"Plato's reduction of political evolution"

 

Plato's reduction of political evolution to a sequence of
monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship
found another illustration in the history of Rome.

From The Lessons of History (1968) by Will and Ariel Durant

 

I've been blogging that quote since 2011.

Durant also used Plato's theory to speculate about the possibility of a dictatorship in the United States.

The AI Overview links to

• Will Durant > Quotes at GoodReads, but an Amazon window came up first and wanted me to sign up for something. Fuck that guy. Does Amazon... Yup: Amazon purchased Goodreads in 2013.
• And From democracy to dictatorship - Times of Malta -- but I'm not even linking to that, because the first thing that came up there was a window asking permission to use my information.

So maybe the AI Overview can serve as a buffer between what the internet could have been, and what it has become. Maybe I will skip the first few search results from now on.

The two links used by the AI were among the first three search results below the Overview. Fourth in the search results was "Excerpt from The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant", a 2-page PDF from the Anacyclosis Institute. But I tripped over "Anacyclosis" and had to look it up:

Oh, I like this! The Anacyclosis Institute defines anacyclosis as a "unified theory" of political history that examines something like the phenomenon I describe as the Cycle of Civilization.

The Anacyclosis Institute home page displays a photo of the US Capitol building in a heavy fog, along with their logo -- ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail -- and a question all in uppercase: "What comes after democracy?" 

Very nicely done. The snake symbolizes the cyclic process; the fog makes the future unclear; and the question is not delivered in a hushed tone.

When people also ask Who invented anacyclosis? Wikipedia responds: Polybius. I dunno who that is, but since reading Simkhovitch I have tremendous respect for the ancient authors and the value that can be drawn from their work.

Another question: What is the Polybian Cycle? The answer is given as "A Modern Interpretation of Machiavelli's Political Cycle" by Learry Gagné, a 9-page PDF that downloads automatically when the link is clicked. A separate search turned up this download page that opens a file that looks like a PDF but doesn't want to save as a PDF. Seems like a lot of trouble, but at a glance, the PDF looks like it might be useful -- for me, at least.

Learry Gagné says Machiavelli's political cycle is "substantially different" than the cycle of regimes devised by Polybius. In the paper, Gagné reconstructs "Machiavelli's own political cycle, using the modern language of rationality and emotions". He says "I am convinced that [this] model can be built from a set of human motivations and social mechanisms found in Machiavelli's works."

We'll see if it still sounds interesting when I try to read it.

At the Anacyclosis Institute, the "What is Anacyclosis" page says:

There is good reason to think that Polybius and his predecessors arrived at this theory empirically. After observing the rise and fall of many hundreds of city-states, most of which cycled through several of the governmental forms mentioned above, Greek political thinkers concluded that these transitions from one form to another were not random. Rather, they seemed to follow simple and recognizable patterns.

It's hard for me to accept a statement like that, without some references and some reading. But that's on me. Meanwhile, they've got me interested.

At the bottom of the page they show two curved arrows forming a circle around the word "Anacyclosis", suggesting a cycle. Around it in a larger circle are the names of "the six regime archetypes that the Greeks identified and which we still use today (monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy or mob-rule)" -- apparently an advance on "Plato's reduction" noted by the Durants.

My mental picture of the Cycle of Civilization is far less developed than the cycle described by the Institute. But my first reaction to this circle of "regime archetypes" was No, that can't be right -- There's no Dark Age in their cycle.

But theirs is not a cycle of civilization, so they wouldn't have a Dark Age. And they do have the "mob rule" stage, ochlocracy, which might correspond to the dark age of the cycle I focus on. A search for ochlocracy turned up Ochlocracy, The Ancient Greek Concept That Explains Our World Today, dated January 2017. (Things have only become more ochlo-crazy since then.)

That search also turned up "Ochlocracy: Are We There Yet?" from the Marquette Law Review. I first ran into Marquette just a few days ago.

Well, it seems that these notes are mostly a reading list for myself. So I think I'll just tie it off here.

Little things

I opened Ross Perot's United We Stand (1992) this morning and started reading Chapter One:

In June, 117,000 more Americans were thrown out of work. While we were putting the finishing touches on this book in July, eight companies announced they were shedding 23,000 jobs. Those were just the announced layoffs.

The Federal debt is now $4 trillion...

I had to stop, to say two things.

