Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

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mretchin
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Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 6:34 pm

Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by mretchin »

I was reading the country studies section of generationaldynamics.com, and Mexico has been in an Unraveling period for...40 years? Can someone explain this to me?

Trevor
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Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by Trevor »

I actually have a couple of theories about that. One is that the millions of people coming over the border into the United States serves as something of a safety valve, helping to reduce the problems they have. Not only are they not around to cause trouble, they send a lot of money back to Mexico, helping to keep them alive.

They had a major financial collapse in the 1990's that we had to bail them out of. If we hadn't, there's a good chance that they would have re-fought the Mexican Revolution. Of course, as things stand, Mexico's collapsing into a narco state, so they're likely going to do so anyway.

mretchin
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Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by mretchin »

http://www.migrationinformation.org/usf ... m?id=679#6

Here's a statistic I found supporting the first hypothesis.


I can't help but emphasize, "About 11% of everyone born in Mexico is currently living in the U.S."

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1191/mexica ... gest-group

So not only are there are lot of Mexicans in the United States right now, the majority of them are of working-age.

mretchin
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Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by mretchin »

When could we expect a crisis to develop in Mexico? And could the flux of foreign immigrants into a country be predictable? Surely it has an effect on both the country with the large amount of immigrants and the country losing them.

Any ideas?

Trevor
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Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by Trevor »

I don't think we can put an exact date on when the crisis war in Mexico will begin. I would say soon after the financial collapse, whenever that may be.

The effect of all these immigrants in our country, many of them illegal, is to inflame tensions, particularly along the border cities. The people who live there feel like their tax dollars are going towards supporting a bunch of illegals, since they generally use up more in services than native-born Americans. On the other side, the immigrants believe they are being discriminated against. Let's not forget the European-Native fault line that still exists in Mexico. I doubt all of them left it behind when they came to this country.

John
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Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by John »

Dear Matthew,
mretchin wrote: > I was reading the country studies section of
> generationaldynamics.com, and Mexico has been in an Unraveling
> period for...40 years? Can someone explain this to me?
A country is in an Unravelling era for around 20 years, and never more
than that. At that point, the country enters a new Crisis era.
However, being in a Crisis era does not automatically mean that you're
in an actual crisis (crisis war, financial crisis). The Crisis era,
like other eras, is characterized by a generational constellation with
behaviors and attitudes unique to that era. In the case of a Crisis
era, those behaviors and attitudes are highly likely to lead to an
actual crisis. If a country goes through an entire Crisis era
with no actual crisis, then it enters a new era, a "Fifth Turning,"
which has different characteristics from turnings 1-4.

There are several major countries whose last crisis wars climaxed
in the 1920s: Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia.

One thing that ties some of them together -- Mexico, Morocco,
Saudi Arabia, Russia -- was the discovery of oil, resulting
in a great deal of income that could be used to delay an
actual crisis.

Lately, I've been writing specifically about the persecution of Jews
throughout history, and how this can be attributed to the actions of
the Nomad generation towards the Prophet generation at the beginning
of the Crisis era: The entire society becomes lawless, as the Nomads
exact revenge against the Prophets through murder, mayhem, fraud, or
genocide.

So we can generalize this proposal to say that a country can survive a
Crisis era with no actual crisis if the government can find a way to
prevent the lawless society just described. One way is the advent of
"unexpected income," as in the case of oil discoveries.

John

John
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Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by John »

Dear Matthew,
mretchin wrote: > I'm sure this is a common occurrence for your website, but I read
> the Foundation, and I was struck by the idea of psychohistory.
> Naturally, I looked around the Web to see if I could find anything
> similar to psychohistory. At first, I found game theory, but that
> didn't predict events, it just predicted the outcomes of events.
> The majority of the mathematical models of human interaction I
> found either focused on the outcomes of events, or were not
> specific in the least.

