Generations and the Economic Crisis

I am currently reading Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe as part of my book research and the bok, along with a recent post on Modite have really made me think about the current economic crisis.

Strauss and Howe identify a circular pattern of four distinct generations that has repeated in America since 1584; the generations are adaptive, civic, idealist and reactive. In their theory, GIs (b. 1901-1924) are the civics, Silents (b. 1925-1942) are the adaptives, Boomers (b. 1943-1961) are the idealists, and Gen X (b. 1961-1981) are the reactives. Gen Y (b. 1981-2000) are another set of civics.

In their analysis, every 45 or so years the active generations (excluding the very old and very young) experience either a secular or spiritual crisis. Secular crises include the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, Great Depression-World War II. Spiritual crises would include periods like the Sixties or the Transcendentalists of the 1820s.

The final element so far is that each generation passes through a life stage: youth (age 0-21), rising adulthood (age 22-43), midlife (age 44-65) and elder (age 66-87). (I’ll post a chart so this makes more sense).

The authors identify five secular crises that produced sweeping change but only four were met with a sense of victory and the dawn of a new era.  These four successful resolutions shared something in common:

• Idealist elders providing principle and vision
• Reactive midlifers that are pragmatic leaders
• Civic rising adults doing their duty
• Adaptive youths following adults and making few demands

The spiritual crises exhibit a different pattern: “the trained order-takers are old while the instinctive order-givers are young.  Any collective effort faces strong social obstacles.”  This was the same pattern Strauss and Howe found during the Civil War — successful in that it ended the horror of slavery and reunited the US, but could have been resolved with far fewer casualties had it occured 20 years earlier or later.

Many have expressed concern about the merits of Gen Y — for one I am not concerned because they appear to be following a pattern that has existed for 500 years and will likely contribute very much to our society.  But if the housing bubble is our next major secular crisis, has it, like the Civil War occurred too early?  The accompanying chart suggests that it would be more easily resolved with different leadership –by that I don’t mean someone else instead of Obama — rather if the crisis came with a leadership pattern reflective of the Great Depression/World War II,  rather than what we see today from a generational perspective.

I don’t know the answer, but I am interested in your thoughts & comments.