2 thoughts on “Everything You Know About The Twenties”

  1. That’s a good article. James Lileks is a national treasure.

    I left a number of comments at that site. Here is one:

    I recently read William Strauss and Neil Howe’s book The Fourth Turning.

    The book has been recommended to me by a number of people in recent years, and I finally got around to reading it. They postulate that history consists of approximately 80-year cycles, and that those cycles are subdivided by four “turnings” of about 20 years each, analogous to seasons.

    They say that the period from about 1908-1929 was a third turning, or “Unraveling”, which is a prelude to the fourth turning, “Crisis”.

    The latest Unraveling was from 1984-2008. We are very clearly in a Crisis now.

    The last three Crises in American history were the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Depression/World War II. So if their theory is even close to accurate, we are really in for it.

    Their book was published in 1997, in the middle of the last Unraveling. They predicted a Crisis beginning in the mid-2000s. I don’t see how any thinking person can deny that we’re actually in it now.

    If you haven’t read the book, see the links in the left column here for definitions of their terms.

    I just thought it was interesting that they considered the 20s as an “Unraveling”. I’d never thought of it that way before reading the book. But now I can see parallels to the 90s and early 00s.

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