> I finally found Generational Dynamics. The idea of the cycling
> generations seems pretty sound to me, but I have a few questions:

> 1. How far is the predictive power of Generational Dynamics into
> the future? Why? (Hari Seldon claimed to have a knowledge of
> 30,000 years into the future)
Isaac Asimov's Psychohistory was a fascinating concept, and I
certainly enjoyed reading the Foundation series many years ago. But
many of the concepts of what's possible to predict were clarified by
Chaos Theory in the 1960s and 1970s, which showed that, for example,
that it's mathematically impossible to predict the weather more than a
few days in advance. This means that weather forecasts will never
be much better than they are today.

The same is true for elections. You can take polls that measure voter
sentiment, but everyone is aware of many examples of polls that turn
out to be completely wrong. In fact, it's just as impossible to
predict election results as it is to predict the weather.

Asimov was portraying a discipline that could model the universe
with precision, unless something huge (The Mule) derailed the model.

What Chaos Theory has shown is that you can try to model the universe,
but it takes only the tiniest thing (the flapping of a butterfly's
wings) to derail the model.

Generational Dynamics forecasting is actually a refinement and
advancement of Asimove's Psychohistory by applying the lessons
of Chaos Theory. It does this by carefully identifying which
kinds of events can be predicted ("trend events") and which
kinds of events cannot be predicted ("chaotic events").

Generational Dynamics recognizes that it's impossible to predict the
attitudes and behaviors of any individual or small group of
individuals. Each person has free will and can do whatever he wants.
But what CAN be predicted, to some extent, are the attitudes and
behaviors of large masses of people, entire generations of people.
Even though individuals have free will, the attitudes and behaviors of
generations of people, taken as a group, are predictable.

For example, it's been provable for ten years that the world is
entering a major financial crisis for the first time since the 1930s.
Furthermore, it was provable that the crisis would involve a credit
bubble based on the abuse and securitization of debt, and that the
crisis would be triggered by a panic when the bubble burst. Those are
trend events.

But it's always been impossible to predict the exact scenario. Things
like the Lehman bank collapse could not be predicted in advance. The
meltdown of Greece could not be predicted in advance. These are all
chaotic events.

So the Generational Dynamics forecasting methodology uses the
concepts of "long-term" and "short-term" forecasting. Long-term
forecasting involves identifying the trend events, and estimating
a time window in which they might occur. This time window is
typically a number of years.

Then, as time goes on and chaotic events continue to occur on
a daily basis, the "short-term forecasting" technique is to
take the chaotic events and match them up to the trend events,
in order to create a combined forecast of highly probably events
in a short time window. This is what I've been doing on my web
site since 2003.

A lot of this is summarized in the following paper:

** International Business Forecasting Using System Dynamics With Generational Flows
** http://assets1.csc.com/lef/downloads/CS ... namics.pdf

If Isaac Asimov had known all of this, then I believe that he could
have created Psychohistory so that would not be defeated by
Chaos Theory.

For example, the power of The Mule was demonstrated when an election
result did not occur as predicted.

This could have been replaced by a Generational Dynamics negative
prediction. There have been a number of negative predictions over the
years. For example, almost every analyst in the world was predicting
that Lebanon was headed for civil war after the assassination of
former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri in 2005, and those predictions
continued for three or four more years.

However, the Generational Dynamics prediction all along was that a
civil war in Lebanon was impossible, or that if one began, then it
would fizzle quickly. This has turned out to be true, and almost
every analyst in the world has been proven wrong.

Now, Isaac Asimov might have used negative predictions to advance his
story. For example, the Mule might have used his powers to cause a
civil war in a place where it was predicted to be impossible. That
could have achieved the same story objective in a different way.

