58 year cycle is not a new idea, its part of calendrical analysis. See Chris Carolan's work for an example.Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis
http://www.calendarresearch.com/resources.html
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58 year cycle is not a new idea, its part of calendrical analysis. See Chris Carolan's work for an example.
http://www.calendarresearch.com/resources.html
Al-Qaeda's Generational Split
Dear Matt,
My hypothesis is that the overlapping cycles are independent. Thus,
a person might be risk-seeking in the area of war, and risk-aversive
in the area of finance and flu epidemics.
I don't know what postings you're referring to.
This situation in Yemen is kind of interesting from a generational
point of view, and I actually wrote something about it briefly a few
months ago. But there isn't enough information to get a real handle
on it. It would be interesting, though, to understand the
generational differences within the terrorists.
** Iraq: Suicide bombers interrupt celebrations in Baghdad over soccer win
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e070726#e070726
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
The climax of the McCarthy hearings occurred on June 9, 1954, with
the retort, "Have you no sense of decency." So the 58-year
hypothesis would predict something in 2012.
I'm not aware of anything that would count as a "climax" of the
Korean War. In fact, the war officially never ended.
But I think it's possible to test the hypothesis by looking at
historical events.
For example, the Palmer Raids of 1919 climaxed in fiasco when an
expected "Communist revolution" didn't occur on May 1, 1920. What
happened 58 years later? The Church Committee met in 1975-76, and
imposed stringent controls on the CIA and FBI, including a wall
between them.
Was that a panicked follow-on to the Palmer Raids? The "catastrophe"
was the rounding up and jailing of thousands "radicals" and
"leftists." The "panic" was the fear that someone (like Nixon) would
do that again. That would seem to fulfill the requirements.
Of course, after 9/11 attitudes changed. The FBI and CIA were
heavily criticized for not "comparing notes" and discovering the
danger in advance -- which of course would have been illegal under
the laws passed after the Church committee recommendations. Also,
hundreds of Muslims living in the United States were rounded up and
jailed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1694961.stm
Is that a fair analysis? It needs more formalization, but I think it
is. If there had been multiple committees like the Church Committee,
but at different times, that would cast doubt on the analysis. But
the Church Committee was quite unique in the last century, and the
fact that it occurred 55-56 years after the Palmer Raids can be
considered significant.
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Dear Mike,
That was a great article. Thanks for pointing it out.
http://www.calendarresearch.com/58yearpanic.html
The only thing that I don't like about it is the nonsense about the
moon. What does the moon have to do with it? Does he believe that
every 58 years the Man in the Moon wakes up and turns on his magic
beam, pointing it toward the earth, and the earthlings obey and
perform some panicked task?
The thing that I'm always complaining about on my web site is that
people seem to be congenitally unable to see a generational
explanation of something, even when it's completely, totally obvious.
This isn't the most obvious example that I've seen, but it makes a
lot more sense than nonsense about the moon.
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
My experience has been that any cyclical phenomenon will eventually have an astrological explanation attached to it. As the stock market moves in cycles, it would be no exception.
Now I'm wondering what a discussion between you and Eric the Green would be like.
Your local general nuisance
"I am not an alter ego. I am an unaltered id!"
Happy Thanksgiving! (Americans only)
To all:
We're entering the holiday season at a very sad and difficult time.
On August 16, I posted a message saying that "the nightmare was
beginning," saying that it appeared we were in the last few weeks
prior to a generational stock market crash. It appeared that it
might occur in the last week of September.
That didn't happen, but the overall prediction was not wrong. The
trend lines today are much worse than they were on August 16. The
stock market keeps falling, and the mood of investors is becoming
increasingly anxious and gloomy. See the article I posted today for
more information.
** Markets fall as investors are increasingly unsettled by bad economic news
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e071121#e071121
As I always say: Treasure the time you have left, and use it to
prepare yourself, your family, your community and your nation.
It's something to remember as we think about what there is to be
thankful for at this sad time.
Happy Thanksgiving! (Americans only)
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Generational analysis of the global financial crisis
Generational analysis of the global financial crisis
The following is excerpted from a recent posting on my web site:
The 1929 stock market crash was not a one-day event. The stock
market kept falling, month after month after month, for four years,
until 1933, when it had fallen 90% of its peak value.