1. "8" is a number; "eight" is a word. Part of the decline of civilization, a small part, includes the change from using words to using numbers when we write. Yes, unwieldy numbers like 117,000 and 23,000 have always been best expressed as numbers. But I must have been taught to write "eight" rather than "8" when I'm writing, because that is still my natural inclination. And these days, I always notice things like Perot writing out the word "eight" in 1992, because I try not to do that anymore.

2. Perot capitalizes the word "federal". I used to do that, too, until I saw that people don't do it anymore. The interesting thing, though is the explanation I once read: In the days when people were generally satisfied with the federal government, the word was capitalized; these days, when people are generally dissatisfied with the federal government, the word is no longer capitalized.

I see everything in terms of the decline of civ.

Coupla versions of a graph, coupla different worlds

Suppose, in a different world, we take a job that pays a dollar an hour. After each year, we get a ten-cent raise. After the first year, that 10-cent raise is a ten-percent increase. That's decent.

After 10 years, we're making $2 per hour. Now the ten-cent raise is a five-percent increase. Not so decent.

In our 31st year we're making $4 per hour, and now a ten-cent raise is only a 2.5 percent increase. It's still ten cents, but it is not enough.

And in our 41st year we're making $5 per hour, and a ten-cent raise is a 2 percent increase.

In a different different world, we take a job that pays a dollar an hour, but we get a 10 percent raise after each year. Now, no matter how many years we work, every raise is 10 percent. After 8 years we're making more than $2 an hour; after 15 years we're making more than $4 an hour; and after 18 years we're making more than $5 an hour. There's no comparison to that other world.

There's no comparison between ten-cent changes and ten-percent changes.

 

Okay, forget those jobs. I want to look at GDP. Make it Real GDP, where prices never go up. And make it Real GDP per person -- per Capita -- because if Real GDP only doubles when population doubles, we're not gaining anything. (BTW, this still doesn't consider changes to income inequality.)

Real GDP per Capita is not like wages. Someone decides what our wage will be, or maybe we come to an agreement on a number. That doesn't happen with GDP. With GDP we have to wait and see how it turns out: Sometimes the economy grows. Sometimes it doesn't. And if we guess ahead of time what the number will be, it is only a guess. It's not like that with wages.

We wait and see what GDP turns out to be, and what it is after they take inflation out of it, and what it is after they divide by population. And after all that, we can do what I do -- grab the data from FRED or somewhere, and look at how much it changes from one year to the next. 

We can look at the change as an amount (like a ten-cent raise) or as a percent (like a ten-percent raise). I want to look at it both ways, and compare the two.

But changes and growth rates of GDP are jiggy. The numbers change from year to year, and it is hard to get a feel for how things are going. Staying about the same? Improving? Getting worse? So I like to look at periods longer than a year. Longer periods help to smooth out the jiggies by blending them together.

I'm using data that starts in 1948. My first 10-year period takes 1948 as a base year and compares the 1958 value to it, so I have 10 yearly changes (even though I'm using 11 years to do it). (And actually, it is 4 times as many changes because I'm using quarterly data.)

The 1948-to-1958 change is plotted at 1958; next I plot the 1949-to-1959 change at 1959, and so forth up to the most recent data. (Actually, first the 1948Q1-to-1958Q1 change, plotted at 1958Q1, and then the1948Q2-to-1958Q2 change, plotted at 1958Q2. Annual data is SO MUCH easier to work with!)

The data I'm plotting is the average of the changes for each 10-year period. I made one graph showing the 10-year averages of "Change from Year Ago" values of the Real GDP per Capita data, and another showing the 10-year averages of "Percent Change from Year Ago" values. 

And it's probably taking longer to read this than it took me to make the graphs, but that's how it goes sometimes.

Here is the "Change from Year Ago" graph, showing the change in terms of amounts:

This graph shows a general upward trend, with large declines in the early 1960s, the mid 1970s, the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and around 2008. Remember, though, that any year we look at on this graph shows the average for the 10-year period ending at that year. Every point on the graph is the result of a decade of economic data.

Next is the "Percent Change from Year Ago" graph. It shows the same general pattern and the same low-point dates, but the general trend this time is downward:

The relatively large drops are for the most part explained as caused by multiple recessions within the 10-year periods. The low at 1961 shows the effects of the 1953-54 recession, the 1957-58 recession, and the 1960-61 recession. The mid-1970s drop shows the effect of the 1969-70 and 1973-75 recessions. The drop of the early 1980s shows effects from the 1973-75, the 1980, and the 1981-82 recessions. The drop of the early 1990s shows effects from the 1990-91 recession and the Savings and Loan Crisis. And the fall from 2006 to 2011 shows effects from the 2001 recession, the Global Financial Crisis, and the Great Recession of 2007-09. These brief explanations apply equally to both of the graphs.

