Talk:William Strauss and Neil Howe
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The 2012 doomsayers could make great hey...ahem... with this. CЯacke®
- But...but...Andy told me Jesus was coming back by 2010 so I don't know where this 2012 stuff comes from. Might be some Satanic liberal deceit. Secret Squirrel 21:45, 27 December 2007 (EST)
Timing need not be precise. The economic meltdown of late 2007-early 2009 looks much like the the first year and a half of the economic meltdown that began late in 1929. The cause in both cases was a speculative boom that imploded after it devoured huge amounts of capital.
Eighty years is a good estimate for the average death of the collective memory of childhood. People with even a child memory (Howe and Strauss' GI Generation) of the wild economics that preceded the 1929 crash remained influential in American life until about 2000. Then the temptations of a speculative boom faced practically no resistance.
OK, one Crisis is not like the other. The American Revolution and pre-Constitutional chaos would be very different from the Civil War. World War II and the preceding Great Depression were very different from the American Civil War and the American Revolution. Today? The USA is not going to have a war to gain independence, establish whether the US have a slave system entrenched or be repealed; if it ends up in war with Evil Empires those will not be Germany or Japan.
Howe and Strauss have an open-ended prediction with much vagueness of result. That said, many of the historical realities result from random and unlikely events.
So maybe there is something to it, but not much potential for specific prediction of events. Pbrower2a (talk) 22:58, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Another possibility[edit]
Perhaps the repeating cycle is linked to human lifespans - the 80 years would cover 'never again in my lifetime' and 'my parents said...' 86.146.100.93 (talk) 10:08, 6 April 2017 (UTC)