One question that I've wondered about is the "mood" of investors
during those years. During the last few years, we've seen the
"euphoric" mood of bubblehead investors for whom every bit of bad
news was good news, and every bit of good news was cause for chirps
of joy.
Well, what was it like during the downturn years?
It may be what we're seeing now -- an increasing expectation of more
and more bad news, a lengthening time horizon before the masses of
investors expect good news to start again.
This is certainly something that pundits and investors and
journalists are completelly oblivious to. The whole concept of
investor mood is foreign to them, especially when it's related to
generational concepts.
And yet, it's the key to understanding what's going on and what's
coming.
In order to advance this a little farther, here's a graph of the Dow
Industrials since 1950:
In the above graph, the red line is the Dow Industrials. The blue
line is the exponential growth trend, computed since 1896, and
represents the "real value" of the stock market. This provides a
reference to whether the market is overpriced or underpriced at any
given time.
What I would like to do is speculate on how investor "moods" change
as generational changes occur.
What I especially want to focus on is the two "inflection points" on
the DJIA graph. At each of these two points, the graph turns a sharp
corner to the left, forming the letter "V". Mathematically, these are
the points in 1995 and 2003 where the second derivative is
discontinuous (or infinite, depending on how you look at it).
Things in nature tend to be continuous, unless affected violently by
some external force. A rolling ball may slow down or speed up, but
the change in speed will be continuous unless the ball hits a rock or
a tree.
Similarly, we would expect the DJIA curve to continue in the same
direction, perhaps gradually rising or lowering, but a sharp "V"
cannot occur unless affected violently by some external force. And
the most obvious choice of an external force is a generational
change.
Thus, we provide theoretically the following generational investor
"moods" from 1950 to the present:
- Depression survivor mood: 1950 to 1995. The leaders
in the nation's public and private organizations were survivors of
the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. They were
very cautious, and very suspicious of credit. During this period,
the DJIA oscillated fairly close to the long-term trend line.
The Depression era survivors exerted leadership in global financial
institutions. These leaders included those in the Silent Generation,
the "depression babies" and "war babies" who grew up during the
horrors of the Great Depression and World War II. They were in
charge until the early 1990s, when they all disappeared (retired or
died), all at once, leaving behind a new generation of younger leaders
with little or no fear of credit.- Boomer Euphoria: 1995 to 2000. The Baby Boomers were the
first generation born after WW II. In common parlance, the Boomer
generation starts with those born in 1946, but in generational theory
it starts in 1942, because anyone born after that time has no
personal memory of WW II.
The phrase that I'm going to apply to Boomers is: "passively
destructive."
As I've described many times on this web site, Boomers have no
ability to govern or lead. Their parents had been taking care of
them their whole lives. All that the Boomers ever did was argue with
and humiliate their parents, as happened in the 1960s with the
"generation gap."
This is the explanation for the dot-com bubble in the 1990s. Boomers
didn't actively create the bubble; they passively let it happen by
removing decades-old restrictions, imposed by their parents, on the
types of investments that they'd allow themselves to make. There was
no destructive intent to harm other people. The destruction was
passive.- Boomer Panic: 2000-2002. The bursting of the dot-com
bubble changed the Boomers' euphoria to panic.
There's really little difference between euphoria and panic, since
both are totally emotional. They correspond respectively to the
manic and depressive phases of bipolar disease. The symptoms may be
different, but it's the same disease.- Generation-X Euphoria: 2002 to September, 2007. There was
a distinct change in 2002, and it was a generational change, but it
appears to have been a different kind of generational change than the
one that occurred in 1995.
There's little doubt that it was in 2002 that the real abuse of
credit began. There had been things like credit derivatives around
before, but it was in 2002 that the really explosive use of
"structured credit" began.
The Boomers were still nominally the leaders, but, as before, they
didn't want to lead. The Gen-Xers stepped up and took charge.
Here's what PIMCO's Bill Gross said recently in his monthly
commentary:
A web site reader put it a little differently. "Only Gen-Xers would
have the technical sophistication to devise these complex, opaque and
(consciously or not) dangerously deceptive models that the CDOs use.
Few Boomer men can even type, let alone write software."
If the Boomers were "passively destructive," the Xers have been
"actively destructive," creating these complex financial structures.
