The Fourth Turning Is Here

[Logen Ninefingers]

The Fourth Turning

https://frankdiana.net/2022/08/15/the-final-stages-of-the-fourth-turning/

1. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order takes root after the old has been swept away.
2. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion against the now-established order.
3. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions.
4. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. Together, the four turnings comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth.

Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years. Now, let’s trace the current cycle back in time – quoted right from the book – keeping in mind that the book was written in 1997.

HIGH: The First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. 1945 -1963

AWAKENING: The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s.

UNRAVELING: The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan’s mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the mid-2000s.

CRISIS: In 1997, the book predicted that the crisis period would begin in 2005. Each turning lasts about 20 years, placing the end of the cycle near 2025, or sometime during this decade. This Fourth Turning is a crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

Sometime in the next few years America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.
The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension. We cannot stop the seasons of history, but we can prepare for them. This message today is about preparing for a very uncertain – but sure to be transformative future.

‘CRISIS: In 1997, the book predicted that the crisis period would begin in 2005. Each turning lasts about 20 years, placing the end of the cycle near 2025, or sometime during this decade. This Fourth Turning is a crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.’

———

Probably you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict a crisis in the US, no matter what breathless term they choose to label it with. The fact they talk about windows of time and ‘the rhythms of history’ adds a spooky mystical element that will appeal to certain mindsets such are the conspiratorial and the spiritual.

It would perhaps be more relevant to ask about when the US *is not* some sort of crisis. This is a nation born out of a revolution that has been fighting wars for the entire duration of its existence, including 1 civil war, 2 world wars, and that major existential crisis that was the Vietnam War. It’s seen a Great Depression, Wall Street crashes, a Global Financial Crisis, the collapse of the US housing market.

Since the year 2000 it’s been one constant crisis: following on from the bursting of the Dotcom bubble there was the crisis of 9/11, then wars costing trillions in aftermath - including the longest war in the history of the US with the war in Afghanistan - then the aforementioned GFC & the rise of unorthodox monetary policy boosting asset prices while US debt ballooned precipitating multiple debt ceiling stand-offs and crises, then the crisis of Trumps election and massive societal angst associated with that, then the COVID-19 Global Pandemic precipitating a massive crisis, then Trumps losing followed by what is often termed an ‘insurrection’ - with the storming of the Capitol building - and then the crisis of high inflation precipitating rapid interest rate rises causing a crisis in asset prices, followed by the crisis of Russias invasion of Ukraine unending the global order while China denounces the US and rattles the sabre vis a vis Taiwan….phew, where does it end.

In terms of ‘crisis’ we could also toss out the Cuban Missile Crisis, frequent race riots (Rodney King, BLM), the Indian Wars, Clinton and Lewinsky and impeachment, the Iran - Contra Affair, the Korean War, the Civil Rights movement and the lingering aftermath of slavery, the assassination of Martin Luther King, massive gun violence and the mass shooting crisis, the oil shocks of the 70’s, Watergate and Nixon, the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, Roe vs Wade and abortion, the fiery outcome of the siege at Waco, the use of atomic bombs on Japan, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 - 1920….and lots lots more besides.

You are on pretty safe ground to say that stability and the absence of crisis is often illusory at best. Even in times of apparent stability there are usually societal, environmental, or geopolitical paradigm shifts quietly occurring at a glacial pace that are going unrecognised and will come to a head in some form in due course. Crisis is something that is happening constantly & something that will always be with us.

Anyone that is not a student of history will be fascinated by spooky books seeking to give spine-chilling revelations. If you have a more definitive knowledge of history then all these events can be properly contextualised and these times look a lot more ‘normal’, even ‘mundane’.

[Logen Ninefingers]

A cursory look around the web found this critique. It is presented here in the interests of opening minds and fostering healthy debate.

https://bryanalexander.org/futures/when-futuring-flops/

‘It’s important for futurists to examine flawed futuring work and learn from it. I’ve said this before, reflecting on my own forecasting misfires. I haven’t offered many criticisms of others’ work, largely for reasons of time. I’d like to start doing some more of this.

Why? There are all kinds of benefits to this kind of analysis. One involves testing the limits of a given method (Delphi, trends extrapolation, etc.) by seeing what it misses… which then suggests how one can either modify the method or choose to use it in addition to another approach.

A second benefit concerns blind spots. For example, in his criminally underrated work on global inequality (cf my notes) Branko Milanovic notes that 1970s futures work focused so heavily on the Cold War’s primary antagonists – the USA and USSR – that they utterly failed to not only predict, but even pay much attention to nations that sidestepped the conflict’s core: Yugoslavia, for example, and most especially China. This is an understandable mistake, given the huge dimensions of the US-Soviet struggle, not to mention the stakes (possible human extinction), but it was a mistake. Seeing it now drives us to look for our own blind spots.

A third reason to prod older futures work is to understand how the broader public perceives futuring. Which projects win followings tells us something about present attitudes.

