And then what happens in the 2020s?
NYT ran a story about The Fourth Turning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/style/fourth-turning-pop-culture.html
Basically, the book came along in the 1990s and said there would be a big crisis in the late 2000s, and then the 2010s-2020s would have a lot of similarities to the 1930s and 1940s for various qualitative/generational/cyclical reasons.
Normally I'm not really into that sort of qualitative/cyclical analysis, but when I'm sitting around making all sorts of quantitative charts that turn out like this:
Then I'm like:
Discussion
I'm curious, as well.
I believe she's suggesting that the 2020s will have many similarities to the Great Depression.
Public debt crisis, and increasing conflict.
How any individual fourth turning ends is something that even the author, Neil Howe, doesn't try to guess. Either society comes together and starts from a new fresh foundation, or it tears itself asunder.
We can only hope it's the former option.
I think the big fear is similar to what happened in the 1930s… we could see another rise of dictators and calls for war as the public get more squeezed and feel like everything is going wrong in their society.
Civilisation is only civilised when the majority feel like the game isn’t rigged against them. I can see the cost of living crisis potentially causing a lot of instability in western societies, and the outcome of that could be bloody indeed…. I’m hopeful that Bitcoin might help prevent this - but I’m not sure… Interesting times, as the proverb goes…
I think there's definitely going to be at least a short period of chaos in western countries. Ya can't have a debt-to-gdp ratio of over 120% and 32 trillion in national debt and have an inflation rate of ONLY 7%. That's ridiculous. Let's not forget about the U.S.' unfunded liabilities... 192 trillion!!! 🤕 Unfunded liabilities are debts, too. In reality the U.S. has around 225-226 trillion in debt... We dead ☹️
#MedicareIsWorthless
Another housing crisis is on the way.
Yeh, it looks that way. People can’t go on with high inflation + high interest rates on mortgages - something will break. My fear is that a lot of folk will lose their homes, big property developers will then swoop in and buy a load of distressed property for cheap, as the banks try to offload it, and then the number of people forced into life-long renting just increases even more. It sucks that housing has become an investment asset - it should be a home first-and-foremost.