Much of what the Xers did was fraudulent, illegal, and contemptuous
of the entire global financial system. I've pointed out several
examples of fraud on this web site, especially fraudulent methods
used to avoid having to apply "mark to market" to overpriced CDOs.
In fact, the number of legal actions is increasing. As time goes on,
we're going to see more and more criminal prosecutions against
everyone from individual homeowners who lied on their applications to
mortgage brokers to major financial institutions.
Generation-Xers are the name for the generation born roughly between
the early 1960s and the early 1980s. In generational theory, they
belong to the Nomad archetype, the generation of people born during a
generational Awakening era. Bill Strauss and Neil Howe, the founding
fathers of generational theory, found that those in Nomad generations
become disaffected and angry, growing up in the shadow of the favored
Prophet generation (like America's Boomers).
In 2002, the first wave of Gen-Xers reached the age of 40, and were
in sufficiently high leadership positions that they could influence
and often control the financial decisions of many organizations,
especially since their Boomer bosses just let them do what they want
anyway.
I've spent a lot of time since the beginning of this year trying to
figure out what's been going on. Once you really begin to understand
what's going on with securitization of credit, credit derivatives and
CDOs, you realize what a totally debauched, depraved and abusive
design they are. This is no simple passive mistake -- that's what
the dot-com bubble was. This was a massively destructive and
self-destructive financial architecture, devised by nihilistic
financial engineers on the edges of the Generation-X generation. This
was active destruction at its most debauched and depraved, condoned
by passively destructive Boomers. We're now about to pay a very,
very expensive price.- Generation-X Panic: September, 2007, to ????. It appears
now that Gen-Xers are just beginning to panic. The market is on a
steady downward trend, and it appears that this will continue. There
hasn't been a generational panic yet, but indications are that it's
coming close.
Don't think that I'm saying that Boomers are good and Xers are
bad. Both are pathetically bad, but it's their interaction, the way
they complement each other, that results in the destruction we're
headed for.
The above is a first pass at a generational explanation of what's
going on. As time goes on, and as more information and more criminal
prosecutions become known, I'll try to expand and refine it.
Excerpted from:
** Markets fall as investors are increasingly unsettled by bad economic news
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e071121#e071121
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Forecasting
This is a response to a posting in the "Bad 1T = No Prophet
Generation?" thread.
That's absolutely right, and that's exactly the problem that I set
out in 2003 to resolve.
As you correctly point out, purely generational forecasting provides
predictions that are 100% certain, within a time window of decades.
The problem then is to narrow the window. And methodology I've
developed, and illustrated with hundreds of articles on my web site,
is to analyze current events and relate them to the long-term
predictions, in order to get short-term predictions with a
probability of 70-90%.
Take the current situation in Pakistan, for example. If you start
from the Partition genocide in 1947, then you can predict a new
crisis war sometime between 1990 and 2047. That's not very useful.
But if you look at the events going on right now -- increasing ethnic
violence between the Sindhis and Mohajirs, between the Balochis and
Pashtuns, sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shia, a possible
HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT generational change in the government (replacing
Artist archetype Musharraf with someone younger), suicide bombings,
and increasing infiltration and military controld by al-Qaeda and
Taliban militants --
then you can reasonably estimate that the original window (1990-2047)
could be narrowed considerably to 2008-2010, with probability around
30-40%.
So then you perform a similar analysis on other regions -- India,
China, Palestine, the Caucasus, etc. -- along with the danger of
financial crisis and bird flu pandemic -- then you get a COMBINED
probability of 70-90% that AT LEAST ONE of these events will occur in
2008-2010.
Then if you assume further that a regional crisis war in any of these
regions will escalate into a world war, then you get a probability of
the Clash of Civilizations world war at 70-90% in 2008-2010.
I've experimented with different ways of saying this on my web site,
and the formula that I usually use is: "This could happen, next
week, next month, next year, or thereafter, but it's coming sooner
rather than later." This is my way of conveying urgency, without
being pinned down to an exact date.
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
I agree, but I still think that your assessment overestimates the interconnectivity of today's world, while we here in the west are used to a steady stream unprecedented technological advancement. In much of the world things are still done the old fashioned way. Much of The developing world still has to relies heavily on their own resources pretty much. Therefore I still think that it would take some time for a regional war to spread to the other regions, and once having spread to merge into into a single war. The spreading and merging would likely take about 5 years or more. However once the conflict merges into a single war it would probably last about another 5 years. Thus the crisis should end around the early 2020's. Before all of this can occur the current boomer-esque world of easy money would have to end not only in america but elsewhere.