There actually has been a science-fiction story based on Generational
Dynamics, and it's posted on my web site:

** 'Maybe we'll get it right this time' by Tom Mazanec
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... anec090309


It's a really good story, and shows some of the things that are
possible.
mretchin wrote: > 2. Here,
> http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... #lab101819,
> you use 9/11 and the War on Terror initiated following the attack
> as examples of Crisis wars. Elsewhere you claim that the war was
> an example of a 58 year panic. What made you change your
> mind?
I didn't change my mind. The 9/11 attack could well have led to a
crisis war, in a different scenario. Imagine that Osama bin Laden had
been operating out of Xinjiang province rather than Afghanistan, and
the Chinese refused to turn him over. That could have resulted in the
Clash of Civilizations war then.
mretchin wrote: > 3. In my mind, World War II was partially caused by World War I
> because of the Weimar Republic having to pay all these indemnities
> to the victors. This is what I don't understand. Are you
> claiming that these wars with specific causes would have happened
> anyway? Did it have nothing to do with post-war payments and
> severe hyper-inflation at all making Germany vulnerable to Nazi
> influence?
If you think about your question, you'll realize it doesn't make
sense, at least as stated. You ask whether WW II would have happened
anyway, then you explain why it had to happen anyway. The example
that I usually use is this: WW II and the Holocaust would have
happened anyway, even if Hitler had never been born.
mretchin wrote: > Thanks for answering my questions, I think Generational Dynamics
> is really promising. By the way, why has no one paid the theory
> much attention? The only website with any information on it is
> yours.
Gen-Xers are running the country, and they hate anything that blames
them for anything, especially something from a loathsome Boomer.
mretchin wrote: > Also, is there a method in Generational Dynamics for predicting
> the winner of wars, if two nations are on the same
> timeline?
Not that I know of. You just have to use standard methods -- compare
the sizes of the two armies, etc. -- to come up with a probabilistic
prediction.
mretchin wrote: > Can Generational Dynamics predict when there will be a new
> religion, or a new nation formed?
New religious movements are launched during Awakening eras, and become
either established or extinguished during Crisis eras. New nations
are formed during a Recovery era, as a consequence of the preceding
crisis war.
mretchin wrote: > What happens when people immigrate and their timelines are not in
> sync with the nation they are immigrating to?
In a small migration, the migrating population will simply assimilate
into the new country.

In a forced migration of a large population, there will be a "first
turning reset," returning them to a Recovery era, irrespective of
whatever era they were in at the time of the migration.
mretchin wrote: > If a crisis war can be 60-100 years after the last one, roughly 40
> years, then isn't that cherry-picking?
There are many ways to distinguish crisis wars from non-crisis
wars, in terms of the behaviors of the belligerents. Furthermore,
non-crisis wars can occur during Crisis eras -- the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars being examples.

John

mretchin
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Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by mretchin »

Wow, you took a lot of time to respond to my questions with pretty extensive and satisfactory answers. Thank you for taking your time!

According to the theory, if there is a war every (approximately) 80 years or so, does that mean there will be a Crisis war for America in the year 2025, plus or minus five years or so? I remember in the Foundation, Seldon tested his theories on the past. It'd be pretty cool to empirically test Generational Dynamics on the future.

mretchin
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 6:34 pm

Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by mretchin »

Could you explain more about the Fifth Turning please? Do you have suggestions of historical events, battles, or periods where I should study in order to learn more? Oh, and something I was thinking- is there any way to come up with percentages, or probabilities of events? I was thinking it might be as simple as going back in time and finding what the historical percentages were. Some groups of people have cultures in which they either have a known trend of warring, or not warring, depending. However, to find whether or not the percentage could be extrapolated forward, you would have to find how variable it was, perhaps war-war-war in the first half of a nation's history, and peace-peace-peace in the second, producing the 50% average that could cause you to believe that it was an alternate. Are there any other ideas you, and the community, have had to be more mathematical so as to produce a more firm result?

mretchin
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 6:34 pm

Re: Why has Mexico not had a crisis in so long?

Post by mretchin »

Also, religiously, it is the Awakening where new religions are made. But politically, when are new parties created?

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