Today’s example is a popular and influential book, The Fourth Turning (1997; official site), by the gurus of generational thinking, William Strauss and Neil Howe. It claims to have discovered a deep and sustained structure to American history, one which will continue to function in the future. Understanding this code will therefore help prepare us for upcoming changes.

The code involves a multi-step sequence, each of which lasts about eighty to one hundred years, a period the authors refer to as a “saeculum”. Within each saeculum are four phases, or “turnings“:

High: “an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.”
Awakening: “a passionate are of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.”
Unraveling: “a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.”
Crisis: “a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.” (3; 101-104)
Within each turning comes a “generational archetype“. The High spawns a “Prophet generation”, the Awakening a “Nomad generation”, the Unraveling a “Hero”, and the Crisis an “Artist.” (19) . Each generation cycles through these types, although I think what this means is that a generation produces a small group of people embodying these patterns, rather than an entire generation becoming artists, nomads, etc.

Most of the book involves working this code out across American history and the then-present, with raids on other histories, historiography, and a final lunge at the future. For example, Strauss and Howe explain that a recent “High” was 1945-1963, followed by an “Awakening” through the 1980s, an “Unraveling” into the 1990s, and an upcoming “Crisis” around 2005-2007. To sum up: “we are presently in the Third Turning of the Millennial Saeculum, the seventh cycle of the modern era… giving birth to the twenty-fourth generation of the post-Medieval era” (19, 123).

The authors insist on the power of their system. They think the timing can wriggle around a bit, but the turnings must happen in order and within that 80-100 year frame. They allow “accidents” (events which don’t fit the system), but insist that what really matters about such events is “society’s response to them” (116; emphasis in original). They don’t have much interest in humility; the book’s subtitle is “an American prophecy.”

One of the biggest problems with the book is classic problem of trying to cram all of history into a narrow frame. Its judgements are so impressionistic that they are sometimes simply wrong. Describing the Kennedy administration, the authors refer to its imagining of the future as having “specificity and certainty but lack[ing] urgency and moral direction.” (101) I’m still not sure what that means, but I’m not sure it works on its face. The Apollo program, the US intervention in Vietnam, the civil rights struggle certainly possessed urgency. Moral direction suffused the New Frontier and its expansion of the Cold War, not to mention black organizing against white racism.

Early on the text looks back 25 years to early 1970s forecasting, which is a fine thing to do. One passage cites Soylent Green (good) and EPCOT (ok) as attempts to predict futures which didn’t happen. I’m not sure what EPCOT got wrong in this sense (surely world is more technologically immersed?), but yes, we didn’t head into a world of massive overpopulation and industrialized cannibalism. (Personally, I see the latter, especially voiced by the Club of Rome, as a fine example of futures work not as prophecy but as warning, and therefore as a success.) Strauss and Howe then build on their thought in a peculiar way:

‘late-seventies forecasters made a more fundamental error… they all assumed America was heading somewhere in a hurry. No one would have imagined what actually happened: that through the 1980s and 1990s, while different societal pieces have drifted in different directions, America as a whole has gone nowhere in particular.’ (18)

This sounds appealing for about one tenth of one second, until you start thinking about the massive developments of those two decades. The internet, for example; AIDS and progress in gay rights; the birth of the modern right wing, starting with the Moral Majority; the Democratic party’s hard turn to the center and right; the end of the ozone hole crisis; massive rearmament; the drastic resurgence of income inequality. Not to mention the whole nearly destroying the world thing in 1983, the end of the Cold War, and the first of a new world order. You know, “nowhere in particular.”

Elsewhere, one passage offers a handy one-sentence summary of the “turning” idea: “In a High, people want to belong; in an Awakening, to defy; in an Unraveling, to separate; in a Crisis, to gather.” (112; emphases in original) This sounds roughly right, if we read back our history in a friendly way. Sure, people gather together in a crisis, and so on. But if we read critically, we find people acting in all four of those lines throughout history, breaking out of the four-phase template. People, especially Americans, are delighted to defy and separate every decade and probably every year since Plymouth Rock. Again, these formulae become bromides, or simply fall apart when taken seriously.

This impressionism also leads to some serious blind spots. A quick tour through British history, applying the code back as far as the fifteenth century, identifies the War of the Roses and the Glorious Revolution as epochal events, while utterly missing the English Civil War, that revolution, Cromwell’s regime, and the Restoration, each at least as important as the foregoing, and probably more so. But the timing’s off, so 1640-1660 doesn’t get its bullet points and position on helpful tables (45). Speaking of British history, Strauss and Howe are quite open about seeing American history in that light. They admit that Americans came from other nations and continents (Asia, Africa, the rest of Europe) and that some didn’t arrive at all (Native Americans), but set those aside because the great cycle started with the British (94).