The only technical point I would make is that I was really talking
about the START of a new world war, not the whole thing.
Beyond that, your scenario is perfectly reasonable. After all, it
took several years for WW II to spread to other countries, once
Britain and Germany were at war. I probably see the world as more
interconnected than you do, and would expect the war to end by
2012-2015, but basically I agree with what you're saying.
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
John, I really don't understand your emphasis an "Crisis Wars." It seems to me that such wars are merely epiphenomena of the generational alignment, thus 4Ts, war or no war, go on until Nomads start replacing Prophets in Elderhood (or, as in the case of the Civil War, the Nomads throw out of power the Prophets that caused an early Crisis) and start calming society's mood.
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
I agree, turnings are brought on by generational change, and I think Xenakis would third that motion. 4Ts have historically featured wars -- maybe war is not necessary for a 4T, but it is common. What I question is whether this 4T's war necessarily has to be a world one. Some have noticed that in Anglo-American history, saecula seem to alternate between "inter" 4Ts and "intra" 4Ts. The War of the Roses (intra) was followed by the Spanish Armada 4T (inter) was followed by the Glorious Revolution (so say S&H; Xenakis says the English Civil War was a 4T. Either way, this was an "intra") was followed by the American Revolutionary War (inter) was followed by the American Civil War (intra) was followed by the Depression/WWII (inter).
Thus this 4T should be an "intra" one, probably but not certainly involving war. Wouldn't this point to a civil war, coup, or internal revolution? That is, NOT struggles between warring nations? Read Naomi Wolf's new book for one liberal perspective on how an intra 4T could play out. As always, take with a grain of salt.
4Ts seem to be the times of maximal stress upon a community, nation, or civilization. The question going into one is what sort of stress one will find. It's obvious that this 4T will not have as its focus the aggression of fascist dictatorships in Germany, Italy, and Japan seeking regional hegemony that won't recognize the USA as a reasonable place to stop. If anything, I suspect that democracy is now more firmly entrenched in either of those countries than in the United States.
Weak leaders, economic folly, political corruption, and bureaucratic vice all weaken extant institutions almost everywhere. These all build during a 3T because people fail to address the 'maintenance needs' of institutional trust, political responsiveness, and inter-ethnic harmony as beggar-my-neighbor practices allow short-sighted hedonism as an anodyne -- until things fall apart. When things fall apart the demagogues offer intellectually-facile solutions... milk and honey for followers, persons to be milked and denied honey not mentioned. That the generational cycles of most parts of the world are almost in tandem suggest great danger at 3T/4T cusps. Or, as William Butler Yeats put it in 1919 in The Second Coming:
Prophetic in 1919, this poem was all too real fifteen years later in most of Europe and Asia. The "I've got mine --$crew you!" ethos that came in on little cat feet during "Morning in America" results in more people not only being $crewed -- but also with no means of recovery -- as the little cat grows unexpectedly into a tiger and can't be led gently out the door.Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Dubya and his coterie have no clue.
Dear Taylor,
You've got a chicken and egg problem. Following your reasoning, you
need a 4T for a crisis war, you need Nomads and Prophets for a 4T,
and you need a crisis war to get Nomads and Prophets.
Something has to launch the cycle to begin with, and the one thing
that works all the time is a crisis war. That doesn't prove it's a
crisis war, but since nothing else works consistently, it provides
strong support.
My background is in mathematics, particularly Mathematical Logic. I
became aware of TFT shortly after 9/11, and became obsessed by it, as
well as the need to prove for myself that TFT was valid. TFT itself
had several problems -- the Depression anomaly, the Civil War
anomaly, the Glorious Revolution anomaly. There were only six cycles
to begin with, and if three of them had anomalies, then it was likely
that TFT was no better than astrology.
The other problem was scope. S&H claimed that TFT only applied to
the Anglo-American timeline, and only since the middle ages. If that
was true, then it was probably useless, except as an interesting pop
psychology artifact for relating ourselves to others in our
generation.
I wanted to see if TFT could be verified at all places and times in
history. As a practical matter, the easiest things to verify were
crisis wars, since they're always listed in every history book. I
was able to show, by many examples, that crisis wars occur at all
places and times in history.
