Generational Cycles

Strauss and Howe's version of historical cycles

William Strauss and Neil Howe introduce a fascinating theory in Generations: The History of American's Future that interprets U.S. history in terms of a repeating series of four basic types of generations. Each generation leaves its own stamp on events of the day, and in turn is shaped by the times. In their follow-up work, The Fourth Turning, they propose that history moves in long cycles, each four generations long, which they call the saeculum, after the ancient Etruscan cycle of similar length.  Examples of how generations affect one's world view (and the actions taken) abound.  Thirty years ago (note: I wrote this in 2001), it was assumed that people tended to be politically liberal when young and gradually grow more conservative as they age.  This idea explained the facts at that time of liberal youth and conservative elders. Yet by the 1990's the situation had reversed, elders tended to be more liberal than young people. The 1980's sitcom Family Ties humorously underlined this trend with the young arch-conservative Alex Keaton and his liberal parents.

It so happens that one's political views do not necessarily change all that much.  Today's young adults, what is called Generation X, have a collective outlook on life that is more conservative than either of their neighboring generations.  This conservative outlook is part of what Strauss and Howe call the peer personality of a generation.  Generations with similar peer personalities will share beliefs and behavior patterns.  For example, the Lost generation, born at the end of the nineteenth century, and Generation X have similar peer personalities, making them the same type of generation.  The Lost were the conservative elders of my youth, who tended to be conservative not because they were old, but because they had always been conservative.  Similarly, today's older people are more liberal because, like Alex Keaton's parents, they have always been that way.  Strauss and Howe would advance the idea that the move towards the political right over the last couple of decades, and the liberal period before then, reflect the impact of different combinations of generations occupying the adult stages of life.

Another example of the effect of changing generational membership is the decline in the sense of community in America over the last several decades.   In his bestseller Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam proposes that the gradual replacement of a civic-minded pre-war generation with more individualistic baby boomers is responsible for about half of this decline.  In a particularly striking figure, Putnam documents downward trends in eight measures of civic engagement by birth year.  For seven of the eight measures, the decline either begins or accelerates in the late 1920's to early 1930's period.  People born after the early 1930's are less active in their community than those born before, and this trend towards less engagement accelerates with more recent birth years. Strauss and Howe would explain the trends Putnam describes as the result of the succession of generations having peer personalities characterized by decreasing civic orientation.  Their GI generation (b 1901-24) has a peer personality of a particularly civic-minded type.  In contrast to the GI's are the Boomers and Generation X, which both have highly individualistic peer personalities.

The peer personality of a particular generation is shaped by the generation's historical location relative to a social moment.  A social moment is an era, typically lasting about a decade, when people perceive that historical events are radically altering their social environment. Social moments seem to be similar to creedal passion periods (as will be discussed later.) A generation's peer personality (what makes it a particular kind of generation) depends on when they were born relative to these particularly eventful periods in history.  Dominant generations are those who come of age during a social moment; the other generations are recessive. There are two types of social moments: Secular Crises, when society focuses on reordering the outer world of institutions and public behavior; and Spiritual Awakenings, when society focuses on changing the inner world of values and private behavior.

Table 1 lists Secular Crises and Spiritual Awakenings spanning the last 400 years. The last three Secular Crises are easily recognized as momentous times in American history.  The social moments in Table 6.1 are spaced about 88 years apart on average. The Secular Crises are located approximately halfway between the Spiritual Awakenings and vice versa. This recurring pattern of alternating crises and Awakenings define an 88-year cycle which Strauss and Howe maintain reflects a repeating succession of four generations of 22-year length.

Table 1.  Social moments in American history

The four generational (peer personality) types are described in Generations as follows:

1.      A dominant, inner-fixated Idealist generation grows up as increasingly indulged youths after a Secular Crisis; comes of age inspiring a Spiritual Awakening; fragments into narcissistic rising adults; cultivates principles as moralistic mid-lifers; and emerges as visionary elders guiding the next Secular Crisis.  Most recent example is the Boomers (b 1943-60).

2.      A recessive Reactive generation grows up as under protected and criticized youths during a Spiritual Awakening; matures into risk-taking, alienated rising adults; mellows into pragmatic midlife leaders during a Secular Crisis; and maintains respect (but less influence) as reclusive elders.  Most recent example is GenX (b 1961-81).

3.      A dominant, outer-fixated Civic generation grows up as increasingly protected youths after a Spiritual Awakening; comes of age overcoming a Secular Crisis; unites into a heroic and achieving cadre of rising adults; sustains that image while building institutions as powerful midlifers; and emerges as busy elders attacked by the next Spiritual Awakening. Most recent example is the GI generation (b 1901-24).

4.      A recessive Adaptive generation grows up as overprotected and suffocated youths during a Secular Crisis; matures into risk-adverse, conformist rising adults; produces indecisive mid-life arbitrator-leaders during a Spiritual Awakening; and maintains influence (but less respect) as sensitive elders.  Most recent example is the Silent generation (b 1925-42).