Setting those large declines and their consequences aside, it is fairly easy to see a general upward trend from the late 1960s to the last data point (2024Q3) on the "Change from Year Ago" graph, and a general downward trend from the mid-1960s to the last data point on the "Percent Change from Year Ago" graph. And now at last, we get to what I wanted to get to.

The Change in Real GDP per Capita shows a trend of increase, and the Percent Change in Real GDP per Capita shows a trend of decrease.

If you look at the raw data for Real gross domestic product per capita (which I used for both graphs) you might notice that the plotted line shows a slight upward curve. If you narrow your browser, the graph narrows with it; this may make it easier to see the curvature. 

I use the edge of a sheet of paper as a straight-edge. I put the straight-edge paper on the low side of the line, hiding most of the lower half of the graph. If you put it on the high side of the line (hiding the upper part of the graph) the things I say below won't make any sense.

The first thing I noticed was that using the paper straight-edge made the drop of 2008-09 look like the most significant event on the graph. The second was that the upward curve of the plotted line continues even after the 2008-09 event.

So the raw data shows an upward curve. This corresponds to the general upward trend of the first graph.

Now, if you want, you can change the vertical scale to a log scale:

• If you narrowed your browser, above, change it back.
• Click the "edit graph" button just above the right end of the graph.
• In the Edit window that opens, click the "Format" tab
• Find "Log Scale" and "Left" partway down the page and click the checkbox to make the vertical scale a Log Scale.

The plotted line on the graph changes from upward-curving to downward curving.

With the Log Scale checkbox checked, I lined-up my paper straight-edge on the middle years (1965 to 1990 or 2000) and the paper I was using covered up the years before 1965 and the years after 1990 (or 2000). With the checkbox checked, the line is down-curving.

And of course, the final step is to uncheck the checkbox and do the straight-edge thing again. With the straight-edge lined up with the data on the 1961 low and the 1990 high, I see most of the data before 1961, and I see the plotted line trying to get out from under the paper by around 1995, and again trying to get out from under the paper a few years after the Great Recession of 2008-09. With the checkbox not checked, the line is upward-curving. Tilt your head so that the part you put the straight-edge on looks "horizontal" and you will see both ends of the plotted line curving "up" and away from the straight-edge.

What the two graphs show is that Real GDP per Capita continues to increase, but the increase has been slowing for decades. The straight-edge technique shows the same.

The general uptrend of the "Change from Year Ago" graph shows the continuing increase. The general downtrend of the "Percent Change from Year Ago" graph shows the increase slowing.

Long-term slowing of economic growth is indistinguishable from the decline of civilization.

Skepticism

Musk at Madison Square Garden during a rally for Donald Trump. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Confidence

Musk at Madison Square Garden during a rally for Donald Trump. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Following up

Takes me a long time to write even a short post for the blog. This means that, if there is a graph, I get to spend a lot of time looking at it and thinking about it. Sometimes that leads to a follow-up post.

 

This is Fernando Martin's graph that I was talking about yesterday, showing 10-year averages of annual growth rates:

From Why Does Economic Growth Keep Slowing Down? by Fernando Martin

It ends at 2016. (It comes from a post from February 2017.)

This is my graph from yesterday, a smaller version of it:

My graph, modeled on Fernando's. I show data thru 2024 Q3.

The big difference between the two graphs is that mine is newer, so it shows data after 2016.

If we focus on those added years, we see an absolutely incredible upswing in the economy's performance during the Trump years, the 2017-2020 period. Maybe Trump's people were looking at a graph like this when they wrote:

Before the Coronavirus spread from China across the globe, President Trump helped America build its strongest economy in history.

in a trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov site titled "Economy & Jobs - The White House".

My graph shows the 10-year rate of growth falling from around 3.4 percent in 2005 to around 1.8 percent in 2010, to around 1.5 percent in 2016. Then comes the turn-around: from around 1.6 percent growth in 2017 to 2.1 in 2018, to 2.5 percent in 2019. A really remarkable and long-delayed recovery.

However, the dates are end-dates of 10-year periods. The growth shown at 2005, for example, is not the growth for 2005. It is the growth for the whole 10-year period ending at 2005, the 1995-2005 period.

