Published: June 13, 2025
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Notably, the long-term debt cycle coincides with the 4th turnings. I mainly focus on what's happening quantitatively (debt). But keeping in mind the changing social/geopolitical dynamic is a nice accompaniment to that. Old institutions/norms facing entropy, death, rebirth. 🧵

Image in tweet by Lyn Alden

Published in 1997, The Fourth Turning spoke of 80-100 year cycles of history, with each fourth one being a "crisis" period. It predicted 2005-2025+ would be the next 4th turning era. Where old institutions get restructured, social norms rapidly shift, and so forth.

Some people dismiss 4th turnings as pseudoscience, and I do get that. But when you combine it with a quantitative backbone like this, it strengthens the useful aspects of it. Naturally, any major sovereign-level debt cycle is going to coincide with big shifts in other things.

1st Turning: High/Unification- Society gets very unified/structured after prior crisis 2nd Turning: Awakening- some pushback against rigid structures/norms 3rd Turning: Unraveling- gradual decay of structures 4th Turning: Crisis- death of old structures, birth of new

Precisely how long each era takes is not my interest. But the general shape of it is: society unifies in a productive but rigid way, then slowly becomes more individualistic against that, entropy/debt builds up in the system, then there's a reset, and people crave unification.

And the broad timeline strokes are about right. Institutions, norms, and social contracts built 80-100 years ago are long enough that those who were adults at the time are gone. Society runs on those, but things change, and needs to form new institutions/norms/contracts.

The accumulation of debt is a good quantifiable representation of entropy building up in the system during the 2nd and 3rd turnings, and then effectively being defaulted/debased in the 4th turning, in parallel to whatever is happening socially/geopolitically along the way.

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