—Former Representative Paul Kanjorski (D) of Pennsylvania’s Eleventh Congressional District, on the 2008 financial crisis
The notion of secular cycles is one of the more promising keys for interpreting history since Nikolai Kondratiev discovered long cycles of economic conjecture in 1926. His long cycles last an average of fifty-five years. The Secular Cycle is a much longer two- to three-century expression of the “fractal nature of historical dynamics,” in which history repeats itself in cycles that look very similar, if not identical, over telescoping time scales.
The pattern traced by basis point fluctuations in the price of a large-cap stock like Apple, subject to high-frequency algorithmic trading, closely resembles a graph of the fluctuations in the social structure of the top strata of magnates in medieval England from 1150 to 1450. The persistence of “fractal geometry” as we zoom in and out over so many scales in economic life, from milliseconds to centuries, seems to confirm mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot’s suggestion that the more we examine, the more we find the same patterns varying endlessly, up and down.1
The famous economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, who highlighted the importance of creative destruction, also left his mark by identifying and naming three economic cycles of varying lengths in his 1939 book, Business Cycles: the Kitchin is an inventory cycle of three to four years, the Juglar is an investment cycle of seven to ten years, and the Kondratiev is a long wave cycle of forty-five to sixty years.2
Beyond all these is the Secular Cycle, which is not only an economic cycle; it also traces the waxing and waning of demographic and political factors. It describes and explains “the rise and decline of nations,” a phrase I use deliberately in homage to the late Mancur Olson (a mentor of mine who wrote a brilliant book of that title).
Olson spelled out a theory about economic growth, stagflation, and social rigidities based on the logic of choice. His argument is a rational exposition of why “distributional coalitions,” a.k.a. crony capitalists and special interests, have a strong advantage over the general interest in securing the spoils of politics. Olson explained why perverse policies are likely to prevail at the expense of economic growth when societies are stable for a sufficient time to make lobbying economically profitable, especially in large economies. As Olson put it, the resulting policy “stupidities, rigidities, and instabilities” are usually quite enough to explain the failures of economies to grow. The “perverse policy syndrome” he identified promotes inefficiency, stagnation, and inequality.
From my perspective, part of the charm of The Rise and Decline of Nations is the fact that Olson abandoned the conceit that politicians and governments were educable and sincere—one that prevailed in the economics profession for most of the last century. The economists generally pretended that policies adopted by government were not the result of pressures, bribery, and back-scratching largely orchestrated behind the scenes, but wise, well-meaning attempts to promote the public interest. To the contrary, Olson stated that organized groups usually create policies favoring themselves while working against the interests of larger unorganized groups in society, causing an unequal distribution of income.3
The Secular Cycle entails a different take on the rise and decline of nations. It has less to do with the organizational advantages accruing to groups of different sizes as they maneuver to control the state for their own advantage and more to do with the waxing and waning of population as a whole. The Secular Cycle is dynamic and includes demographic, as well as political and economic, dimensions.
For a theory that is pregnant with implications for your future, however, the Secular Cycle has remained almost deliberately obscure. Before now, you could only study it in fragments and piece them together like bits of a spilled jigsaw puzzle. To my knowledge, there has never been a coherent expression of these long-term oscillations. You would look in vain for a comprehensive overview of the big picture.
What do I mean? Simply this: You can’t be expected to get the “big picture” from a few unassembled bits of colored cardboard. Fragments and partial truths about the dynamics of growth and disintegration abound in academic literature and the blogosphere, but what do they mean? Putting them in perspective has been difficult because they have not been fully pieced together.
“Don’t Know Much about History”
An obvious reason for the partial view is that there are greater rewards from studying growth than disintegration. Also, ignorance should not be overlooked as an explanation for inadequate understanding of the past. “Don’t know much about history,” is not only a refrain from Sam Cooke’s iconic ballad “Wonderful World”; it is also an accurate characterization of current knowledge, notwithstanding the trillions lavished on education.4 The weak grasp of history today tends to foreshorten perspective. It is hard for people who really “don’t know much about history” to discern its patterns.
Further to that, the experience of developed economies over the past two centuries has been one of unprecedented growth, interrupted by occasional spasms of depression. Only an outlying country—Argentina—among economies that became rich in the modern era seems to have experienced the disintegrative phase, highlighted by long periods of negative compound growth and political instability. By and large, however, there has been little attention paid to the prospect that modern economies could follow the same downhill trajectory that historians have documented in so many instances in the past.
Pieces of the Secular Cycle jigsaw puzzle were identified by Jack Goldstone in his 1991 book, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Employing what he describes as “a demographic/structural approach,” Goldstone argues that population growth tended to cause overwhelming fiscal problems for the state, including destabilizing intra-elite competition and popular unrest.5 Put simply, Goldstone is a sophisticated neo-Malthusian.6
Almost two centuries earlier, in 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, the leading modern text on population and the economy. Two centuries before that, in 1588, the sixteenth-century Jesuit scholar Giovanni Botero had anticipated most of the Malthusian perspective on population in On the Cause of the Greatness of Cities. Malthus’s, Goldstone’s, and Botero’s argument is one that seems to reemerge from the footnotes to be discovered anew every two centuries, perhaps because the underlying Secular Cycle is more in evidence on that schedule.
