Posted on 08/02/2012 5:27:33 PM PDT by rjbemsha
Researcher Peter Turchin sees two cycles driving political instability. The secular cycle, lasting two to three centuries, starts with a relatively egalitarian society (supply and demand for labour roughly balance). But over time, population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. Then the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues, leading to collapse, and the cycle begins again. The shorter fathers-and-sons cycle, spanning 50 years or two generations, interacts with the longer cycle. Turchin sees this cycle peaking around 1870 (ethnic strife, class resentment), 1920 (race riots, workers' strikes, and anti-Communist feeling), and 1970 (violent student demonstrations, political assassinations, riots and terrorism). Then....
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Shouldn't happen except in a dead economy where entrepreneurial behavior has been smothered. Even in poor countries, people generate their own employment. The idea that a job is something someone gives you is part of the problem. It comes from a top-down mentality.
But another part of the top-down mentality is the necessity of permission before you can engage in some kind of entrepreneurial activity. Its a self-reinforcing vicious circle.
You have a job because someone gives it to you. He gives you a job because someone gives him a contract. Entrepreneurs despair of getting permission to do what they do and eventually wander off to where the air is freer.
Of course, the more restrictive the economy is, the more certain that the living breathing part of the economy is off the books.
“Turchin’s approach — which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history — is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies”
Um. There’s already a name for this, jerk.
It’s “Psychohistory”.
Get with the program.
I asked my 95 year old mother how they had survived the depression. They raised their own food. No food crops allowed in my subdivision; likewise no farm animals. They didn’t have property taxes so they could stay in the home they owned without any income. My property taxes have gone up several hundred percent since 1994. My grandfather took big jobs from constructing buildings to moving safes to second floors, to installing windows. Each of those jobs today requires permits, insurance, safety inspections; money, money, money before you can even attempt to bid a job. My grandfather hired employees as needed to help him. Today he’d have to pay unemployment insurance.
If you want to make money the government is going to be your noisy, intrusive partner who takes, but gives nothing.
The higher education scam in the developed world is producing many graduates with degrees that lead nowhere. This is precisely what happened in Egypt in the decade before Egypt’s current explosion.
Graduates with worthless skills and an inflated sense of their own value are fodder for movements like OWS.
America's shining gem is our personal liberty and freedom.
Free to think and act on our thoughts without encumbrance.
I stepped back and read what I just wrote and need to clarify;
We are free as capitalists to think and invent and act on what we've thought.
THAT has been our crowning achievement and contribution to mankind and the planet ...
I don't know the percentage of what nation contributed what (though I'm pretty sure the muslims have contributed nothing, no matter WHAT the fascilitator in chief may say), I DO know that many men have left other lands to come here and take that silly, unreadable scratching on a cafe' napkin and build an empire from it (I made that up, but you get the idea)
As long as we think, and act on our thoughts, we are free ... and mighty ... men.
Unless you study at a tech school, or engineering, your degree probably doesn't directly relate to a job. Not a problem; you take a job on the shop floor and, if you're smart and you work hard, in a few years you've worked your way into the corner office. Or having learned the business, you've started up your own shop.
Graduates with worthless skills and an inflated sense of their own value are fodder for movements like OWS.
Exactly. The problem isn't that they studied humanities instead of technology, the problem is that they thought someone owed them a job with a white collar because of it. There's nothing wrong with a guy with a literature degree working as a longshoreman while he writes his great novel. Or a guy with a degree in sociology going to work as a welder's helper when he gets out of college. Or remodeling houses with his uncle. The problem is just as you say, the inflated sense of your own value and as I say, the death of the entrepreneurial spirit. Thinking a job is a commodity, something someone gives you.
Good post.
1870? Wasn’t there a wee peak around 1861-1865?
Exactly. The more we try to regulate economic activity, the more we choke it off. I was thinking precisely about how our grandfathers made it through the depression, and how I've seen people survive in third-world economies. They become very entrepreneurial. Where that spirit has been regulated out or bred out or choked out, you have social explosions because people are expecting the government to provide something it isn't providing. Where people are free to do for themselves, and their efforts are protected, they don't lash out. They survive and then thrive.
Where they are taught not to do for themselves, and the regulators punish them for doing for themselves, you have social explosions. In a world where freedom is illegal, only pirates are free, I think. I think we're further down that road than most people realize. You have to have permission to sell lemonade in front of your house. I mean, really.
It’s worse than that!
