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Cycles of Crisis: Past, Present, and Future
Wednesday October 2 at 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm CDT
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Hosted by DJ Scruggs, a kinda sorta tech bro who is worried about how political rhetoric in the United States has become ever more apocalyptic since his first presidential vote in 1988.
In my lifetime, apocalyptic political rhetoric was mostly a right wing phenomenon driven by fundamentalist Christian ideas of prophecy. In the last 10 years or so, I’ve noticed it coming from the center and left as well. These critiques focus more on material, economic and national security concerns, and cover topics ranging from deindustrialization to Fed policy to the rise of China.
Ray Dalio, a legendary hedge fund manager, has been talking about “the changing world order” for several years, but he primarily focuses on how investors should navigate it. A more recent phenomenon is books like The Fourth Turning is Here and End Times, both published in 2023, which posit that we are in a crisis era that will almost certainly lead to large scale political violence.
For discussion, the main questions I’d like to think about is:
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- Do any of these hypotheses square with your personal experience?
- To what degree does it explain many of our social problems — stagnating wages, declining life expectancy, housing costs and even clout chasing on social media?
- What parallels exist in other countries, past and present?
- Are there any policy solutions? Examples: Kamala Harris’s wealth tax, JD Vance’s expanded child tax credit, Trump’s promise of free IVF.
- If the problem isn’t meaningfully resolved, what does that portend for the future?
Recommended reading:
Books
- End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin;
- The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe;
- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio;
- The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis, blog post by Noah Smith;
- America is Headed Toward Collapse, article by Peter Turchin in the Atlantic;
- Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers, by Freddie deBoer in Persuasion;
- Where We Are in the Big Cycle: On the Brink of a Period of Great Disorder, blog post by Ray Dalio
Podcasts/Videos
- Interview with Peter Turchin author of End Times, interviewed by Matt Grossman of the Niskanen Center
- Interview with Neil Howe, author of The Fourth Turning is Here, interviewed by Julia La Roche
- Interview with Ray Dalio, author of Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, interviewed by Julia La Roche
- Video explainer of Ray Dalio's book