It took five years for the growth rate to fall from 2.4 percent (2005) to 1.8 percent (2010) -- and not lower than 1.8 percent in 2010 despite annual readings of -2.5 percent in 2008 and -4 percent in 2009 -- because the data plotted at 2010 is an average (or a CAGR) of all the growth between 2000 and 2010. Not every year in that decade was a financial crisis year.

The rapid downtrend shown on the graph between 2005 and 2010 is the result of the high-growth years from 1995 to 2000 gradually dropping out of the calculation, one year at a time.

Likewise, the incredible upswing of 2017-2019 was the direct result of data for the bad years 2007, 2008, and 2009 dropping out of the calculation. When you add up ten numbers and take the average, and then take the lowest numbers out of the calculation, the average goes up. And when you add in the new data, now a decade after the financial crisis of 2008 and with things a little better, that new data is bound to push the average up even more -- not because it was the strongest economy in history, but because anything even close to 2 percent growth would have been enough to push the average up.

And that's what won the 2024 election for Donald Trump.

One more thing: If I change the period length from 10 years to 14 years, then we don't get the "strongest economy in history" until the Biden years!

Differences

I started out making a version of Fernando Martin's graph from "Why Does Economic Growth Keep Slowing Down?" He shows 10-year averages of annual growth rates.

His data ends in 2016. I can continue it to the third quarter of 2024.

He uses quarterly data, so I went with quarterly also. But he works with annual rates, and that left me with some options, because FRED gives the data in different formats. I could go with "Percent Change from Quarter One Year Ago". Or I could go with "Percent Change from Preceding Period" at an "Annual Rate" as FRED gives it.

So I went with both of them. Might as well see how they differ, right?

Plus I figured the CAGR for the 10-year periods. So, three lines on my graph:

I'm showing the graph bigger than usual this time, because the lines are so close together. It might show up better if you make your browser wider, or just click the graph.

The "Percent Change from Preceding Period" data -- the red line -- shows the growth of a single quarter, multiplied by 4 or perhaps compounded, to create numbers comparable to yearly values. Note that if three quarters of the year are just average and one is really good, the good one will be noticeably above the others, and also noticeably above the "Percent Change from Quarter One Year Ago" line. The red change-from-preceding-period line magnifies three months of growth, as if that really good growth lasted the whole year -- as if there was a whole year at the really good rate of growth. That's why the red line so often runs above the others on my graph.

Of course, if three quarters of the year were just average and one quarter was low, the red line would understate the low quarter, just as it exaggerates the high quarter. On my graph, however, where the red runs low it is fairly well hidden by the green line, the CAGR calc.

The CAGR takes the start and end values of the 10-year periods, and distributes growth at an equal rate over the whole 10-year period. I think this is the most "honest" way to figure growth for periods more than a year in length.

When I figured the CAGR, I used 1/40 as part of the calculation (because there are 40 quarters in 10 years). The result was crazy, and far off from FRED's growth rates. Then I noticed my growth rates were closer to 1 percent than 4 percent, and I figured out my mistake. Using 1/40 in the calculation gave me quarterly growth rates. I changed the calc to use 1/10 (because there are 10 years in each period) and my results suddenly became reasonable. I checked one 10-year period: Using 1/10, the end-value I calculated matched the value at that date in the FRED data. So this confirms what I thought I could do -- use the CAGR to convert annual rates to quarterly or quarterly to annual, for example. But this is the first time I ever did it, so don't take my word for it!

 

When I google "CAGR" I get "Compound Annual Growth Rate". Seems to me, if I'm using it to get quarterly growth rates or 10- or 20-year rates, maybe it is really called "Compound Average Growth Rate" and I just remembered it wrong.

But apparently not. When I google "Compound Average Growth Rate" the search still turns up Compound Annual, almost exclusively. So maybe I didn't remember it wrong.

But I did find something interesting: How to Calculate BOTH Types of Compound Growth Rates in Excel, by Charley Kyd at ExcelUser: the Fitted Average Growth Rate.

Charley Kyd points out that for the CAGR, only the start- and end-values matter. The intermediate values do not affect the result of the calc. (Yeah, I noticed that myself.) So Charley presents the "Fitted" version:

This rate represents the average growth rate returned from an exponential curve fitted to [your data]. With this method, the value for each period DOES matter, because each value affects the average growth rate that the fitted curve displays.

So now I've got something else to look at, if I ever get around to it.