Another blind spot swims into our view when the authors address demographic issues other than their generational dynamic. They see anxieties about overpopulation only in terms of their saeculum, and can’t account for a multi-generational project to redo millennia of human population practices when it’s right before their eyes, except to cram it back into their framework (194-5). That this development could warp their model – do only children react differently to their forebears than kids among broods of a dozen? – remains unaddressed. We can see this in the authors calling on GenX to become “America’s largest potential generational voting bloc.” (327) Setting aside questions of mobilization, this fails for two reasons: GenX is much smaller than Boomers or Millennials, a fact clearly known in the 1990s; mass media love ignoring GenX, a fact which we in that generation could have told you, had you asked us.

The generational archetypes strike me as the weakest part of The Fourth Turning. They offer glancing glimpses into historical figures encountered for the first time, but offer little insight beyond that, and ultimately fail to characterize people usefully. Prophets, for example, include religious leaders, as one might expect. They also number atheists, managers, and war leaders. “Their principle endowments are in the domain of vision, values, and religion… These have been principled moralists, summoners of human sacrifice, wagers of righteous wars.” (96) In short, a “Prophet” is just about any political, religious, or cultural leader.

Similarly, “Nomads” include “Stonewall Jackson, George Patton… George Washington and John Adams, Ulysses Grant and Grover Cleveland, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower… Their principle endowments are in the domain of liberty, survival, and honor.” (96) Elsewhere we learn that Huey Long and Boss Tweed were also nomads (269). At this point I’m not sure why the authors even use the term “nomad” (John Adams?!). They certainly aren’t addressing nomadic patterns within native American nations. Perhaps they are referring to physical mobility, hence Patton and Grant? We can easily swap personages between these two categories with at least as much logic as the authors show for including them. The other two archetypes offer the same superficial sense and deeper uselessness. It reaches the point where Andrew Jackson and Walter Mondale are lumped together (!) as “Artists”.

A similar problem attends the idea of “gray champions.” (139ff) Strauss and Howe pick up Hawthorne’s story of the same name (1837) to identify a figure who prophecies the advent of a fourth turning. But the generic, impressionistic nature of this figure means it can arrive at any time, and embody basically any message, from reactionary to radical.

Ultimately the strong claims of the book are either too flimsy or unfalsiable to be of use.

These problems vitiate what must have been the book’s most vital section when it appeared, its description of and advice about an upcoming fourth turning (270ff). It begins in a promising way, offering a series of potential crises, from state secession to disease outbreaks. One of them actually comes pretty close to 9-11, imagining a terrorist strike, but with different nuclear and financial consequences.

Then things become too light to be useful. One sober page reminds us that crises can trigger all kinds of distress (277). Older people will warn young people about stuff (279, 285). Xers will not be happy all the time. A currency devaluation will cripple Boomer finances – ah, well, that didn’t happen. A “great leader” will lead us into “a new High” – well, give it time, I suppose; again, this narrative arc could occur at any time, saecularly fitted or otherwise (300). We might see popular desires for more free market economics, or less (310).

The advice we get is similarly weak tea. We’re told to remember this is a different era than certain prior times. A “Lincoln-like leader” might spark secession or greater unity, depending on timing. We should “forge [a] consensus and uplift the culture” but “don’t attempt reforms that can’t now be accomplished.” “Treat children as the nation’s highest priority, but don’t do their work for them.” “Expect the worst [on defense] and prepare to mobilize, but don’t precommit to any one response.” These are all generic, middle of the road nostrums that don’t really guide us one way or the other.

One bit of advice is actually quite specific. Strauss and Howe recommend that we trim government spending. “We should shed and simplify the federal government in advance of the Crisis by cutting back sharply on its size and scope…” Related to this is a hedged call to “Tell future elders they will need to be more self-sufficient, but don’t attempt deep cuts in benefits to current elders.” It seems like an economically conservative message is buried therein.

Now,. there are some useful insights in The Fourth Turning. Opponents of the Obama and Trump administrations would each be glad to see that the book anticipated a return to “authoritarian government… rested and refreshed.” (108) Strauss and Howe based their code on a basic observation about intergenerational struggle, a development humans have thought about since Procopius complained in the sixth century about Byzantine kids wearing Hun-style haircuts to irk their elders, and probably earlier than that. But Strauss and Howe go a little farther, offering the idea that generations sometimes share commonality via leapfrog: “Your generation isn’t like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you.” (79; emphases in original) . Call it the Harold and Maude hypothesis, but it’s a neat concept.

I was also impressed at how the book admitted one giant flaw in its system: the American Civil War. For two pages (121-2) the text explores what it deems to be “the only conspicuous anomaly” to its scheme. I admire how the discussion tries to apply the turnings and generational archetypes and ultimately finds them falling apart. The book’s fierce determinism exits for just a moment, and the authors return agency to human individuals. It’s a rough spot, one which the rest of the book sidesteps, but one I appreciate. I’m reminded of how Steven Pinker tries to fit WWI and WWII into his narrative of declining rates of human violence. Strauss and Howe do a better job in this brief passage.

