I feel like an important often missed variable is what part of the population is actually not having enough food & shelter or not able to support their family.
Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
61–70 of 237 posts
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#62This Turchin fellow seems to have missed the boat by about 20 years.
The book "Generations: The History of America's Future" by Strauss and Howe was published in 1991 and predicted exactly the same thing. It was a bestseller at the time.
It's so well known that it's notable on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
It predicted a "crisis of 2020" caused by a number of factors including the temperaments of baby boomers.
There's an interesting interview with one of the authors here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/us/politics/coronavirus-r...
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#63I recommend reading William Strauss and Neil Howe's book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny [1]. The book introduces the idea of generational cycles [2] According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes) and I couldn't put it down when I read it over the summer. Several people whom I deeply respect recommended this book, including the famous bond trader Jeffrey Gundlach.
After reading the book, it was really no surprise to me when the capital was overrun with rioters. The book convinced me, we could very well have a bloody revolution or war considering the unaddressed underlying conditions: extreme wealth inequality, pandemic, desperation, hunger and feeling like one has no personal stake. The rise of China and decline of the United States contributes to another dangerous possible outcome. The tech industry's most recent moves to purge conservatives/libertarians may make our social condition even worse, by isolating rather than including the most desperate people in our society.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rend...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#64What is "violent" in 2021? If everyone collectively stopped paying their bills and crashed the economy, is that violent? I would suggest that when (sorry, all things end) America collapses...not a shot will be fired.
Likewise, if I were to advise a foreign adversay on the best way to "fight" the US, I would suggest currency manipulation or information manipulation. Why fire a gun? Someone might get killed!
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think analytical thinking has anything to do with political leaning, I'd argue that the US higher education system particularly the humanities is a breeding ground of idealogues. I would say the tendency of education to lean left is largely due to left leaning people being more attracted to working in academia.
This is an umbrellas make it rain reverse causation. If you look outside the US the education level does correlate with the political spectrum. The higher educated the population the entire spectrum shifts left. See Northern Europe, Japan, Australia, Singapore, China, even political ideology (democracy vs socialism) doesn’t change this correlation
I guess your education did not teach you that correlation does not imply causation. The simpler explanation for why people that are educated lean left is that the people teaching them lean left. Why do teachers lean left? Because they are often broke and underpaid. The fact that there is such uniformity of thought in higher education just goes to show the power of indoctrination.
I feel bad harping on common talking points but most degrees do not teach analytical thought.
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#66Turchin's two main ideas are intriguing. a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. b) elite overproduction…
> a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. That's why education is the most important pillar of democracy…
This is what I would expect a technocratic forum like HN to suggest. America's most poverty stricken regions have had public education for nearly a century with almost no meaningful improvement in prospects. Tell me how rural poverty in West Viriginia is reduced by giving people humanities degrees. Better educated voters? Who cares, the poor have no representation of merit anyway; their choices are to vote for one party who ignores them or the other that ignores them.
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#67Turchin's two main ideas are intriguing. a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. b) elite overproduction…
Within the professions that make up "tech" 10 years is enough time for institutional memory to go out the window.
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think, it's an interesting model, and would probably work all else being equal. But in that case, I believe he misses one critical variable. We are much less violent than 50 years ago because kid beating largely went out of fashion.
"We are much less violent than 50 years ago" I would say that the population is, on average, much older and has more to lose. Fortysomethings do not regularly engage in street chaos. This is even more visible in Europe, even in formerly violent places like the Balkans or Northern Ireland. Once the share of the young hotheads in the population drops, you have much smaller probability of really serious riots.
The drop in violence is enormous and visible in crime rates across basically any age demographic you look at. It’s not just a function of an aging society. It also doesn’t seem obviously correlated with policing, since it exists across cities with radically different policing regimes. A lot of people think it has to do with environmental factors, and specifically lead.
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#69Turchin's two main ideas are intriguing. a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. b) elite overproduction…
Perhaps unfortunately, 50 years might not be long enough for generational turnover in US government. Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell are both 78 years old. Nancy Pelosi is 80. Senators Diane Feinstein and Chuck Grassley are 87.
It's 48 years since Joe Biden became a senator, and he was one of the youngest senators ever. None of those people held a national-level office 50 years ago. There has been a complete turnover in leadership in the past 50 years.
Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
#70Turchin's two main ideas are intriguing. a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. b) elite overproduction…
Samuel Huntington observed 'convulsions' every 60 years in American history: > American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in t…
How was the the revolutionary period "moral convulsion?" Political, sure, but not moral.