New Year 1962 -- Are we there?
David wrote:
What are you up to this fine Sunday?
Michael wrote:
Not much. Researching whether we are between 1958 and 1962 with a repeat of the 70s coming up in about 10 years or whether we're already as late as 1968.
We'll go and get Lauren and meet Bonnie at the Holiday Market this afternoon. Things are quiet.
David wrote:
Curious... where we are as a society? In what aspect, and of course, the generic "why" questions come to mind
Stock market? Resurgence of bad hair cuts? The Chia Pet?
Yes, I meant societal/social stuff. I think we're coming out of a time of business growth and socially conservativism into a time of increased liberalism and focus on human issues.Why? I think that history does run in cycles. Of course, things don't exactly repeat, meaning I doubt that we'll see an exact replay of clothes, music, or hair styles from the 60s or 70s. Though, of course, I'm sure we'll see some of those things come back in the typical "retro loop" of those things.Perhaps it's a bit like biorhythms... various cycles of general cultural direction, war/peace, technology, etc that result in a "bumpy" cycle of repetitions of things, but never an exact duplication for everything.
Your mention of the stock market makes me curious. Look at these two graphs of the Dow Jones Industrial Averages:
One is for the last 10.5 years and the other is for the 4.75 years ending at the end of 1961. The pattern of climb, climb, climb, notable decline, climb, climb, climb is almost identical, except that it happens over half the time. (Could this reduction in cycle time be part of an acceleration do to increased participation in the stock market or due to more speedy and pervasive communication?)
Here also is an article from 1960 that, while talking about different specifics, reflects the same worry about cautious investors from the 1960 stock market downturn as we saw after the recent "tech bubble" downturn.
Stock article from Time magazine, 1960
Really, though, I'm not much interested in speculating on the stock market based on these huge cycles. I am more interested in seeing a more humane society.
Interesting stuff, I think. Are you ready for something like the "Summer of Love" again in 2011, or maybe even in 2009?
Great scott! A post!
(Like I should talk)
Of course, this now ruins the chance of your blog's number of days of non-posting outnumbering the number of days of uptime of my Linux server at home... curses!
Your post did remind me of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fascinating look into the newspapers (each a scanned PDF) from 1841 to 1902. Granted, a bit beyond the era you're evaluating. But the difference between the beginning and end of the life of this newspaper amazed me as to how it started out as "news" (subjective to the era, of course) and ended up being "advertisements, with a little bit of news".
Regardless, welcome back!
followingedge.com:~$ blogtime
03:08:52 since last post, blog averages this quarter: 0.03 0.25 1.89
You're still alive! Thank God! I was really starting to get worried, especially since you and Dave both disappeared at about the same time. I feared you'd been in a car accident together.
Any study of repeating cycles needs to take into account the Singularity which is scheduled to occur in 2045. If your blog can survive that long, it will achieve sentience in that year.
Your alive and well! Thank goodness, TVindy located you and David safe and sound from the time warp. I say, we may still be close in the late 60s to repeat, but lets hope for another repeat of the snow year, 1969 style!
Merry Christmas gang.