There are other problems with the book. A text so keenly focused on the future barely touches on science fiction at all, and then ignores the great creative works about the future (think of Heinlein’s future history, or Asimov’s Foundation sequence!). It tries to coin some new terms, which the best that can be said of is they didn’t take. Generation Xers remain Xers, not “the Thirteenth” (although I enjoyed being evoked by Rosemary’s Baby (194)). While there isn’t a widely accepted nickname for the years 2000-2009, I don’t think any human beings other than Strauss and Howe have thought of them as “the Oh Ohs.” My final nit to pick: the index is terrible, only a list of names, and not a useful one at that.

So to return to my framing device: what can we learn from this kind of flawed futuring?

Method: this kind of “key to all mythologies” scheme is not very useful for serious analysis or futuring. Paying attention to generational differences has some advantages, but we should hesitate before building systems on top of them.

Blind spots: in 2018 I probably don’t have to remind readers of the importance of paying attention to populations other than straight white males, but that’s one group of blind spots this book struggles with. A less obvious point is taking demographics seriously, as this book fails to do.

I am intrigued at the pre-2001 approach to religion. Religion here appears mostly as a historical artifact, faintly echoed in the New Age movement. Radical Islam does not appear, serving instead as a black swan. Big, big blind spot.

Popular understanding of futures work: first, American really love their generational tribes. We adore self-identifying by Boomer, Xer, Greatest. The authors helped stoke this affection, and it rewarded them well. Futures work that speaks to strong identity markers has a good shot of winning and audience.

Second, busy people like handy sketches. Fourth Turning is a longish book, but the schema is clear, repeated throughout, and represented through many charts and tables.

Third, more deeply: this is a very 1990s book. It is suffused with neoliberalism’s cultural win, such as its call to cut back on elder services. I’m not sure how far this goes, since so much of the futuring is cloudy or think. One of the authors apparently worked with Steve Bannon on a film, but I don’t see Breitbart in The Fourth Turning. Instead this is closer to second term Bill Clinton.

These three present challenges to me as a futurist. Methodologically I try to use several tools, but research and time demands place trend identification and extrapolation at the top of my agenda, so I need to correct that imbalance. I don’t share the authors’ blind spots about demographics or religion, but then again, that’s how blind spots work. I need to know what I miss.

As a creator and business leader, I’m not sure I’ve connected as well with my audience as Strauss and Howe did. I address people by their professional identities, in terms of job and institutional situation, but not much more than that. I really fail to provide accessible sketches. So this is a good prompt for me to improve outreach skills.

What do you think? Does this book remind you of anything else?’

[moka]

A cursory look around the web found this critique. It is presented here in the interests of opening minds and fostering healthy debate.

https://bryanalexander.org/futures/when-futuring-flops/

Today’s example is a popular and influential book, The Fourth Turning (1997; official site), by the gurus of generational thinking, William Strauss and Neil Howe. It claims to have discovered a deep and sustained structure to American history, one which will continue to function in the future. Understanding this code will therefore help prepare us for upcoming changes.

These problems vitiate what must have been the book’s most vital section when it appeared, its description of and advice about an upcoming fourth turning (270ff). It begins in a promising way, offering a series of potential crises, from state secession to disease outbreaks. One of them actually comes pretty close to 9-11, imagining a terrorist strike, but with different nuclear and financial consequences.

Then things become too light to be useful. One sober page reminds us that crises can trigger all kinds of distress (277). Older people will warn young people about stuff (279, 285). Xers will not be happy all the time. A currency devaluation will cripple Boomer finances – ah, well, that didn’t happen. A “great leader” will lead us into “a new High” – well, give it time, I suppose; again, this narrative arc could occur at any time, saecularly fitted or otherwise (300). We might see popular desires for more free market economics, or less (310).

Client First Capital regarded the book so highly that they included a blog about it on their website under investment planning.

https://www.clientfirstcap.com/posts...fourth-turning
A 2021 look at The Fourth Turning

In 1997, Neil Howe and William Strauss published “The Fourth Turning” which goes into detail on how history moves in 80-year cycles and each one is divided into periods, defined by each generation (i.e., Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials) as they come into adulthood. Each of these phases hold one generation at a time, and each phase is associated with a specific societal role.

The end of the cycle or the “Crisis” phase is also known as the “Fourth Turning” when the hero generation, entering young adulthood, faces off against the prophet generation that is entering elderhood. In this case, it is the Boomer Generation retires and the Millennial generation takes the wheel. It has been suggested that this phase only ends when the eldest Boomers move beyond the age of political leadership and retire from public life and Gen Xers begin to retire and move into the senior role, Millennials begin to move into midlife and take over society’s institutions and those younger than Millennials are just beginning to join to society.

Howe and Strauss predicted that the start of the Fourth Turning would have been 2005, plus or minus a few years. With this in mind, it appears the 2008 Financial Crisis was the trigger for the move into the current Fourth Turning. They predicted a climax coming around 2020 and the resolution, including a “Great Devaluation” as the economy is entirely restructured for a new set of circumstances, around 2026.

