Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

John wrote:

Higgenbotham wrote: > Personally I think we can see 50% come off the stock indexes in
> 2-4 days.

> From the 1929 and 1987 tops it took about 2 months for the stock
> indexes to fall 50%. I believe it can happen an order of
> magnitude faster this time.

I'm not so sure. I would expect a "flash crash" of some kind, maybe
20%, with a quick recovery, followed by a long-term crash, as happened
in 1929.

John wrote: I wonder how Vince is coming with his plans to move his family into
some seagoing vessel (I forget what it's called), and live
indefinitely in the middle of the ocean?

Grégoire Canlorbe: In his 2010 essay, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-vision of Capitalism, Howard Bloom proposes a radically naturalistic approach of boom and bust cycles, according to which depressions and good times are a manifestation of “a cosmos Googling her potential” through our cyclical mass emotions.

“Our economic gurus, Howard Bloom writes, had given us the false sense that catastrophic crashes like the Great Depression of 1929 – 1939 would never happen again. Why? Economists had cracked the code of the business cycle. They had found the secrets that stopped slides from becoming nosedives. Their tools? Raising and lowering interest rates, and knowing how and when to become financial saviors–“lenders of last resort”… Would these techniques work? No way…

Because economic crashes are not the fault of bad guys. They are not the result of obscure things like credit instruments and subprime mortgages gone hog wild. They are built into our biology… They come from our emotions and our perceptions. They come from the way we feel and see. What’s more, [they] come from the bio-cycles we help make when we are part of a group. They come from the soul of a society…

Boom and bust cycles are not unique to human beings. They arose when life itself began 3.85 billion years ago. They showed themselves among our first ancestors, bacteria. Then they reappeared in every other beast that lives in flocks, swarms, colonies, crowds and herds. Why? Because boom and bust—the cycle of good times and depressions—performs a vital function for society. That purpose? Exploration, consolidation, and repurposing. Learning, thinking, and creating. Functioning as an evolutionary search engine. Operating as a secular genesis machine.”

As a firm believer in socionomics, which influence has this analysis exerted on your own thought? Are you in line with the Bloomian perspective on the emotional cycles underlying the fluctuations of human economies?

Roy Barzilai: I completely agree with Blooms’ analysis of the biologicals roots of the cyclical nature of social mood, which exhibits itself in the history of economics and financial markets. Bloom’s original line of thinking is exactly what is lacking in our contemporary academic culture and we must come to a much higher level of understanding of our complex nature than the reductionist approach which dominates the sciences today. The same process of evolution that creates the biological cycles of growth and decay, of thriving new species followed by mass extinctions, regulates the volatility of our cultural history, from periods of prosperity and growth to great depressions and wars of mass extermination.

John wrote:The more capitalism creates wealth, the more it sows the seeds of its own destruction. - Karl Marx