In The Fourth Turning (1997) Strauss and Howe develop the concept of turnings, historical periods (associated with generations) that show common characteristics just as do generations:

1.      An Awakening turning (Idealists coming of age) is a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.

2.      An Unraveling turning (Reactives coming of age) is a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and a new values regime implants.

3.      A Crisis turning (Civics coming of age) is a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

4.      A High turning (Adaptives coming of age) is an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.

Strauss and Howe's model for generational history
In Generations, Strauss and Howe defined a generation length as equal to the length of a phase of life. The first of these is youth, defined as the period between birth and coming of age. Then comes rising adulthood, mature adulthood, and elderhood. Generations have peer personalities that are shaped by living though a social moment while in a particular phase of life.  A new generation starts to be born when all four existing generations are leaving a previous phase of life and entering a new one. Table 2 shows the birth dates of generations still playing societal roles during the 1970’s. Strauss and Howe note that in modern times, generations have run shorter than their standard 22-year length. If we define the modern lengths of these phases as 20 years, we can estimate when each generation begins the transition from one phase of life into a another as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. A new generation begins to be born

When the leading edge of one generation begins to leave one phase of life, the next generation starts moving into that life phase. When GenX began to enter into adulthood, the Boom generation started to leave adulthood and enter into midlife, the Silent began to move into elderhood and the oldest of the GIs were leaving active life. This happened around 1982, and so we should expect a new generation, which Strauss and Howe called the Millennials to start being born around 1982. Which transition date one gets depends on the length of a phase of life. For example, if I use a length of 20 to estimate when the next generation (GenZ) should come, I get 2003, which was the estimate Strauss and Howe provided in Generations.

Back in 2000, a number of generational enthusiasts, included me, at the (now defunct) Fourth Turning discussion site favored an 18-year generation length. This was based on the fact that generation and turning length must be the same for the Strauss and Howe model to work, and the average length of turnings since 1822 was 18 years. With this length, the start of the next generation (GenZ) should begin around 1998, and since turnings tend to lag by about 3 years, we expected the Fourth Turning to begin around 2001, and saw 911 as confirmation of this. 1998 is a lot closer to the actual start date for GenZ of 1997 than is 2003, which supports the idea of 18-year generational length.

The most important feature of the Strauss and Howe generational cycle is its relation to cyclical history through the turnings. If we repeat the analysis above for the next generation (Alpha) using the 18-year rule, we get a start date of 2017 for them and the start of a new High turning around 2020. Enough time has passed since 2000 to evaluate the validity of the prediction of secular crisis turning over 2001-2020. The idea that over 2001-20 we completed a Crisis comparable to the Depression and WW II, the Civil War, or the Revolution and founding of a nation is hard to believe. Instead of the country becoming unified as we entered a post-crisis High after 2020, we are more divided than ever. Two decades ago, nobody, except us, was talking about a potential civil war, today lots of people are. Back then we faced problems like global warming, a shrinking middle class, a fake kind of politics (political correctness), and political polarization that would be solved during the upcoming Fourth Turning. All of these problems remain, and most have gotten worse. It would seem we haven’t even entered a Crisis turning yet.

On the other hand, we began a creedal passion period around 2012. The period since the 2008 financial crisis seems to qualify as a period “when people perceive historical events radically altering the social environment” (i.e. a social moment). Indeed, shortly after the financial crisis, Howe proposed that the Secular Crisis turning began in 2008 and would likely last until around 2030. However, the period since 2008 looks less like “the replacement of the old civic order” (Secular Crices) and more like “a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime” (Spiritual Awakening). Long-standing problems get addressed during Secular Crises; they intensify during Spiritual Awakenings. It seems to me that we have indeed begun a new social moment turning, but of the wrong type.

Furthermore, the 2008 start date for this turning is 11 years after the associated generation (GenZ) began to be born, instead of the typical 2-5 years. Back in the early 2000’s, we had no idea of when the post-millennial generation would start being born. Strauss and Howe had projected the start date as 2003, which is consistent with a 20-year generational length (which had “worked” for the millennials) and with a 2008 Crisis turning beginning. In the more than two decades since then, we have had multiple independent confirmations of the post-millennial generation (GenZ) starting to be born around 1997. This establishes the 18-year length and rules out generations causing a social moment turning that begins as late as 2008.

One of the things that appealed to me about the generational model (and why I adopted it as a basis for my cycle thinking) was it allowed for fairly precise predictions to be made. That is, it was falsifiable. I looked for correspondences between it and the Kondratieff cycle, my Stock Cycle and with cycles in social unrest and spiritual activity. My extension of Turchin’s cycles of sociopolitical instability to include cultural instability built on my earlier efforts to find empirical support for historical social moment turnings.

The failure of the generational cycle forecast made using Strauss and Howe’s model to correspond to external reality (wrong turning type, happening too late), the collapse the alignment between the Stock Cycle and the generational cycle, and the failure of political predictions made with it led me to consider it invalidated.