If we think about the world that we live in today there are similarities – a pandemic, racial and social unrest, and a contentious election that is now behind us – with the fourth turning that Howe and Strauss discussed. It is important to note that it is during these Fourth Turnings when crises tend to be solved rather than pushed under the rug.
If the fourth turning does lead to a reset by 2026, we need to be prepared for disruption on a mass scale. Permanent changes in our culture and the markets are happening, causing uncertainty across the board.

[Logen Ninefingers]

Another review here -

‘Tedious mix of badly written obvious insights and revisionist or reductionist history, with a ton of unnecessary repetition. I abandoned (it) at about the 1/2 mark and did an accelerated flip through the rest after 3 months of trying to force myself to read this. Don’t make my mistake.’

Ultimately books like this are aimed at certain personality types and it seems the authors did a good job in crafting pseudoscience and a potted version of history into something that sold a heap of copies - which was undoubtedly their aim.

[Logen Ninefingers]

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nyti....26lindlt.html

Generation Gaps
By MICHAEL LIND

Everything goes in cycles, the authors say, including American history

The Fourth Turning
An American Prophecy.
By William Strauss and Neil Howe.
382 pp. New York:
Broadway Books. $27.50.

‘The idea that history moves in cycles tends to be viewed with suspicion by scholars. Although historians as respected as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and David Hackett Fischer have made cases for the existence of rhythms and waves in the stream of events, cyclical theories tend to end up in the Sargasso Sea of pseudoscience, circling endlessly (what else?). ''The Fourth Turning'' is no exception.

This is the third book on the subject of American ''generations'' written by William Strauss, the director of the Capitol Steps, a Washington satire troupe, and Neil Howe, a senior adviser for the Concord Coalition, a group dedicated to balancing the budget. In case you missed the previous two, ''Generations: The History of America's Future'' and ''13th Gen,'' Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe claim that the key to understanding not only American but world history is ''a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.'' Practically every major historical crisis, the authors assert, comes in a transition between saecula, or at distinct periods within a saeculum. This claim seems less impressive when it is revealed that one size of saeculum fits all facts. ''Eighty-five years passed between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the attack on Fort Sumter. That is exactly the same span as between Fort Sumter and the Declaration of Independence,'' they write. ''Add another decade or so to the length of these saecula, and you'll find this pattern continuing through the history of the colonists' English predecessors.'' The key to history, it appears, is the Fudge Factor.

After introducing the non-falsifiable concept of the elastic saeculum, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe proceed to stupefy the determined reader with dozens of equally mystifying categories: not just Anglo-American Generations (from the millennial, 1982 onward, back to the Arthurian, 1433-60), but also Four Archetypes (Hero, Artist, Prophet, Nomad) and Four Turnings (whence the title). Put these together, and you get sentences like this: ''An Unraveling cannot lead back to an Awakening, or forward to a High, without a Crisis in between.''

Purveyors of pseudoscience typically try to validate their theories by brutally ransacking scholarship and mythology. Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe have a chart purporting to show that ''Four-Type Generational Cycles'' can be found in the writings of, among others, Arnold Toynbee, the Old Testament's authors, Homer and Samuel Huntington. Surely this is the first time that the Blind Bard and the Harvard political scientist have been neighbors, though there are other equally bizarre juxtapositions -- how about ''role models who combined G.I. confidence with boomer sensitivity (Merlin Olsen, Carl Sagan)''? Somehow, in rummaging through the library, the authors missed Yeats's gyres and Blake's Four Zoas. Perhaps next time. All of this huggermugger might be forgivable if the authors delivered on their promise: ''This is a book that turns history into prophecy.'' (I should disclose that they gently criticize Walter Dean Burnham and me, for not predicting in our own work exactly when the next American republic will be established; I wish I knew.)

Now and then, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe are capable of brilliant apercus: ''By the time Saigon fell, both political parties were agreeing to spend the new 'peace dividend' on middle-class elder benefits.'' Even more provocative is the claim that the baby boomers, having shaped the radical youth culture of the 60's, will mature into repressive prigs. ''Calls are mounting for more objective grades, separation of boys and girls, abstinence-only sex education and school prayer -- along with longer school days, year-round schooling and stiffer truancy laws,'' the authors write. The boomers' millennial-generation offspring will be strictly policed by the gray-haired fans of classic rock. ''In their new attitudes toward children, boomers are playing out a psychodrama about how undisciplined they themselves have become.'' Ultimately, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe foresee calls ''for a spare-no-expense national program of compulsory youth service.'' They themselves approve: ''We must battle against civic dysfunction wherever it appears.''

The boomers, then, will be even harder on their children than they were on their parents. The ''final boomer leaders,'' Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe predict, will be ''authoritarian, severe, unyielding''; ''the same boomers who in youth chanted 'Hell no, we won't go!' will emerge as America's most martial elder generation in living memory,'' they warn.

