The cyclical phenomenon of recurring crises, evenly spaced throughout history, has been thoroughly documented and theorized by George Friedman, found of [Geopolitical Futures](www.geopoliticalfutures.com). He has published several books which refer to these rolling crises throughout American history, with the latest, The Storm Before the Calm, being published in 2020 which proved to be a pivotal time for this cyclical model due to the global pandemic. His view is that leaders (Presidents) do not create these crises, but that the crises create these leaders who attack existing institutions due to underlying social and cultural pressures from these cycles. In the Storm Before the Calm he forecasts that two institutions, the Federal Government and Universities would be in crisis as their functioning had become outmoded for the current social, political, and economic realities. These dual crises would be painful, as previous institutional crises were, because they would overturn norms and generate division. This forecast can easily be seen as a specific forecast under the [[Cycles#Generational Theory|Generational Theory]] model developed by William Strauss and Neil Howe. >We are now 80 or so years removed from World War II, and the nature of this new institutional crisis is becoming clear. It started when the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how ineffective a federal technocracy is in imposing solutions over a vast and diverse continent. As I argued in “The Storm Before the Calm,” experts are essential but insufficient when it comes to governance. [[Expert Problem|Their fundamental weakness]] is that expertise in one area can be insensitive to or ignorant of the problems their solutions create. Medical institutions did the best they could do under the circumstances, but their solutions disrupted the production and distribution of goods and alienated people from one another. Governance is the art of seeing the whole. Physicians tend to see only their own domain. The federal government responded to expertise in one area without creating systems of competing expertise, and it often failed to recognize the variability of circumstances that the founders envisioned. > >Now another important dimension of the institutional shift is taking place: the crisis of universities. Universities have been central to the moral functioning of the United States since Thomas Jefferson required that all new states admitted to the republic fund universities. He saw them as essential in the cultivation of expertise and in creating an educated elite armed with varied knowledge essential to the regime. Over time, universities, and especially elite universities, tended to exclude prospective students and teachers who were not already part of the elite, and thus tended to suppress ideas offensive to elite values. > >The GI Bill disrupted the system by welcoming soldiers into universities regardless of background. Many of them already had elements of technical expertise, thanks to their time in the armed services, and they knew too much about life not to doubt the self-certainties of their professors. This development helped create a massive professional class with highly specific areas of knowledge. That notion of expertise fed the emerging principle of government. It accepted diversity as a principle, except that its proponents weren’t always aware of, let alone concerned about, those their definition of diversity excluded. The university was therefore the pivot to the elite. It always develops cultural idiosyncrasies that overlay its function, but it also remains a foundation of the institutional structure. The university has again developed strange dynamics, but it has also developed in a direction that is deeply linked to the federal system. The problem is that students must take out outlandish loans to pay for the outlandishly high price of higher education. Given the existence of a federal lending program that linked available credit to the cost of education, universities had little incentive to control costs. The lending program was linked to cost, and the cost could rise because the available loans, in general, increased in tandem. > >At the time that I wrote “The Storm Before the Calm,” student debt stood at about $1.34 trillion. This was roughly equal to the amount borrowed by subprime homeowners prior to 2008. A massive default on student loans would create problems at least on the order of the subprime mortgage crisis. The government control system was used warily, not wanting to upset an unqualified class of borrowers for political reasons or lenders who were reaping substantial profits before the collapse. The government wanted to be as inclusive as possible; it couldn’t risk excluding an “unqualified” class of people from borrowing, and it wanted to take advantage of the large constituencies endemic to large universities. The debt burden assumed by students was staggering, and universities kept increasing costs, and thus increasing the debt, hoping to ride the train as long as they could. The recent decision to bail out students, then, is the least of the issues. How the government allowed the situation to get to this point is the issue. >[America's Institutional Crisis](https://geopoliticalfutures.com/americas-institutional-crisis/) As we can see from Mr. Friedman's work, the institutional crisis results from the combination changing principles and values and rigid structures that do not adapt to changing reality. The American Dream is further out of reach for the average American today than it was twenty years ago and this is felt deeply in society and manifests over time in politics and the economy. **Case Studies:** - [[CHG Issue 210 Barbarians Blowing Bubbles]] - [[CHG Issue 203 The Undisciplined Mind]] - [[CHG Issue 200 Decomposing Duration Risk]] - [[CHG Issue 198 How things could turn out differently]] - [[CHG Issue 189 Private Credit Crisis]] - [[CHG Issue 183 Narrative Fallacies]] - [[CHG Issue 178 The Age of the Generalists]] - [[CHG Issue 155 Leadership Crisis]] - [[CHG Issue 140 Modern Aristocracy]] - [[CHG Issue 129 Disconfirming Information]] Explore Further: [[A Song of Fire and Ice]] | [The 2020s and Its Historic Shift: The United States](https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-2020s-and-its-historic-shift-the-united-states/) Tags: #themes Your support for Cedars Hill Group is greatly appreciated <form action="https://www.paypal.com/donate" method="post" target="_top"> <input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="74PGN8ZXHQVHS" /> <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" title="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!" alt="Donate with PayPal button" /> <img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1" /> </form>