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Cycles, Systems and Seats in the Coliseum

December 12, 2020

Cycles, Systems and Seats in the Coliseum

The idea that debt, leverage, speculation, greed, exploitation and parasitic elites can expand exponentially forever is magical thinking.

Contrary to first impressions, I am not a doom-and-gloomer; I’m a systems-cycles-er, meaning I’m interested in where systems and cycles are heading.

Cycles work because we’re still running Wetware 1.0 which entered beta testing around 200,000 years ago and was released, bugs and all, around 50,000 years ago. Since the processes and inputs haven’t changed, neither do the outputs.

Nature is a mix of dynamic, semi-chaotic systems (fractals, etc.) and cyclical patterns which tend to operate within predictable parameters. Why should human nature and human constructs (societies, economies and political realms) be any different?

So longterm success breeds complacency, hubris, economic and intellectual sclerosis, draining political infighting and the overproduction of parasitic elites, to use Peter Turchin’s apt description. Consumption of resources expands to soak up every last bit of what’s available and then the supply of goodies plummets for a multitude of completely natural and predictable reasons (sunspot/solar activity, El Nino, etc.) and a host of unpredictable but equally natural semi-chaotic extremes (100-year droughts, floods, etc.).

Wetware 1.0’s go-to solutions to all such difficulties are rather limited:

1. Ramp up magical thinking. If a couple of human sacrifices ensured good harvests in the good old days, let’s slaughter a couple hundred now–and if that doesn’t work, then…

2. Do more of what’s failed spectacularly and slaughter a couple thousand fellow humans, because darn it, maybe everything will turn around if we just kill another couple dozen.

This requires ignoring the novelty of the current challenges and clinging to what worked so well in the past even as whatever worked in the past can’t possibly work now because circumstances are fundamentally different.

3. Seek scapegoats. It’s those darn witches. Burn a bunch of them and our troubles will magically disappear.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Was All Predicted 10 Years Ago

December 3, 2020

This Was All Predicted 10 Years Ago

In 2010, the scientific journal Nature published a collection of opinions looking ahead 10 years, i.e., where we are right now.

Nature then published a short response from zoologist Peter Turchin in its February 2010 issue.

Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent — and predictable — waves of political instability (P. Turchin and S. A. Nefedov Secular Cycles Princeton Univ. Press; 2009). In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. These seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. They all experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability.

Very long “secular cycles” interact with shorter-term processes. In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.

We are also entering a dip in the so-called Kondratiev wave, which traces 40- to 60-year economic-growth cycles. This could mean that future recessions will be severe.

In addition, the next decade will see a rapid growth in the number of people in their 20s, like the youth bulge that accompanied the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s.

All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.

Again, that was from 2010. Right on schedule, we are experiencing the “instability spike” Turchin says tends to come along every 50 years.

Why 50 years? It relates to the human lifespan.

Consider who was “in charge” during the period around 1970. Baby Boomers were all 25 or younger at the time. Managing the chaos fell on older generations, who remembered it well and spent the rest of their lives trying to prevent more of it.

But after 50 years or so, they are mostly gone. We who remain must learn the lesson again.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ray Dalio Warns ‘History Repeats’ – Understanding Big Debt Crises, Part 1

September 10, 2018

Ray Dalio Warns ‘History Repeats’ – Understanding Big Debt Crises, Part 1

Ten years ago this month, the world’s financial system nearly ground to a halt. It was a dramatic and pivotal time, which has had lasting effects on many people’s lives. But, as the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, notes, it was also something that has happened many times in history and will happen many times in the future.

Authored by Ray Dalio via LinkedIn.com,

As you know, I believe that everything happens over and over again and that by looking at those things happening many times, one can see the patterns and understand the cause-effect relationships to develop principles for dealing with them. Prior to 2008, I had studied these relationships for debt crises with my colleagues at Bridgewater, and because we understood these relationships, we were able to navigate the crisis well when many others struggled.

Today I am sharing our understanding of how debt crises work and how to navigate them well in a new book called “A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises.”

