Opinion of Cliodynamics

[Tetro Kornbluth]

This forum needs a thread on something more ridiculous than the normal 'God' threads (as if that isn't absurd enough).

For those who don't know, ftr, cliodynamics is Cliometrics the return, or see here

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

While oversimplified, the basic premise that tensions build up over a period of time and then are released in a short period of time is not ludicrous. Indeed, one could argue that the Jubilee cycle in the Hebrew Testament was intended as way to peacefully resolve the inequalities that inevitably build up over time in any human society.

[Mopsus]

"With" and "from" should not be capitalized in the name of that article.

[opebo]

The sound 'Clio' or 'Cleo' means, in Thai slang, 'perpetually wet female sexual organ'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Cliometrics? Again? lolololololololololol

[King]

I calculated before voting that Option 3 would be winning the poll and I was correct.

[afleitch]

Bit Malthusian no?

[pbrower2a]

The eighty-year cycle of history (Howe and Strauss) in which historical tendencies tend to repeat after eighty years due to the extinction of living human memories of consequences of bad decisions makes more sense.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

The eighty-year cycle of history (Howe and Strauss) in which historical tendencies tend to repeat after eighty years due to the extinction of living human memories of consequences of bad decisions makes more sense.

No. No. No. Seriously No. That's the worst sort of pseudoscience

[pbrower2a]

The eighty-year cycle of history (Howe and Strauss) in which historical tendencies tend to repeat after eighty years due to the extinction of living human memories of consequences of bad decisions makes more sense.

No. No. No. Seriously No. That's the worst sort of pseudoscience

Tendencies repeat.  

Just think of how similar the 1920s were to the Double-Zero Decade. America got one of the weakest Presidents ever, basically a telescoping of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover into eight years instead of twelve. The mass culture in both decades was brash and mindless. Economic inequality intensified. Big Business called the shots in the economy. Babbitt-like hucksters pushed a speculative boom in real estate.

Enron and Teapot Dome are good analogues. Al Smith and Barack Obama both ran for President as Democrats and got the nomination and were significantly different in some respect from any other Presidents before them. (Obama got elected).

Both decades had a dubious economic boom ending in severe crashes of the economic order. The meltdowns from the economic peaks of 1929 and 2007 had obvious parallels for a year and a half.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/10/four-bad-bears/



OK, institutions have changed, and we have a far-stronger safety net. The Republicans got defeated badly in Congress in 2006 for reasons that had nothing to do with an economic collapse. After all, whatever their faults, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover did not get us into any wars.

This is not the whole story of the cycle. The timing is not perfect, so cycles can take somewhere between 70 and 90 years. The cause is partly biological -- the extinction of human memory. People resist what they remember loathsome, and people who remembered the Great Depression did everything possible to avoid its recurrence, whatever their partisanship, even if the economic mistakes that led to the Great Depression have some attractiveness and even if one was a child in the 1920s.

But people born in the 1920s, influential as they may have been in American politics, academia, and news media, have been dying off, and they are almost completely gone from electoral politics. The bad policies that made the Great Depression possible tempted people who find those policies attractive for their own agendas. Weak, pro-business government, admiration of the successful gambler on other people's money, contempt for 'losers' in an economic struggle, and a lack of economic probity all made possible  the economic meltdowns beginning  in 1927 and 2007.    

Really-bad pseudoscience would associate the cycle associated with the loss of collective memory with the movements of the stars.  

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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Pbrower finds correlation between one and another thing; Scientific breakthrough results

Generations and Decades are arbitrary constructs. The sentence beginning "Babbitt-like hucksters" could apply to large periods of the history of the United States as could "Big Business called..." (when has that not been true? If you claim the government played a larger role at certain times remember that the growth of government in the US has been cumulative since the beginning of the twentieth century and thus not cyclical)

It's very easy to pick out aspects of certain narratives describing certain periods of time and claim similiarities. Here's how the 1920s and the 2000s are different: No prohibition, Organized Crime negilible, no television, no internet, practically none of the communications and technological infrastructure which is crucial to the socialization of today's generations and generations since, large areas of the US had not been electrificed yet, Wall Street was still the preserve of certain social elites, very few Americans owned stocks and shares... etc, etc. Why these facts are less important than the ones you highlight does not seem clear to me. And I just picked out a few utterly random facts (and most of the facts you state are hardly facts so much as narratives. And historically lazy ones at that)