The boomers are to get their comeuppance when they are impoverished during a financial panic early in the next century. ''Following the Great Devaluation, boomers will find new ethical purpose in low consumption because, with America in Crisis, they will have no other choice,'' the authors write. Many boomers ''who spent a lifetime paying steep Social Security and Medicare taxes will be substantially excluded from benefits by an affluence test.'' Making a virtue of necessity, the aged Aquarians ''will eschew high-tech hospital care for homeopathy, minimalist self-care and the mind-body techniques Deepak Chopra calls 'quantum healing' '' -- thus perhaps accelerating generational succession.

Alas, most of the authors' predictions about the American future turn out to be as vague as those of fortune cookies: ''Decisive events will occur -- events so vast, powerful and unique that they lie beyond today's wildest hypotheses.'' And: ''Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action.'' This faction, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe inform us, will be ''Republicans, Democrats or perhaps a new party.''

Sometimes Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe try to have it both ways: ''America will become more isolationist than today in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised.'' At other times they hedge their bets: the ''New Silent'' generation ''could well be the first to reach other planets in a rocket fleet,'' even as ''the Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation.'' All the blinking and whirring of their methodology permits them to make this daring prediction: ''The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.'' The Macintosh has labored and brought forth a mouse. ''Human history,'' Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe write, ''seems logical in afterthought but a mystery in forethought.'' Indeed.’

[moka]

Elite Overproduction

Peter Turchin is a historian and complexity scientist who developed the concept of "elite overproduction." This concept describes a society that produces too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This situation can cause social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.
Turchin and Jack Goldstone argue that periods of political instability throughout human history have been due to the purely self-interested behavior of the elite. Elite overproduction generates fierce ideological competition and cancels culture. Turchin has used this concept to explain social disturbances during later years of various Chinese dynasties, the late Roman empire, the French Wars of Religion, and France before the Revolution. Turchin predicted in 2010 that this situation would lead to instability in the United States in the 2020s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

[moka]

https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-new-economic-regime-fourth-turning-theory-millennials-boomers-2021-4

A book published almost 25 years ago predicted that the 'Next New Deal' would follow a period of great social unrest in 2020 — and that millennials would take the reins after decades of boomer rule.

It's an outlandish theory and the book has also been widely criticized for its lack of scientific support and vague predictions. But it's also resonated among conservative and liberal leaders alike, and bears uncanny parallels to American history.

The authors predicted that a key component of the Next New Deal would be a new era for infrastructure: "Fourth Turning America will begin to lay out the next saeculum's infrastructure grid — some higher-tech facsimile of turnpikes, railroads, or highways. Through the Fourth Turning, the old order will die, but only after having produced the seed containing the new civic order within it."

That's exactly what Biden is proposing, arguing explicitly in the rollout of his $2.3 trillion package that now is the time to rethink infrastructure for the first time in decades. It includes funds for nationwide broadband and green energy projects as well as more "traditional" infrastructure such as rebuilding roads and bridges.

[Logen Ninefingers]

Elite Overproduction

Peter Turchin is a historian and complexity scientist who developed the concept of "elite overproduction." This concept describes a society that produces too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This situation can cause social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.
Turchin and Jack Goldstone argue that periods of political instability throughout human history have been due to the purely self-interested behavior of the elite. Elite overproduction generates fierce ideological competition and cancels culture. Turchin has used this concept to explain social disturbances during later years of various Chinese dynasties, the late Roman empire, the French Wars of Religion, and France before the Revolution. Turchin predicted in 2010 that this situation would lead to instability in the United States in the 2020s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

An extraordinarily vague Wikipedia article reading almost as an advertorial. It could have been written by Turchin himself. Straight off the bat the article it says Turchin developed the theory of 'Elite Overproduction', but it doesn't even say when he did so.

There are a number of red flags regarding this article. The most glaring is that it offers no critiques.

Turchin is not really a historian, but what he definitely is is a prolific author.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin

Turchin has published over 200 scientific articles (including more than a dozen in Nature, Science, or PNAS) and at least eight books. He is the founder of the journal, Cliodynamics, "...dedicated to 'the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies'",[2] and manages a blog, Cliodynamica.[12]

The scientific articles are pretty bland stuff, 'Soil fertility depletion is not a credible mechanism for population boom/bust cycles in agricultural societies' being one example....whereas the books are more breathless speculation and tales of impending catastrophes. The books are where he will be making a motza no doubt.

Going further down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and clicking on the article about 'Cliodynamics', we find this:

The term was originally coined by Peter Turchin in 2003,[6]

And then this:

Criticism
Critics of cliodynamics often argue that the complex social formations of the past cannot and should not be reduced to quantifiable, analyzable 'data points', for doing so overlooks each historical society's particular circumstances and dynamics.[44][45][46] Many historians and social scientists contend that there are no generalisable causal factors that can explain large numbers of cases, but that historical investigation should focus on the unique trajectories of each case, highlighting commonalities in outcomes where they exist. As Zhao notes, "most historians believe that the importance of any mechanism in history changes, and more importantly, that there is no time-invariant structure that can organise all historical mechanisms into a system."[44][45]

[Logen Ninefingers]

And for a real take-down of Peter Turkin -

https://www.newstatesman.com/the-wee...pty-prophecies

10 June 2023
Peter Turchin’s empty prophecies
The social scientist has made a career from predicting global instability. But in the new book 'End Times', his analysis produces nothing but banalities.

