You just can't beat this scene from Harry Potter when looking for a visual representation of the phoenix of myth.
The idea is simple... huge, old, no longer needed parts of our Industrial Age society are breaking down, to be reborn into a new, Information Age version of American society. The most chaotic part of this transition will happen in this decade we're entering now, the Tumultuous 2020's as I'm now calling them. That's The Phoenix Great Depression in a nutshell.
On October 1, 2019, nine months ago, I first used the term, "phoenix recession," in this blog post. For three years, in that personal blog, I had been writing posts about the coming recession, and some of the big economic and societal issues that I realized would affect all of us, in a big way. I'm a geek on economics and big picture social dynamics, and an amateur futurist. Since childhood, I've been fascinated by trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future. A lifetime of watching and learning led me to the conclusion that a major economic crisis was coming in the late 2010's.
In short there is this convergence of some ultra long term trends and cycles, shorter term trends and cycles, and then the Covid-19/human corona virus pandemic also fell right into the mix, like a societal atom bomb, to force the change needed on so many levels. The Universe is weird like that.
On one hand, we have the long, sticky transition from an Industrial Age society into an Information Age society, described by futurist Alvin Toffler, in his long forgotten book, The Third Wave. In addition to that, we have a transition from the Acquisitor, or businessmen-dominated age, as the dominant mentality in American society, to the Laborer, or working people's mentality. This concept is described in The Law of Social Cycle by P.R. Sarkar, a 20th century thinker from India. In that theory, this is a time of a major populist uprising, which we've now seen in a series of increasing waves, since Occupy Wall Street in 2011.In addition to those two huge transitions, we have the rise of the Creative Class, described by professor/author Richard Florida, an aspect of the rising Information Age where the economy is dominated by ideas, and the clustering of creative people into creative scenes who come up with those ideas. In addition to that, economist Ravi Batra found 30/60 year cycles of economic depressions in the U.S., and wrote about them in the late 1980's. The best known is The Great Depression of the 1930's. Then the cycle skipped 1960, and in 1990 we had a long "double dip" recession, six years of stagnant economy. 2020 is the next point in that cycle, so we're due for a depression or great depression. And what do you know, things lined up again and we dropped into what is now officially a recession, right in line with that cycle. It takes 3 years or a 10% drop in GDP to make it an "official" depression. We'll probably get the 10% GDP drop in the Q2 numbers. In addition to all of that, our U.S. (and most of the world's) economy is floating on the highest levels of government, corporate, and personal debt in human history. Oh, and we're at the end of the traditional 4 to 7 year business cycle. This cycle was highly manipulated, and stretched out for 11 years. So by late 2019, we were due for a major economic crash, and some major social movements as well.
So all those things somehow converged into the set-up for a major economic downturn, which would jump start a period of major economic and social change. Basically, a massive pile of shit is sitting in front of the biggest fan ever, and it was waiting to be plugged in. Then... like a late night infomercial, "And that's not all folks, as an added bonus, here's Covid-19, a 100 year, worldwide pandemic." The fan got plugged in, and a historical shitstorm began. We're going to see a level of change, all throughout society, like none of us alive have ever seen, in the 2020's.
This incredible period of breaking down of the old, the no longer useful, and the just plain fucked up aspects of human society, will usher in changes of all kinds. It's happening, like it or not. Change. More change than any of us can imagine now, even after the last 4 crazy months. This is just the beginning.
Change. Lots of change. The old is breaking down, and we have to figure out something new, and hopefully better, and build it. Quick. Death and rebirth from the ashes, on a societal level. That's The Phoenix Great Depression in a nutshell. We've got at least 5 to 7 years of craziness ahead, maybe more. Buckle up, it's gonna be a wild ride.
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