Thread: Demographic models

There are various models of cycles of child nurturing and while fairly similar there are either bugs in the models and/or the US is in really deep shit. I put this thread in history on the assumption that the US is in big trouble and that part of the cause of the trouble is knowledge of these models.

Predictive models: Strauss & Howe in "The Fourth Turning" and HS Dent jr. in "The Next Great Bubble Boom" using different models have come up with the same timing error period of four years late. Strauss & Howe predicted a 9/11 terrorist attack involving airplanes as one of five possible scenarios for 2005 from a publication date of 1997. Dent in 2004 was predicting the 2006-7 real estate bust for 2010-11. Some of the excuses given for this error include:

Longer life expectancy throwing off the normal 70-80 year knowledge base available to inform decisions.
Knowledge of the demographic models have informed economic and political decisions.
The various nurturing cycles of the world are lurching towards synchronization and are throwing the US cycle out of whack.

Any other ideas on where the errors originate and is this a big enough problem that it should not be used to analyze history?

I would be curious as to how one could predict a terrorist attack accurately in the first place? What variables were used?
As to the housing bubble, one would have first had to be able to predict the energy crisis and the astronomical rise in consumer credit to be able to predict the housing bubble. Was part of his housing burts prediction using the terrorist attack prediction timeline?

Originally Posted by metheron

I would be curious as to how one could predict a terrorist attack accurately in the first place? What variables were used?
As to the housing bubble, one would have first had to be able to predict the energy crisis and the astronomical rise in consumer credit to be able to predict the housing bubble. Was part of his housing burts prediction using the terrorist attack prediction timeline?

Good questions! Check out Chapter 10 of fourth turning. It blew me away when I was rereading it for a possible article on the Anthrax attack case closing. Planes, CT threads, terrorists, even alliance attacks on the terrorist bases and talk about nuclear strikes all in one very short paragraph. And no, Dent was writing after 9/11 and was well acquainted with the models Strauss & Howe used and the ones that they didn't use. So his timing error in the model of the market bust seems to have been independent of earlier errors. Since the two sources use different models with publication dates 7 years apart I find the persistence of the same timing error curious.

Originally Posted by william the wierd

Predictive models: Strauss & Howe in "The Fourth Turning" and HS Dent jr. in "The Next Great Bubble Boom" using different models have come up with the same timing error period of four years late. Strauss & Howe predicted a 9/11 terrorist attack involving airplanes as one of five possible scenarios for 2005 from a publication date of 1997.

Come now - they predicted a 9/11 terrorist attack involving airplanes? I'm guessing they certainly didn't predict the date. As you said; it was one of 5 scenarios - and 'terrorist attack' isn't that prescient. All they actually predicted was the onset of a crisis - which is the sort of vague prediction that will always be fulfilled.

Let's try it now - I predict a major crisis of some kind by 2010. Bet you I'm right.

I'll be honest and admit I've never read these books, so I could be a little unfair in my dismissal, but it strikes me as the kind of nonsense where a theory of history's progression is supported merely by searching for the appropriate signs from each era, and dismissing those that disagree. It's easy to look at almost any 20-year period in history and pick and choose things which meet the appropriate definition - see! This is a Crisis period!

Even then their own model falls down and is forced to skip a generation; as the authors couldn't handle the American Civil War being anything other than a Crisis.

Looking further at their cycles and how they've broken it down, I'm intrigued to see how they could possibly justify it in their book. The English Civil War doesn't fall under a period of crisis - but that's okay. The entirety of the 17th century was a time of upheaval and crisis in Britain, so by the time the Crisis period rolls around we still have conflict with the king in the form of James II; and along comes the Glorious Revolution. But, oh dear, our Crisis period isn't over yet. This isn't a problem, however, we still have the Jacobite uprisings! Um - lets just ignore the last few years, eh?

These are interpretations imposed on history. They aren't telling us anything about what's going on.

While there are certainly vagaries in the model the timing problem is my focus. Hell, there are molecules that do in fact exist but chemists have trouble reconciling valance and physical structure. Tunnel diodes were so confusing that for parts of three decades there was no defensible theory of how they worked. So a three decades old discipline may very well be in the same position as the Prolemaic or Brahe model of cosmology before Kepler worked out the bugs does not strike me as a big deal. But a consistent timing error means right ball park and either wrong theoretical structure or the model is affecting the observed world. That is interesting.

You haven't pointed to a consistent error in timing. You've shown one vague prediction of the onset of a crisis, and found something you'd consider the onset of the crisis that happened four years earlier. Then, you've found somebody missing the end of the housing bubble by four years (and predicting that the housing bubble would build and burst is not an achievement - I predicted that). You can't claim a 'consistent' error from a sample size of two.