By William Davies

'In January 2010 the scientific journal Nature did what publications so often do at such moments in the calendar, and invited a range of scientific experts and policymakers to speculate on “where their fields will be ten years from now”. The various responses, which were collected under the heading “2020 Visions”, included a brief contribution from the biologist and complexity theorist Peter Turchin.

Turchin, who is based at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, is a pioneer of the field of cliodynamics, in which scientists seek to establish long-running historical trends by studying large statistical datasets. He had spent the previous few years trying to spot patterns of political instability across societies. His 2010 response to Nature included what, from a historian’s or sociologist’s perspective, would have appeared a simplistic observation: “In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.”

Turchin is certainly not the first social scientist to identify long-term historical patterns. The Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev (who Turchin cites approvingly) had noted how new technologies unleash long-term waves of productivity growth, which then dissipate until a new one comes along, at regular intervals. The economic anthropologist and historian Karl Polanyi introduced the concept of the “double movement”, whereby long phases of market expansion eventually hit their limit, and are then rebuffed by equally long phases of social protection.

More ambitiously, the Marxist historian Giovanni Arrighi observed how, ever since the Renaissance, the global economy has witnessed the rise and fall of successive state hegemonies, with each phase shorter than its predecessor, and each terminating in a crisis of “financialisation”. Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994) made no concrete prediction, but nevertheless interpreted the rising power of Wall Street since the 1970s as a symptom of imminent US decline, followed perhaps by an era of Chinese global leadership.

When 2020 finally arrived, Turchin lucked out. The combination of Covid-19 with the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers – which escalated to become one of the largest social movements in US history – added to the already unhinged presidency of Donald Trump. In witnessing these events unfold, few would disagree with a diagnosis of American “instability”. Yet what followed is a morality tale about the impoverishment of public intellectual discourse, and the mystical cult of “Science” that continues to exert its hold over the media.

“This researcher predicted 2020 would be mayhem,” announced Time magazine excitedly. “Ten years ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature,” declared the Economist. The year 2020 was turning out “roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold ten years ago”, gushed the Atlantic. “The scientist who predicted 2020’s political unrest reveals what comes next”, ran a Vice headline. Turchin leaned into his new celebrity: “The science behind my forecast for 2020”, he headlined one of his blogposts.

Few remembered (or cared) that Turchin had only been responding to Nature’s invitation to speculate about 2020, at a time when the US was already pulling apart under the strains of the 2008 financial crisis and deepening political polarisation. Turchin had attained the status of a prophet. In 2023 we are presented with his new book, the none-too-subtly-titled End Times, which promises to reveal how he foresaw the future, and what else we (or the US) might now be in for.

Predictions are fun. When sports pundits and pollsters stick their necks out to predict the outcomes of contests, it’s all a pretty good laugh, especially when someone ends up with egg on their face. Who can forget the sight of the academic and commentator Matthew Goodwin eating his own book live on Sky television in 2017, as he’d promised to do if Labour polled more than 38 per cent in that year’s general election. Twitter has added a playfulness to all of this, where people’s spookily good, and comically bad, calls can be dredged up from the archive.

Yet is it the job of social science or history to try to predict the future? Some would say that it is. In his 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics”, Milton Friedman argued that the value of any science, social or otherwise, lay entirely in its capacity to make accurate predictions, and owed nothing to its descriptive plausibility. Thus, regardless of whether human beings are as economists portray them, it only matters if things turn out as economists predict. A theoretical model is not a representation of the world, but a tool for controlling it – an engine not a camera.

Friedman’s behaviourist manifesto aimed to position economics as closer in spirit to the natural sciences than to its “social” cousins, anthropology and sociology, and to have nothing to do with such disciplines as history or philosophy. The urgency generated at the time by the Cold War saw the Pentagon funnel billions of dollars into fields of psychology, mathematics and computer science that promised to render the social world predictable. It has since become a commonplace for statisticians to offer forecasts for phenomena such as inflation, GDP growth or flu outbreaks.

This faith in the predictive power of quantitative methods has experienced various surges of optimism (and investment) over the decades, the most recent of which is the one surrounding algorithmic data science. It was around 2008 (the same time, not coincidentally, that Google and other tech companies were collating the world’s data) that breathless anecdotes began circulating in Wired magazine and management journals, of the algorithm that knew a woman was pregnant before she did, or the marketer who could predict a consumer’s shopping preferences based on their music downloads. The journal Cliodynamics (which Turchin edits) was founded in 2010, during the same hype cycle.