They’ve added SS taxes, workman’s comp and mandatory wage garnishment if the worker owes back taxes or child support. You have to have a license to do almost any kind of work...and this involves kissing a union’s ass, taking a rigged test, and taking worthless classes every year that literally amount to “protection money” paid to goddam union pricks. You have to be a registered contractor in every state you work in which requires special bonds and insurance. health insurance is a massive expense. If you do a job for the government, you have Bacon-Davis to contend with. The DOT does spot inspection of company vehicles and they have all sorts of stupid rules they can’t wait to issue fines for. OSHA and the EPA are always threatening you.
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Thanks rjbemsha, but of course, this is just a variant of the 52 year cycle nonsense. |
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As the Left breaks down the self-discipline of Judeo-Christian religions, more and more laws are needed simply to keep people from devouring each other.
- Dennis Prager, Sept. 20, 2005 -
Until the downtrodden peasants with pitchforks storm the Bastille. Then events tend to go too far in the other direction. The Tea Party is a feeble harbinger of much worse to come unless the government comes to its senses. We all know it won't.
Hear, hear!
Yes, there were other wee peaks 1914-18 and 1962-73. Interestingly, these wee peaks also were about 50 yrs apart.
This is demonstrably false and utter nonsense. It simply regurgitates the same Leftist pablum they've been dishing out for over a century.
Population growth is a good thing and a sign of hope in the future. The general supply of labor cannot outstrip general demand for labor in a free market, so the blame here is government intervention. Elites always exist. Good societies have elites by merit while bad ones have political elites. The living standards of the "poor" rise along with all living standards in a free society. It cannot be helped, so again growing disparity points to politics and thus this is a governmental problem.
Finally, we should be very skeptical of this theory since the desperate to believe something atheists love it: Maybe 2020 will see a global revolution against corrupt uber-elites whose corporations stand in the way of a sustainable future and global justice.
But what about the 1930’s and 40’s? A LOT happened then.
1930s
-Hitler came to power; Nazis pass purity laws; Krystalnacht
-Stalin’s purges; millions starve; gulags full
-Japanese officer assasinations and militarism
-Victory bonus riots; Depression
1940s
-World War II
-Communists gain half the world’s population
-Mao kills millions
The problem is, you could do this with virtually every decade in history...
Check out this line from the article:
Just as an epidemic can be averted by an effective vaccine, violence can be prevented if society is prepared to learn from history — if the US government creates more jobs for graduates, say, or acts decisively to reduce inequality.
Bwahahaha! The GOVERNMENT cannot mandate more jobs. If so, then Obama would be a hero with no unemployment by now. Reduces inequality? Defined as and by who? Oh, how noble, comrade! Raise your fist in a power salute!
What the man has done is to develop a method for integrating biorhythm cycles into two new cycles with long periods.
I doubt it.
Would really like to see how they decide where to set the "start" of a society.
In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again.
Somewhat of a restating of Malthus. It works in some societies, most notably I would suggest in the Mandate of Heaven cycle of Chinese dynasties of the last 3000 years. But that is in a society with little major technological change.
It seems pretty clear to me that the Industrial Revolution and succeeding technological change have drastically changed the story from what it was in previous millenia.
This approach in general reminds me of Toynbee, who saw similar cycles, though not calendar-based, in the life of civilizations, which he saw as essentially organisms. Tremendously impressed me at first, and I still see value in some aspects of his thought. But then I began to see how belief in his theories required a great deal of "scrunching" to get things to fit. I'm sure this theory is the same.
Awwww... I was all prepared with a Hari Seldon response, and saw that you beat me to it! :^)
I like your last question because it points to the major flaw in all liberal thinking: definitions. They just make things up and let their imaginations fill in the facts. Try to pin them down on the meaning of “sustainable” or “hate” and they flutter away in confusion.
I attended a water quality board meeting concerning proposed regulation and engaged in a conversation with their attorney. The basic premise of regulation is to stop actions that result in substantial harm to public health and safety. The landowner should have the presumed right to do what he wants with his property until he harms someone else. However, an action that will substantially harm the general public can be “permitted” conditionally upon avoidance, minimization and mitigation of the harm to a less than harmful impact. This is the premise of regulation.
In the case of the current practice of mposing “conditional waivers” on activities that could harm impaired water quality, everyone is presumed to fall under the waiver. This allows the board to request verification, monitoring, plans with benchmarks and reporting to prove that you are still not harming water quality. (Presumed guilty until shown otherwise.) The attorney told me that their responsibility is to protect water quality and they have to show the environmentalists that they are doing their job.
This is also like suction dredging for gold mining. The law is written that the miner must show his activities are NOT deleterious to fish. Your liberty and freedom is gone. Gone is the presumption that you can do what you want with your property unless it harms others. Now the presumption is that it harms others and you have to show it doesn’t. Individual interest is only tolerated by the common good That is the communal, the collective destroying our individual liberty. It is the basis for European style socialism. That is oppression and one source of why some sort of pendulum swing will occur.
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