for a successful political party or movement to define its agenda, mobilize its resources, implement its policies as best it can, and obtain the inevitably less than hoped for results. Political parties and other political organizations go through a fairly predictable cycle: growth and vitality under a charismatic leader, a period of mature, more routinized leadership, then a gradual decline as the leaders become soft and the supporters tire of the message.
By introducing this 15 year length to the paradigm model, 15-year paradigm generations are now created at regular intervals of Amax - 17.5 years. The period in between the liberal eras (or the "inactive" generations in between the paradigmatic generations) are not 15 years in length as a rule. Their length is given by Amax - 32.5 years.
As for a social moment, one needs economic support to get one. Shortly after the paradigm model got going, the interaction between politics and economics ensures that the requisite economic factors will be present by the time a generation reaches Amax so that a social moment can be created. But for the first critical election in 1800, this alignment wasn't in place. Thus, the 1800-1816 liberal era isn't a social moment. What happens is a libertarian experiment is launched that fails on the reality of governance. There are no bad times to color the paradigm of the young Jeffersonians. There are no great achievements either. Mostly there is simply a core "Democratic" ideology implanted into the paradigms of young Jeffersonians. Later, when economic hard times develop after 1819, this ideology allows old Jeffersonians to become Jacksonian Democrats. The economic hard times have already created some of the features of a social moment. The Jacksonians are able to put an ideological spin on the times and win power in 1828.
The Jacksonian era is essentially a pragmatic rerun of the last liberal era. The generation whose paradigms are being expressed didn't experience triumph while young and so don't have the "can-do" ethos of Hero-type generations. They also did not experience an awakening when young either, so they don't have the moral certainty possessed by Prophet-type paradigms. But they do have a political paradigm and that is enough to produce a new liberal era.
This liberal era creates its own 15-year paradigmatic generation, but this one is colored by the socioeconomic milieu of the Awakening triggered by the Panic of 1819. Specifically, ideas about slavery, wealth redistribution (stealing Indian land to sell/give to whites) and states rights (e.g. nullification) are implanted, which will help frame the next political era/social moment. This particular paradigmatic generation has prophet qualities because the economic conditions are favorable for a social moment, and the political conditions are unfavorable for a crisis (there are no divisive paradigms held by the elder dominant generation)
When this generation ages into power we see a number of interesting things. First we see the first direct attempt to engineer an economic cycle through political means. In 1854 Congress passes the Graduation Act that slashes the price of long-unsold federal lands by 90%, igniting a land boom that peaks in the same year (coincidentally exactly 18 years after the last peak in 1836). With a peak comes the bust in 1857 and economic conditions are created that increase political irritation. We already have a tinderbox with conflicting paradigms on the issue of slavery. Patience runs out in 1860, the Democrats split, and Lincoln is elected. That is, there is a critical election associated with the generation whose paradigm was created in the last social moment/liberal era. This critical election results in the Civil War. In contrast to what S&H claim, the Civil War did produce one group of empowered youth. These are the young Abolitionists who see their objective of emancipation realized. Those holding the Abolitionist paradigm will age into Progressives. After the failure of the Populists in the 1896 critical election, they launch a liberal era of their own, which is quite different from what the Populists would have done.
Being an empowered generation, the Civil War generation does not possess "battling paradigms" like their predecessors, but rather "can do" paradigms that support attempts to form a more perfect union. This sort of leadership prevents the social moment from being a Crisis. The Panic of 1893 and subsequent depression helps produce the stress needed for the characteristics of a social moment to be present in the liberal era.
And it goes down from there. Generational paradigms forged in crises, lead to "ameliorative" efforts in the following liberal era, that induce the divisive paradigms in the young people of that time (prophets). This divisive paradigms lead to a Crisis for the liberal era after that. Just because this political cycle is operating to keep a roughly even spacing of liberal eras of alternating crisis and non-crisis flavors doesn't mean that the S&H-type generational developments cannot still happen. Artists will still be born during crises and Nomads during Awakenings. Those whose paradigms are of the can-do type will look a lot like S&H Heroes and the holders of the divisive paradigms will look a lot like Prophets. The difference is that we don't have to rely on these generations somehow creating the cycle. The cycle runs underneath them, although they will certainly color each era in ways that will make them look like turnings. They will also smear the boundaries to make the turnings (as opposed to the political eras) more uniform in length.
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Originally Posted by Kurt Horner
