From WSJbooks: Will economic and political upheaval drive Americans apart, or is stability and common purpose still possible?
By Barton Swaim March 27, 2020 11:17 am ET George Friedman’s latest book is either a work of balderdash or a prescient anticipation of our current woe, or bits of both. In “The Storm Before the Calm” , Mr. Friedman, specialist in geopolitical forecasting, posits two kinds of “cycle” in American history: an institutional one, which lasts roughly 80 years; and a socioeconomic one, which lasts roughly 50.
Each iteration of these cycles—in both categories—has ended in crisis, Mr. Friedman says, but in each case America has reinvented itself and established another period of stability and prosperity. If you take away Mr. Friedman’s dodgy idea of recurrent 50- and 80-year cycles, and ignore the ever more speculative prophecies near the end, the book contains real insights. One example: The two problems now bringing us to a political crisis, he contends, are “diffusion” and “entanglement”: i.e., the “diffusion and fragmentation of knowledge among individual “experts” and “multiple federal agencies engaged in managing parts of the same problem.
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