That said, the pattern they saw might correspond to a real phenomenon for which their proposed theory was invalid. Table 3 shows radical eras generated by the Turchin social contagion model and associated creedal passion periods (CPPs). The first seven entries for events come from the data shown in Figure 1 of my post on cycles of radicalism. These first seven entries are the radical eras in America. For the CPP-defining events before the eighteenth century, I cite periods of turmoil in Britain: The English civil war and Glorious Revolution for the seventeenth century and the War of the Armada and Mid Tudor crisis for the sixteenth.  The 1500-15 period has no corresponding CPP of which I am aware. Two 15th century CPPs are projected by the model. One is associated with the first war of the Roses, and the other reflects the spread of Lollardy by the radical priest Jan Hus. Hus, who is sometimes called the First Protestant, was burnt at the stake in 1415 for his heresy. His followers carried on afterward with his teachings, resisting five successive crusades launched against them in what is known as the Hussite Wars. Hus’s teaching was based on Jon Wyclif’s radical “proto-Protestant” theories developed in the mid 14^th century, which came to be known as Lollardy. This was also a period of political turmoil culminating in the 1381 Peasants Rebellion. This period constitutes the earliest CPP in Table 3.

Table 3. Social contagion model and events compared to Generational Turnings

Table 3 also shows the Strauss and Howe social moment turnings for comparison to the social contagion model output and CPP events. The turnings correspond well to CPPs from English civil war up though the US Civil War and then with the Sixties and Great Awokening CPP. Strauss and Howe have two social moments in the century between the Civil War and the Sixties CPP, while there was only one CPP. However, they have a Secular Crisis social moment corresponding to the 1929-41 resolution period of the last secular cycle. This period was not one of high levels of social unrest or cultural turmoil, but rather massive growth in the size of scope of the state, which is why Strauss and Howe see it as a Secular Crisis. Secular cycle resolution periods typically correspond to periods of structural change in the state and so will be characterized as Secular Crises in the generational cycle.

But secular cycle resolution periods and CPPs arise from different mechanisms, although they can occur at around the same time as they did in the Glorious Revolution, American Revolution and the Civil War. The reason for this is these events were spaced about 90 years apart (two 46-year CPP cycles). In contrast, the Depression and Civil War Secular Crises were spaced 75 years apart, about 1.5 CPP cycles, and so occurred right in low-instability middle between the Progressive era and the Sixties CPPs. The absence of radicalism might have contributed to the great success of the last secular cycle resolution by the pragmatic New Dealers.

Social contagion cycles and the secular cycle are fundamentally different things. Social contagion cycles are first-order cycles arising “from fast density-dependent feedback mechanisms” that “arise most naturally in discrete population models and have a typical period of two generations.” For social contagion there is the generation affected by radicalization and the subsequent unradical generation who are protected by a high density of recovered radicals who suppress radicalization. The protective effect is fast-acting. War Cycles and Kondratieffs are also first order cycles. So is the Strauss and Howe saeculum. It consists of two successive first order cycles. Each features a dominant generation who matures in a radicalized period (CPP/social moment) and a recessive generation who matures in a calm period. The kind of radicalism prevalent (spiritual/religious or materialist/secular) determines whether the dominant generation is Idealist or Civic, and the recessive generation is Reactive or Adaptive. Modelski and Thompson’s Leadership Cycle is also a double first-order cycle (two War Cycles) like the Strauss and Howe saeculum.

Secular cycles are second-order cycles, which “arise as a result of population size interacting with some other slow dynamical variable.” Second order cycles are “characterized by increase and decrease phases of multiple generations in duration.” Here the slow dynamical variable is business behavior that reflects culture (black line in this figure) which evolves through a slow process from economic policy choices creating a particular business environment (dotted line in the figure).

Because Strauss and Howe (correctly) identified the 1929-41 secular cycle resolution and the CPP-adjacent Civil War as Secular Crises, their saeculum model required there to be a Spiritual Awakening between them. The proper place to put this would be the 1913-1927 CPP, but this was too close to their 1929-1946 Secular Crisis, it would mean an Unraveling turning that was only a few years long, which is far too short. So, they put it in 1886-1908, a period largely devoid of the instability events characteristic of a social moment. Doing this interfered with a Civil War turning of normal length, one that would include Reconstruction. So, they cut the Civil War turning down to 5 years and proposed that there was no Civil generation coming from the Civil War in what they called the civil war anomaly. Those of us who favored the 18-year generation length did not think there was an anomaly and held that the Civil War Secular Crisis included Reconstruction. This pushed the subsequent awakening closer to the Progressive CPP (though none of us knew about CPPs then).

The cause of the civil war anomaly was the characterization of an apparent cycle of eventful periods as arising from a single cyclical mechanism (generations) when at least two were operative, each having a different time scale. This is why it is next to impossible to discern patterns in history from inspection. All you need is two cycles operating at time scales that are not multiples of each other and the result will look chaotic and very difficult to interpret by inspection. And the ultimate reality is likely more complicated than two cycles.