Into the Fourth Turning

This week for your Outside the Box reading pleasure I am pleased to offer you the beginning of a very intriguing interview with Neil Howe he did with my friend David Galland at Casey Research. I think Neil is one of the premier forward looking thinkers of our time. His book The Fourth Turning is one of the more important books of the last two decades. 12 years ago, he and the late Richard Strauss basically outlined the psycho-social dynamics of our current time and his predictions have been uncannily accurate.

Basically, he and Strauss demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxon world has a pattern of four repeating generational types. As each generation assumes its period of dominance, the character of the various nations change in a pattern that rhymes throughout 500 years of history. We are in the beginning–middle of what he calls the Fourth Turning. This is a lengthy (17 pages) but fascinating interview but one you definitely should read. It is too long for me to put up in its entirety, but if you want to read more there is a link to the full interview at the end of the article. Just type in your email and the people from Casey will send it to you. They will also add you to their very interesting letter written by members of their research team. And of course you can easily unsubscribe if you like, but you might want to read it for a few weeks to see if you like their angle on things.

Neil Howe is a historian, economist, and demographer who writes and speaks frequently on generational change in American history and on long-term fiscal policy. He is cofounder of LifeCourse Associates, a marketing, HR, and strategic planning consultancy serving corporate, government, and nonprofit clients. He has coauthored six books with William Strauss, including Generations (1991), 13^th Gen (1993), The Fourth Turning (1997), and Millennials Rising (2000). His other coauthored books include On Borrowed Time (1988). He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he helps lead the CSIS "Global Aging Initiative," and a senior advisor to the Concord Coalition. He holds graduate degrees in history and economics from Yale University. He lives in Great Falls, Virginia. His website which has more information is www.lifecourse.com.

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box

subscribers@mauldineconomics.com

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Into the Fourth Turning

A Casey Research interview with Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning is an amazingly prescient book Neil Howe wrote with the late William Strauss in 1997. The work, which describes generational archetypes and the cyclical patterns created by these archetypes, has been an eye-opener to anyone able to entertain the notion that history may repeat itself. At the time the book…