You even admit the comparison falls down as Obama got elected and Smith did not. Why? Because of the state of the political party organization and social attitudes how they differed in 1928 and 2008. Not because of any mystical cyclical laws or tendencies. You can't explain one historical period in terms of another when the two are not connected at all in chronology

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Rubbish. For a start that assumes that it is known how to avoid great depression, that we still know and that it was forgotten due to some human law of forgotten memory. Never mind that the head of the federal reserve is a man whose career was dedicated to studying the Great Depression as an event and the Crash of 2008 has been compared to that of 1929 a millionity times. Among other facts. As for "People resist what they remember loathsome" again that assumes that all people agree, that they know how to avoid what is loathsome, that what is loathsome is obvious. I agree nearly everyone doesn't want a repeat of the great depression (and 2008-2013 still doesn't compare to that disaster) but different people had very different experiences of 1929-1933 depending on who one was, what one did, where one was, etc. For example, in the UK wages actually increased during the Great Depression which was a boon at least for those who had work.

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Nonsense. For a start under Bush the government was bigger and stronger than ever just highly militaristic and favourable to business (as if having 'weak government' is good for business by defintion anyone who thinks knows nothing about, for example, early US history). And again that the policies to cure the great depression are obvious, that we know what was responsible, etc, et bloody cetera that I mentioned above.

TL;DR version remember kids what Galbraith said about economic forecasting making astrology look respectable. Well, at least astrologers and economic forecasters use actual knowledge and not Breakfast cereal packet history.

[pbrower2a]

History does not repeat precisely. Nazis obviously aren't returning to Germany, and Boris Putin isn't forcing the collectivization of agriculture in Russia.  The Japanese do not control Korea and are not taking over northeastern China. Colonialism is dead.

For nearly three quarters of a century we had people who resisted the tendencies that made the Great Depression possible even though those policies were good for turning a swift profit. 

The horrible practices in the financial industry about ten years ago turned investments into $#!+. People were packaging worthless loans as securities, and the most successful operators were those who gambled on other people's money. That is roughly how people were doing things in the 1920s. People will likely not do such stuff again until the 2080s.

The last people to have memories of a time are those children roughly 5 to 10 in age at the time. Disdain for corrupt 1920s economics crossed partisan lines until the 1990s when people born in the early 1920s were still common in public life. Liberals might hold contempt for the destructive practices of the 1920s because such was unjust; conservatives might have liked the potential for profit but dreaded the ruin.   

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Lame response is Lame

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Thank you. I agree. And I don't think I have much time for discussions about 'neo-colonialism' either. This is sensible.

Now if you want to claim a cyclical theory you have demonstrate what your parameters are. How far can it deviate from the model? At what level? And what do the deviations say? Unfortunately, you have failed to do that (in part because it's impossible)

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Citation very much needed. What tendencies? What exactly are you talking about? Be precise here. You are assuming that what caused the 1929 and 2008 economic crashes was the same thing. Was it? You have merely asserted that it was. And if so, what thing exactly are we talking about - and how is it different from any other time in history such as, for example, the savings and loan debacle in the 80s.

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Again you are making assertions. Here naive ones. Wall street is still packaging worthless loans and making money out of it. Why wait until 2080? And again you haven't demonstrated why this is different from other periods such as the 80s in which there was no crash. Or better, the period before 1913 in which instability was the rule in the financial system (don't believe the fed alarmists kids). And this ignores the academic historical evidence that the crash of 1929 was not responsible for the great depression (and there may be similar evidence for 2008). Again, you are thinking in simple narratives around an event rather than giving substantial analysis.

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This is rubbish. Anyone who has ever discussed politics with anyone will realize that memories are short and inaccurate and that we don't either base on our judgements on them and justify our judgements by changing our memories. The same, of course, applies for history. Therefore, we know that Calvin Coolidge was a great economic manager and that Hoover and FDR made the depression worse. Ronald Reagan was the greatest president in the history of the United States unless you belong to Team Blue in which he's satan. Nothing of controversy ever happened in the 1960s and that members of the Youth International Party, Spiro Agnew, a steelworker in Cleveland, OH, a black steelworker in Cleveland, OH, a bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama and a bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama whose white but whose wife is not remember the exact same period of time in exact same way because clearly all they remember is what they learnt from TV and eighth grade history textbooks of the period they lived through. Words can not express...