Malthus was famous for pointing out that the tendency of population to increase geometrically meant that it was prone to escalate faster than the means of subsistence—hence the danger of a Malthusian crisis in which food prices increase, real income declines, and consumption among the poor drops. The resulting economic distress, sometimes compounded by plague and war, results in lower birth rates and higher mortality. This stabilizes or reduces population, easing the pressures on the means of subsistence. After an adjustment period, often involving political reorganization, food prices fall, real wages rise, population growth resumes, and the cycle repeats itself.
Enter Peter Turchin, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, and Sergey Nefedov, of the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Using Goldstone and Malthus as their points of departure, Turchin and Nefedov wrote Secular Cycles. Their book focuses on multicentury oscillations in economic and political dynamics (“Secular Cycles”) that they argue have characterized agrarian economies over the last two millennia.7
Turchin and Nefedov make an effort to specify common stages of past civilizations as they rise and decline. The so-called expansion phase peters out in stagflation, the first stage of the disintegrative phase, where the economy declines toward crisis and depression, often culminating in the collapse of the state. They explain that the stagflation phase is typically characterized by a high level of social inequality and an oppression of society’s productive segments. Population growth leads to larger armies and bureaucracies, which result in more government spending. But tax revenues fail to keep up with mushrooming outlays. Despite increa
sed taxation, the state still enters a fiscal crisis, giving way to bankruptcy, loss of military control, rebellion, and the breakdown of central authority.
Turchin and Nefedov present startling details of the dramatic oscillations in population correlated with the Secular Cycle, documenting the disintegrative phase of the Secular Cycle. In medieval England, for example, the population rose from about 2 million in 1086 to a high of 6.52 million in 1292, only to fall back dramatically to about 2 million by 1450.
Their argument suggests that many of today’s seemingly unique problems, such as mounting economic inequality, and the inability of the sclerotic political system to come to grips with the looming prospect of state bankruptcy, may simply be the latest manifestations of a centuries-long Secular Cycle dating far into the past.
Turchin and Nefedov have added colorful detail, but not enough of the jigsaw puzzle to give you a clear view of the big picture.
Climate as a Megapolitical Driver
It fell to a reviewer of Secular Cycles, Bryan J. L. Berry of the University of Texas, an expert in long waves, to develop the most interesting interpretive analysis of the Secular Cycle. (Berry is the author of Long-Wave Rhythms in Economic Development and Political Behavior.) Whether we “like it or not,” he warns, “our lives appears to be embedded in a higher order of complexity.” He argues that longer-term cycles are “more than a figment of some overactive imagination.”8
Berry points to a megapolitical basis for the population oscillations and accompanying crises that characterize the Secular Cycle. Population doesn’t just surge because people all of a sudden randomly decide to have more children. They make such decisions in clusters when real income rises, as reflected in the famous postwar Baby Boom generation. Fluctuations in climate have also been obvious drivers in the waxing and waning of prosperity. Berry summarizes the climate fluctuations that drove history:
Global warmists notwithstanding there have been long cycles of solar activity and global temperatures that correlate with the alleged secular cycles. Rome’s ascendancy was in a warm period that preceded the Dark Ages’ cold., Followed by the medieval warm period that reached its maximum between 1110 to 1250 and then descended to a low, the Wolf minimum (1280–1350), at the end of which the Black Death ravaged Europe (1347–50). Temperatures abated for a century as Europe was reshaped in response to massive depopulation before declining to the Sporer Minimum between 1460 and 1515, rose for another century and then descended to the depths of the Little Ice Age in the Maunder minimum (1645–1715), during which time the bubonic plague returned. Each epoch of declining temperatures would have been sufficient to cut yields, reducing fertility as marriages were delayed and the proportions never married increased while death-inexperienced populations were ravaged by plague. Each epoch of increasing temperatures brought increased agricultural productivity and population increase. The crisis phase of the Plantagenet and Capetian cycles occurred in the Wolf minimum and their terminal depressions during the Sporer minimum. The Tudor-Stuart and the Valois and Muscovy cycles foundered during the Maunder minimum.9
Berry underscores points that we take up in this volume. If you think about it, you can see the danger inherent in one of today’s false narratives—the pretense that the planet is warming due to human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. What could otherwise seem merely a cynical rationale for an assortment of power grabs and crony capitalist rip-offs is something much worse. The remorseless pretense that humans are causing global warming masks a more ominous turn in the solar cycles that have heretofore driven history.
