Forecasting With Generational Dynamics
March 03 2008 / by JanetDCohen
Category: Economics Year: 2008 Rating: 11
This piece was cross-posted from BabyBoomerBlog .
I am writing today about the method of forecasting that has
guided my thinking since I discovered it in 2004. 
This method is called Generational Dynamics developed by
John J. Xenakis on his premier Website and Web Blog, Generational
Dynamics.
Generational Dynamics is based on Generation Theory, developed by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe , in their ambitious work, The Fourth Turning (1997). They look at 400 years of Anglo-American history against a template of four twenty-year generational groups, The Artist, Hero, Nomad, and Prophet, in four twenty-year cycles of Eras, the length of a human lifespan.
The Eras are Crisis, Austerity, Awakening, and Unraveling. Each
generation has characteristics and themes that propel them
diagonally through their place in history, along with their
generational cohorts. In the chart on his blog, the Artists are the
Homelanders, age 8 and younger, the Heroes are the Millennials,
ages 9 to 28, the Nomads are 
Gen X, ages 29 to 46, and the Boomers, ages 47 – 65 are
the current Prophets. Oldsters would be on the previous chart, the
Artists of the last cycle are the Silent Generation, and the few
remaining oldster Heroes are from the Greatest Generation, who
fought in WWII.
Xenakis took Generational Theory and created Generational Dynamics as a methodology for forecasting history. His blog looks at news events that depend on generational changes in attitudes and beliefs of large masses of people.
What is Generational Dynamics?
“Generational Dynamics is based on a simple idea: That societies and nations make mistakes and then learn lessons from those mistakes. But generations grow older, retire and die, and are replaced by new generations who are too young to remember those mistakes and those lessons. When that happens, the mistakes are repeated,” says Xenakis.
This is important today, because one of those mistakes is to have a major war. There are certain wars called “Crisis Wars” that are so violent that they actually put the nation’s survival, or at least the nation’s way of life, in danger.