I am making it available for free because I am now at a stage of life where what’s most important to me is to pass along the principles that have helped me. My hope is that sharing this template will reduce the chances of big debt crises happening and help them be better managed in the future.

The template comes in three parts.

The first explains the template for understanding how debt cycles work and provides principles for dealing with them well.

In the second, I look at how three big debt crises worked in depth – the 2008 financial crisis, the US Great Depression of the 1930s, and Germany’s inflationary depression of the 1920s.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Collapse of Society – Are the Doom & Gloomers Even on the Right Page?

March 20, 2018

The Collapse of Society – Are the Doom & Gloomers Even on the Right Page?

QUESTION: Hey Marty,
Thanks for the incredible information you are sharing. I subscribe to your service and read your blog every day.
Do preppers have any justification in planning for a complete collapse, be it economic, political or otherwise? I keep a 30 day supply of freeze dried food but I have friends that are much more serious in their stockpile.

Thanks!

DL

ANSWER: The end of the world scenarios that the doomsday people forecast are over the top. If things unfolded as they proclaim, there would be no point in preparing for there would be nothing left. Movies like the Planet of the Apes were based upon this theory. The likelihood that there will be an economic and political upheaval is 100% on point.

I have recommended keeping a stash of food, but notfor the reasons they put out there by the doom & gloom people. The winters are going to keep getting colder. As they do, this will also disrupt the food supply. I have warned that historically, it is Global Cooling that kills off people – not Global Warming.  Additionally, as political unrest rises, there will also be a disruption in the food supply. The majority of people are incapable of growing food for themselves, so society as a whole has this great vulnerability as was the case in in the eternal city of Rome. I simply look at history and there is no agenda in what I publish. We are entitled to just the facts.

Historically, as taxes kept rising, and public safety became a growing concern in the urban life, more and more people began to migrate leaving Rome walking away from their property. There is simply a cycle where we all come together to form great societies, the ruling class becomes greedy, and then the cycle turns we migrate back to suburbia.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Checking In on the Four Intersecting Cycles

March 14, 2018

Checking In on the Four Intersecting Cycles

If you think this is a robust, resilient, stable system, please check your Ibogaine / Hopium / Delusionol intake.
Correspondent James D. recently asked for an update on the four intersecting cycles I’ve been writing about for the past 10 years. Here’s the chart I prepared back in 2008 of four long-term cycles:
1. Generational (political/social)
2. Price inflation/wage stagnation (economic)
3. Credit/debt expansion/contraction (financial)
4. Relative affordability of energy (resources)
Here are four of the many dozens of essays I’ve written on these topics over the past decade:
The key point that’s not communicated in the chart is there are dynamics that interact with each of these cycles. For example, demographics are influencing each of these trends in self-reinforcing ways.
Governments are borrowing more to fund the promises made to seniors decades ago when there were relatively few retirees compared to the working populace. Now that the ratio of those collecting government benefits to workers is 1-to-2 (one retiree for every worker), the system is buckling.
The “solution” is to borrow increasing sums from future taxpayers to fund pay-as-you-go healthcare and pension programs for retirees.
Technology is another dynamic that is actively influencing all these cycles in self-reinforcing ways. As technology is substituted for human labor, wages stagnate and the size of the populace paying taxes dwindles accordingly. The “solution” is once again to borrow more to substitute for declining purchasing power.
The dynamics driving wealth/income inequality and the rise of politically/financially dominant elites are also powering these cycles. As Peter Turchin has explained–a topic covered in my essay When Did Our Elites Become Self-Serving Parasites? (October 4, 2016)– social disunity / discord rises when the number of people promised a spot in the elite far exceeds the actual number of slots available.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cycle of Knowledge

September 20, 2017

Cycle of Knowledge

QUESTION: Hello,

I am a French Astrophysicist and I end up watching with great interest a TV story about Martin Armstrong. As a scientist I am really curious and keen to build new connection between our way of describing the Universe and the bias introduced by our own vision and history. Hence I was wondering if the algorithm that Martin has developed was ever tested on human knowledge discovery or if this is something that could be interesting to do.

