Sunday, June 23, 2013

Peak Prosperity — Neil Howe: The Fourth Turning Has Arrived


Neil Howe of Strauss and Howe thinks that the Fourth Turning started in 2008 with the global financial crisis and the election of President Obama.

He is completely off his rocker about the economics of it though. Sociologists should stick with sociology and not do pop economics.
We cannot possibly afford the government we have promised ourselves. And, that will be a painful process of deleveraging, and it is not just deleveraging the explicit debt that we have already actually formally borrowed, it is all the implicit debt. And, I think we will deal with it, because we have no other choice.
I don't disagree with this analysis factually, however. Even though it doesn't have to happen, as a proper understanding of economics shows, the likelihood of it coming to pass is high due to ignorance, vested interests, and systemic hysteresis due to persistence of failed ideology and institutional arrangements. Neil Howe is unknowingly trapped in it himself.

Peak Prosperity
Neil Howe: The Fourth Turning Has Arrived
Interview with Neil Howe
(h/t Zero Hedge)

4 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Tom his work was originally funded by Peterson don't forget....

I don't see how you can get the economics so wrong and still be right....

Rsp

Anonymous said...

Actually, we can afford a much bigger government than the one we have promised ourselves. This should be obvious no matter what one's views are on money and public financing.

Education, health care and retirement should be socialized. Real public investment in fundamental energy and transportation systems should be increased. The real resources that are currently being poured into the grotesquely unequal and inefficient private systems that handle these tasks need to be redirected.

Matt Franko said...

Maybe the "turnings" line up with the historic occurrences of gold/silver strikes...

Find large deposits of these metals, things get better, population/economic growth follows, then the metals start to become scarce, things get worse, rinse and repeat..

rsp,

Matt Franko said...

"He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Global Aging Initiative, and a senior advisor to the Concord Coalition."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Howe

He's with the Concord people too...

So he is all caught up in the "debt/deficit" hysteria...

These cycles he found I think are probably accurate, but his association with these out of paradigm political groups is probably preventing him from getting to the causality...

rsp,