After that, I tested the theory in a number of other ways, using
multiple methods that corroborate each other:
- Strauss and Howe's theory
- Theoretical description of the generational cycle
- The crisis war list
- Detailed analyses of numerous wars and awakenings in history
- The Malthusian argument
- The evolutionary theory argument
- Integration with economics and macroeconomics.
- Theoretical development of cycle/generation integration
- Real-time testing of predictions on my web site
All of these methods point in the same direction, supporting the
validity of Generational Dynamics. Each of these methods by itself
may have some weakness, but when all the methods are taken together,
they form an enormous mountain of proof of the validity of
Generational Dynamics.
From the point of view of Mathematical Logic, what I want is an
abstract model of the Generational Dynamics theory. If such a model
exists, and if the model is "true" in the real world, then I know
that Generational Dynamics is internally consistent and that it
models the real world. That doesn't prove that some other model
wouldn't work equally well, but it does prove that my model works.
And my model is based on crisis wars, which launch the turnings and
the eras and the archetypes and the following crisis wars. The above
list of things all show that the model is "true" in the real world.
So I'm quite satisfied that Generational Dynamics is a correct
theory.
Now, I haven't proven that there aren't any other theories that work.
For example, maybe you have theory that works based on moon cycles.
That's great, and nothing I've done proves that your theory is wrong.
But the reverse is also true: You moon cycle theory would not prove
that Generational Dynamics is wrong.
So in answer to your question about the emphasis on crisis wars, my
answer is that they work. They produce a model that works in the
real world, as I've shown in many different ways. And until I find
something better, that's good enough for me.
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
On Crises
I've found, in my research (this is an estimate):
98%+ of crisis eras have some sort of war in them
85%+ of crisis eras have a war that adequately meets the crisis war algorithm
South America seems to account for the majority of that ~15% (its usually that the war is not the centerpiece of the 4T), but it's the reason I have slowly backed away from the term "Crisis War" when talking about a Crisis. I think the concept is important for evaluation should the war be the centerpiece, but is not the sole determining factor.
Last edited by Matt1989; 11-25-2007 at 10:16 PM.
Fair enough, but since you are in part arguing against a 5th turning you'll need to find me a period that had no crisis for 130+ years (or a full saeculum plus a mid-cycle), or show me that every post-industrial mid-cycle period was less than 75 years long.
You can start with something like Mexico, Sudan, Turkey, Ireland, Saudi Arabia or Morocco in the modern day.
Last edited by Matt1989; 11-25-2007 at 10:21 PM.
The inter/intra switching doesn't hold up to well when applied to the outside world. I imagine its just a coincidence in the Anglosphere. I could see a civil war or revolution at some point in time, but it doesn't seem likely to kick off the crisis.
Dear Matt,
What are some specific examples of crisis eras without "centerpiece"
crisis wars?
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
I'll throw out 5:
Egyptian Revolution (1944-1953)
UPC Revolt in Cameroon (1955-1960)
Brazilian Dictatorship (1964-1974)
Military Dominance in Ecuador (1960-1972)
Peru Instability and Military Dominance (1965-1985)
Now, all 5 of these examples had some sort of war that took place over the course of the Crisis. There was the Arab-Israeli War for the Egyptians, the minor wars in Cameroon, the guerrilla warfare in Brazil, etc. etc. There is no doubt these wars shook the national conscience, and in some cases, set off a chain reaction that lead to the climax, but it's hard to view the wars as being "The Crisis."
Last edited by Matt1989; 11-26-2007 at 12:49 AM.
Upward Crash
At 2 pm, the Dow is up well over 300 points, in a drunken orgy.
It's a new "upward crash."
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
I guess this isn't a dead cat bounce. Dead cats don't bounce this high for two days.
Your local general nuisance
"I am not an alter ego. I am an unaltered id!"
They do if they're hugely bloated and stuffed with nothing but hot air.
John
101 uses for a dead cat--#99 Hot air balloon.
Your local general nuisance
"I am not an alter ego. I am an unaltered id!"
This is the second correction of the year. Just looking back at 1928 and 1929 Dow data, I have found two corrections before September 3rd, 1929. The differences are that they were more spaced out and the peak to bottom occurred in a timeframe of ~2 weeks. I wonder what the causes were.