Kind Regards,

IA

ANSWER: Absolutely. There is cycle to knowledge that I have also encountered and found fascinating. We reach period of knowledge and then we seem to lose it all and reboot. Society before the Dark Age knew the Earth was round and not flat.  For example, if we look at the ancient Greeks, the knew the Earth was round and not flat. They burned people like Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) alive at the stake for claiming the world was round and it revolved around the sun instead of the other way around. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) argued in his writings that the Earth was spherical, because of the circular shadow it cast on the Moon, during a lunar eclipse. Another reason was that some stars visible from Egypt are not seen further north. Aristotle wrote:

The evidence of the senses further corroborates this. How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them? As it is, the shapes which the moon itself each month shows are of every kind — straight, gibbous, and concave — but in eclipses the outline is always curved: and, since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth’s surface, which is therefore spherical.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Long-term Cycle of Monetary Crisis

September 9, 2017

The Long-term Cycle of Monetary Crisis

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong, I have been following you for all my adult life and that has exceeded 20 years by now and am shocked to say, I found your article on how things evolve GOLD-Oil-Dollar.  I must say this is a eye-opening evolution you are talking about. Has this always been the case with things changing coming into play and then vanishing?

ANSWER: Absolutely. I have written about how gold vanished from use with the Dark Age following the fall of Rome. Gold did not reappear in coinage for nearly 600 years. The first gold coin to reappear in Britain came during the 13th century issued by Henry III.

The Gold Cups of Mycenae

The same thing took place with the Dark Age in Greece. This is when the Mycenae ruled known as the Heroic Period of which Homer wrote. Scholars thought it was just fiction written by Homer until the ancient city of Troy was discovered. Troy VIIaappears to have been destroyed by war around 1184 BC. However, scholars did not believe the writings of Homer because Homer was born sometime between the 12th and 8th centuries BC. He remains famous for his work The Iliad and The Odyssey. So once again there is about 600 years separating the Heroic Age and the Hellenistic Age.

If we turn to Japan, here too we find that the emperor abused his power to issue money and once again we find money vanish for about 600 years. Each new emperor devalued all previously issued coinage to 10% of his new coinage. People simply refused to accept coins because they were devalued and were no a store of value.

Therefore, throughout economic history we always have long-term structural reform. Do not expect either gold or oil to always be a valuable component.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART FOUR

February 14, 2015

FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART FOUR

In Part One of this article I explained the model of generational theory as conveyed by Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning. In Part Two I provided an overwhelming avalanche of evidence this Crisis has only yet begun, with debt, civic decay and global disorder propelling the world towards the next more violent phase of this Crisis. In Part Three I addressed how the most likely clash on the horizon is between the government and the people. War on multiple fronts will thrust the world through the great gate of history towards an uncertain future.

War on Multiple Fronts

 

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe –The Fourth Turning

The drumbeats of war are pounding. Sanctions are implemented against any country that dares question American imperialism (Russia, Iran). Overthrow and ignominious imprisonment or death awaits any foreign leader questioning the petrodollar or standing in the way of America spreading democracy (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Egypt). The mega-media complex of six corporations peddle the government issued pabulum about ISIS being an existential threat to our freedoms; Russia being led by the new Hitler and poised to take over Europe; Syria gassing innocent women and children; and Iran only six months away from a nuclear bomb (they’ve been six months away for the last fourteen years). Hollywood does their part with patriotic drivel like American Sniper, designed to compel low IQ unemployed American youths to swell with pride and march down to enlistment centers, located in our plentiful urban ghettos.

The most disconcerting aspect of Fourth Turnings is they have always climaxed with total destructive all-out war. Not wars to enrich arms dealers like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, but incomprehensibly violent, brutal, wars of annihilation. There are clear winners and losers at the conclusion of Fourth Turning wars. Leaders mobilize all forces, refuse to compromise, define their enemies in moral terms, demand sacrifice on the battlefield and home front, build the most destructive weapons imaginable, and employ those weapons to obtain victory at any cost.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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