Elevating prediction over description comes at some cost, however. Mathematical models are esoteric and opaque to the public, especially when (as in the case of surveillance capitalism) those models are proprietary secrets. Description, on the other hand, produces shared narratives and explanations. There is a reason why works of history command prominent positions in the windows of Foyles bookshop, while econometric models circulate in specialist journals and expert networks. When experts do seek to make the transition from specialised intricacy to a general readership, they often end up resorting to a mixture of mysticism (“This is all based on Science!”) and crude credentialism (adding “PhD” in their byline) to get the layperson to trust what they can’t really understand.

This is the dilemma that runs through End Times, a book that alternates between superficial bird’s-eye views of historical epochs, derived from prominent historians and social scientists, and bold declarations of what the author’s all-powerful (but largely unexplained) model and database can yield. As a descriptive account of what’s wrong with the US, Turchin’s story often repeats the economist Thomas Piketty’s account of inequality trends, and the economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case’s findings on life expectancy and morbidity, and the recent revival of the sociology of elites.

Turchin does cite lavishly, quoting long passages of contemporary historians, but the implication is that conventional history is not what he’s here to do. There is little to learn from such observations as “Race has been one of the most important issues in American politics, all the way from its beginning to this very day.” Meanwhile, the claim that “Privatisation [in the former Soviet Union] was an incredibly corrupt and violent process, with the winners literally walking on the corpses of their less lucky competitors” belongs in Private Eye’s Colemanballs.

So what does Turchin have to offer? The central theory is a relatively simple one. There are four drivers of political instability, gleaned from cliodynamics: “popular immiseration”, “elite over-production”, “failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state”, and “geopolitical factors”.

The first two (and especially “elite over-production”) receive the most attention, but as Turchin proceeds in his discussion of the present day, it becomes less and less clear what he is adding to Piketty’s finding, that wages have stagnated while the number of billionaires has grown. The political analysis then comes down to a crude economic determinism, that at some point people will not stand for this any longer, though this is hidden behind jargon regarding a mysterious “wealth pump” that transfers money from the poor to the rich.

Should anyone doubt this analysis, it comes verified by “CrisisDB”, the statistical database containing everything that Turchin’s team has collected from the study of societies throughout history. On the issue of “elite over-production”, Turchin fears that the US is now churning out too many graduates for what its labour market can support. “History (and CrisisDB) tells us that the credentialed precariat (or, in the jargon of cliodynamics, the frustrated aspirant class) is the most dangerous class for social stability.” Flatlining wages (which he attributes to high levels of immigration, citing Angela Nagle) makes the US ripe for a revolution.

In case any of this sounds too apocalyptic (or empirically falsifiable?), Turchin throws in some caveats for good measure. It’s not enough for unwieldy economic forces to be present: there also needs to be a large proportion of “radicals” in the population, and the masses need to be organised, further variables that cliodynamicists need to feed into their model. Fortunately, for the US, neither of these things has happened. Crisis averted, or at least delayed. One wonders if the real insight of CrisisDB is that political instability is most likely when politics becomes unstable.

The climax of the book, the money shot of this whole exercise, occurs on page 200: “Now that we have the MPF engine [Turchin’s model, still not really explained by this point], let’s use it to investigate the possible trajectories that the American social system could take beyond the 2020s.” Finally, after considerable limbering up, the main event arrives.

Spoiler alert: MPF’s big reveal is disappointing. “Elite over-production” and “popular immiseration” will continue through the “turbulent Twenties”, producing greater and greater violence. Yet the effect of this violence is, counter-intuitively, to turn “radicals” into “moderates”, until the country calms down for 40 years before erupting again in 2070. The problem, Turchin explains, and the reason why society will become unstable every 50 years is the “wealth pump”, which continues to divert money from the poor to the rich. Only with the kinds of liberal reforms witnessed in Britain in the late 19th century, or the US after 1929, will the “wealth pump” be switched off and political instability put to rest.

Rather like Deep Thought, the super-computer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, CrisisDB and MPF appear to have been fed the most fundamental, existential questions of politics, and answered with a banality: moderate redistribution or barbarism. More than once, I wondered if this whole project was a hoax. (If rationalists can pull pranks on critical theory journals by sending in fake papers to see if they get published, why shouldn’t critical theorists do the same to Nature?)

Who really needs End Times, when one can read the sweeping historical work of Piketty, Arrighi or Eric Hobsbawm instead? This is TED-Talk-lit that so vastly over-promises that the under-delivery is baked in from the start. The insistence that nothing can escape statistical model-building is ultimately a power grab, a determination to own and to control, not just the future but also adjacent scholarly disciplines. As Theodor W Adorno wrote of philosophical system-builders, this is a symptom of the “belly turned mind”.'

[Baa_Baa]

You could just link this BS, there’s no need to copy paste it here. Some of our dutiful protagonist academics think Wikipedia is the source of truth, we can read it and decide for ourselves.