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Really, ….. it's my fault they built a terrible system?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Tbf, the boomers came of age in the 70s, so the economic system was well in decline by then.
Part of the problem is a secular cycle. The baby boom of the postwar period helped fuel a big economic expansion that helped people for a while, but eventually the power of individuals fall because there's so many people.
Most boomers didn't want their jobs to move to China. China is starting to experience the same secular cycle ironically.
Many millennials were the same age during the gfc. Are you to blame for that? Are you to blame for the debt expansion and money printing that have promised to destroy the next generation? Zoomers came of age during covid, are you to blame for covid policies that destroyed the economy?
You should maybe check the definition of the word secular.
You end up looking really silly when you say something like that.
https://peterturchin.com/books/secular-cycles/
In fairness, even this just seems like those two authors are the only ones using this term in this way, almost like they intentionally chose a word to specifically use in a way that didn't agree with the way everyone understands it.
Further, I don't think it's tricky reasonable to be snotty about it when you're choosing to use the term in this one very specific, abnormal way without explaining why.
Like...they might just as well have called their book Chocolatey Cycles. Most people wouldn't make the connection unless they were familiar with the work, and would think that it's a typo or other error.
Simply put, your referencing this work doesn't make me think "Oh! They were actually right about the word!", rather, it makes me think, "Oh...they, and the authors of that book, were all wrong about the word."
The etymology of the word secular from latin is "of a generation". So while it is a non-standard use of the word, it can be used to refer to something that happens once in a generation or once in a large amount of time like a century.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secular
https://www.etymonline.com/word/secular
Generation is commonly used in the sense of a fairly short span of time, ~20 years. Secular cycle, googling quickly, seems to be using secular more in the 'lifetime/age' sense since the cycles are over the course of a couple centuries.
You wanna go hard? Let's go hard.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/secular.asp
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2002/08/aa1923/aa1923.html
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/49/4/1520-0493_1921_49_230_tsvoc_2_0_co_2.xml
https://study.com/learn/lesson/secular-trend-puberty-overview-causes.html
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-230-27468-6_9
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secular
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/24/business/market-watch-oil-spurt-a-rally-that-few-believe.html "Sure, there can be market hiccups, but the secular trend is against rising prices of real things and for rising prices of stocks and bonds."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/us-risks-falling-off-a-global-cliff/2012/10/25/38cdc85c-1ebe-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_story.html "If so, a long-term secular trend of higher interest rates, a lower dollar and stunted GDP growth would contaminate an already polluted fiscal chemistry lab with a fiscal gap of growing and unacceptably large proportions."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-recession-is-over-but_b_375770 "The secular force is the D-process and the deleveraging, so I expect deflation to be the resulting secular trend more than inflation."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/18/health/13-reasons-why-study-suicides-trnd/index.html "I take issue with their analysis which did not take into account the secular trend in suicide and the large increase that occurred in 2017 in young men."
The word "secular" has been used in this manner referring to things over a much longer term in multiple Fields including investment, astronomy, medicine, sociology, climate. It's in the dictionary. Its Used in major newspapers. When I used the term originally referring to secular cycles specifically, I immediately followed the use of the term with a general explanation of what I meant, it was the next sentence in the same paragraph.