Category: Book Quotes of the Day

The line separating speculation from investment is so thin that it has been said both that speculation is the name give to a failed investment and that investment is the name given to a successful speculation.

It is, by dint of sheer will, they could force tiger lilies to bloom in the November Woods.

When a new Awakening later erupts, the Millennials will for the first time discover a generation that refuses to celebrate them: their own kids, freshly come of age.

Of all today’s generations, the Millennials probably have the most at stake in the coming Crisis. If it ends badly, they would bear the full burden of its consequence throughout their adult lives.

If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026.

From this sudden realization could issue the end game of Boomer life-cycle consumption and savings habits: the Great Devaluation. At long last, aging Boomers will focus on the hard fact that a newly endangered America truly cannot (and younger generation will not) make their old-age subsidies a top public priority.

All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

• Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
• Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
• Cultural distress, with the media plunging into a dizzying decay, and a decency backlash in favor of state censorship
• Technological distress, with cryptoanarchy, high-tech oligarchy, and biogenetic chaos
• Ecological distress, with atmospheric damage, energy or water shortages, and new diseases
• Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
• Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction

In foreign affairs, America’s initial Fourth Turning instinct will be to look away from other countries and focus total energy on the domestic birth of a new order. Later, provoked by real or imagined outside provocations, the society will turn newly martial. America will become more isolationist than today in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised.

When the society approaches the climax of a Crisis, it reaches a point of maximum civic power. Where the new values regime had once justified individual fury, it now justifies public fury. Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality. The risk of revolution is high–as is the risk of civil war, since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries.

Questions about who does what are settled on grounds of survival, not fairness. This leads to a renewed social division of labor by age and sex. In the realm of public activity, elders are expected to step aside for the young, women for men. When danger looms, children are expected to be protected before parents, mothers before fathers.