The implications of the current decline in solar irradiance are sweeping. It could parallel the way that natural climate cycles drove productivity and political cycles in the preindustrial organic economy, which operated upon the energy of sunlight as converted by plants through photosynthesis. You could be challenged by the disintegrative phase of the Secular Cycle as another solar minimum wreaks havoc on unprepared global populations that have swollen by tenfold since the last Little Ice Age.
This would be less challenging if the earth really were warming, as Al Gore and his accomplices never tire of telling you. Unfortunately, global warming is a hoax—little more than a crony capitalist rationalization for a multi-trillion-dollar rip-off. Rather than getting warmer, the Earth has actually been getting colder for the past eighteen years (up to 2015), with the government wasting billions of your dollars annually on bogus climate research, designed to reach a forgone conclusion. They have turned out thousands of pages with all sorts of alarms about why global warming is a serious problem notwithstanding eighteen years of falling temperatures. Mostly, what they have succeeded in doing is providing an updated validation of Upton Sinclair’s classic observation: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”10
But not everyone is fooled. One of the more concise summaries of the dangers arising from solar hibernation is the argument from Dark Winter, a book by John L. Casey, a former White House national space policy advisor, NASA headquarters consultant, and space shuttle engineer. Casey echoes my belief that the world is at the threshold of a climate period similar to the Little Ice Age. In Dark Winter, Casey tells the truth about ominous changes taking place in the climate. Among other things, he predicts crop-destroying cold, food shortages, and riots around the world, including in the United States. Among his original insights, Casey argues that there is a high probability of record earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which are more prevalent in periods of colder climate for unknown reasons.
The Secular Cycle is a template for understanding one of the more unexpected developments of modern history: the destabilizing onset of protracted cold. Indeed, it has probably already begun. I base my apparently crazy forecast of a coming Little Ice Age on the research of solar physicists such as Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, and the late Dr. Theodor Landscheidt, who detected a pattern of declining solar irradiance years ago and warned that another Little Ice Age could begin in the first half of this century.
You need only have flown across the continent as I did while writing this book to see that most of North America was buried in a deep carpet of snow then. Temperatures ran 15 °F to 20 °F below normal. Talking heads on CNBC blamed a sequence of weak economic statistics on the surprisingly cold winter. Does that work for you?
You have been conditioned by decades of nattering about global warming to expect a much warmer climate over the foreseeable future. This just shows again why you need an independent source of information and judgment like Newsmax and Strategic Investment. The normal news and information channels in American society are totally bent under the weight of false narratives. You can trust their reports on today’s date, but that’s about it. You certainly can’t trust what they tell you about the weather, except perhaps the current temperature reading. If you believe Al Gore, anthropogenic global warming, redubbed “climate change,” is supposedly responsible for putting most of North America in a deep freeze. Huh?
As I write, National Weather Service forecasts that another blast of arctic air could push temperatures in the Midwest from 30 °F below normal to 50 °F below normal. This is global warming? What a joke. You have been misled by self-serving propaganda, ginned up at your expense, exactly the type of abuse President Eisenhower warned against in his prescient farewell speech to the nation on January 17, 1961. He spelled out exactly why you cannot blindly trust government-funded research. Crony capitalists like Al Gore lie remorselessly about climate change because it pays for them to do so.
Gore “Richer than Romney” from Crony Capitalist Scams
A New York magazine profile, “Al Gore’s Golden Years,” reports that the former vice president “is now richer than Mitt Romney.”11 A Google search on the subject of Gore’s wealth turns up a treasure trove of information about the apparently not-so-secret inner workings of crony capitalism.
A November 3, 2009, article in London’s Telegraph reported that Al Gore coul
d become world’s first “carbon billionaire.”12 The article details Gore’s “profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures in which he invested.” In particular, the Telegraph mentions Silver Spring Networks and Gore’s other green energy companies that profited from billions of Department of Energy grants.
A 2012 article in the Washington Post, “Al Gore Has Thrived as Green Tech Investor,”13 provides more details of his profiteering from hysteria about global warming, ginned out of government-funded research to build support for reducing your standard of living and siphoning away billions of tax dollars. According to the piece, fourteen green-tech firms that Gore has invested in received or benefited from over $2.5 billion in loans, grants, and tax breaks—part of Obama’s push to use public money to support a renewable-energy industry in the United States.
Turning Back the Clock to the Inquisition
Global warming is a geocentric theory of climate change, proposing that human actions on earth are the largest factors determining climate. According to global warming fanatics, heliocentric factors such as patterns of solar irradiance have little or no bearing on the earth’s climate. The fact that Gore and his followers are taken seriously at all shows how far rational scientific thought has receded today. Indeed, Gore and company seem to have done more to revive geocentrism than even Cardinal Bellarmino and the fires of the Inquisition. Of course Pope Francis has taken up the cause of geocentricism where Cardinal Bellarmino left off, issuing a papal bull in support of the view that humans cause temperature fluctuations on earth.
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