I had hoped to start this blog much sooner in the year, but due to some life circumstances, we are getting going now. The realization by many much smarter than myself in #fintwit that a Fourth Turning is upon us has become somewhat of a viral topic on social media as we have seen year after year of seeming chaos impact lives of people around the world. As I have just finished the book and it is still relatively fresh in my head, I’m going to put my thoughts down as well. Like I do on Seeking Alpha, I like to use writing as a way to put thoughts to paper and ideally structure them better and put them out for commentary. So guess what? That’s what this is. And in the spirit of piling in to an area already rich with commentary, I decided to borrow the post title from another blog on Substack as well (one for the value investors out there).
The Book So Far
Although there is a new edition where the author get more granular on the details of this specific Fourth Turning, I wanted to explore it without having a preconceived notion of when and what. The scary part was how prescient the authors’ were of many events that would play out. The book was originally published in 1997, before Y2K, Dot-Com bust, the financial crisis, 9/11, wars in Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Middle East and COVID all happened. The authors posit that the Boomer generation, the so-called Prophets, have essentially run western society into the ground in their quest for greatness, only to too late realize what they have done and remain unwilling to pay any price for the excess.
Now in fairness, I am died in the wool Gen X/13er/Nomad. For a book written by a couple of Boomers, it grasped my generation pretty well as we surfed behind this massive generation that seemed to stay everywhere too long, whether in politics, culture or the working world, leading to our more fatalistic view of life and the situation we now seem to be in. Fourth Turnings are traditionally viewed as a “Crisis” in the book’s vernacular as the prior order runs its course with enough people disenfranchised so as to want to find a new sense of order.
But a Crisis doesn’t just start, it is fomented by an Unraveling, in the authors’ parlance. This is the good times slowly starting to fall apart as the original premises begin to weaken. The meme of “good times, create weak men who create hard times which creates strong men” would certainly seem to be at the “weak men” stage right now.
Timing
In the original book, the author’s had the rough timing to occur in 2005 and run for roughly two decades into 2026. This would be great as it would mean we are almost through the Crisis and onto the other side with the Millennial generation ready to take a leading role.
This is where I differ. I believe the author’s under-estimated the duration of the impact the post-WWII population explosion would have with Boomers taking over so much of the social infrastructure (media, politics, corporate etc.) and having become so accustomed to this monopoly power, that they would co-opt ideas from the prior generations. Thus we saw in the US the Bush, Obama and Trump 1 eras essentially maintain their power long past the authors’ due date. This delay in the norm stage of Unraveling was accomplished by a massive “kicking of the can”, whether by sheer money printing to meet government promises or outsourced deflation by shifting the creation of goods to lower cost areas through globalization. While this helped to pull up other countries standards of living, it allowed for a continued transition of political and monetary power to the existing power generation.
This continued centralization of power began to see more and more people becoming disaffected, which saw the rise of more and more people sharing far left and right ideologies. While differing in methods and viewpoints, both sides had the same issue with a growing inequality between a shrinking, Boomer-led power structure and a growing proletariat.
With the post-Boomer generations, they all dealt with this extended powerlessness very differently. Gen X was so used to it, that they have largely just kept their heads down and weathered this storm, similar to the author’s expectations. The Millennial and Gen Z groups have had a much harder time as their opportunities are really clogged at the top, while the widening wealth gap and closet inflation has made life in the western very costly to the point that most cannot see how they can have anywhere near the lives of their parents and grandparents. (As a GenX, I have experienced the same, with substantially more success required to just match the Boomer generation).
Many will probably point to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 as the catalyst for this Fourth Turning we appear to be in. I tend to think this was more of a warning shot. There was a clear dis-satisfaction with the status quo in America and in that case the margins of a divided country swung the vote one way, against almost all of the Establishment’s expectations. While this did reverse back 4 years later, we have no seen it swing back but with even more authority in 2024. The question is why.
The Snowflakes
This sub-title can have many connotations, but I tend to look at it as the snowflake that causes the avalanche (Yes, I love metaphors). In this case, I believe that the Western populations were starting to rebel against the solutions the Boomer class had to the eroding western lifestyle. With inflation much higher for regular people than posted (ask anyone how much groceries, gas, etc has cost over the last couple decades have gone and it sure wasn’t 2% annually), stagnant real incomes and no savings, the non-Boomers were getting restless. In order to try to keep costs down, they boosted immigration to allow workers in who would do work for cheap, as long as the wink-wink-nudge-nudge allowed it to happen. This was more noticeable in both the US and Europe whose borders were substantially less controlled and had largely nicer climates than my home country of Canada. Our immigration didn’t really take off up here until post COVID when the supply chains broke down everywhere and laid bare the real weak state of our economy. This immigration would also help to buffer some of the legacy programs that require more and more participants in to keep going, such as Social Security, Old Age Security etc depending on your home country. (What other type of business requires more people to be the key determinant of their continuation?) This immigration helped economically but the powers that be missed out on the shock to the home country culture that they would bring. Immigration at a certain scale helps to buffer population growth and helps to fit into the generation mosaic of a population, with both the home and migrant population doing a give and take within their cultures. The elevated levels that have taken place, however, have led to more and more new comers retaining their old way of doing things rather than adapting to the culture they are joining. This understandably creates conflict between both sides, with both wanting to hold on to their culture.
Culturally, however, the wealth Boomer generation wanted to start to get back to their roots of social activism, in the eyes of the authors’. In this case, I agree as this was the rise of activism such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG), gender fluidity and an all encompassed focus on racial differences. This article won’t debate those merits but these are all essentially driven ideologically rather than economically. When times are good, these can be debated and rolled out to society. However, in this case a larger and larger portion of society was getting left behind economically as more and more wealth was getting concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer, with most of it in aging demographics, making these utopian ideals seem more and more farcical in nature when many were struggling.
Where We Are At Now
I believe the actual cause of the crisis is the delay in allowing it to occur naturally. A reflexive Crisis if you will. As the Boomers clung to control, their own aging made them less responsive and capable to actually transition over to the smaller Gen X/Nomad group who had become accustomed to this but had now spread to more and more generational groups. This general disaffection with their lives, both present and looking forward, needed an outlet which was the first Trump electoral win in 2016. The ensuing elections in the US and other Western nations around the world has shown that this disaffection is continuing to rise with incumbents being highly unpopular or being removed altogether. The second Trump administration has the look of a new Generation being imprinted upon the world as despite his clear Boomer-ism, many of his key staff are from the next generation, including his VP. In the authors’ view, this is when the Nomad generation takes charge during the Crisis period.
This was a lot of words with which I attempted to be as coherent as possible but the main takeaway is that we are indeed now in the Crisis stage, the so-called Fourth Turning in the Howe/Strauss vernacular. I believe we are not as far into it as the original book had forecasted but that the delay in allowing this stage to occur is causing it to be extra volatile. People are frustrated because the world that seemed to work for so long is no longer working for the majority of people and that needs to change. Welcome to the Crisis.
Thanks to the authors Neil Howe and William Strauss for writing a book that I got so much value out of. I have always felt that the circle of life was a thing but they managed to expand that to how it affects society and the rhyming each stage has while also being distinct.
I welcome your feedback and comments below and if this verbal diarrhea resonates, feel free to share. As the Substack title indicates, I’m hoping to use this to try to work out some of the solutions to problems we are experiencing in this crisis; I certainly don’t have all the answers but am hoping to try to see ways to improve things through discourse. You can follow me on Twitter at your own risk as well.