As developmental futurists, systems theorists, and students of accelerating change, one of the broadest questions we can ask about any complex system (an organism, a political structure, an economy) involves the natural constraints on its dynamics. Very few physical systems in the known world undergo sustained acceleration for long. In fact, only computation, as a generalized process, appears to accelerate indefinitely, which suggests it occupies a very special place in our universe. Most elements and attributes of complex systems seem to follow cyclical developmental dynamics. Understanding the cycles can give us great insight into their relative importance in creating the future, in our observed world of continuously accelerating technological and computational change.

Let's turn now to U.S. history. Among the first things many of us learn in high school civics is that the United States has a government based on democracy, and an economy based on free enterprise. We certainly are a uniquely pioneering and privileged nation, but reality is more complicated than we were initially taught.

Complex systems like governments, and economies can be shown to be on a cyclic pendulum between more decentralized (e.g, democracy-promoting, reformist, progressive, free enterprise) and more centralized (wealth-, power-, and control-concentrating, big business, plutocratic) forms of existence. This same cycle is seen in all living systems, from the life cycle of dycostelium, the slime mold, which reliably cycles between independent foraging and group aggregation in reproduction and crisis, to the various patterns of homo sapiens, the self-aware hominid, which engages in predictable oscillations between differentiated independent experience and joining together for a range of reproductive and social functions.

With regard to the political and economic structure of U.S. society, where we are on this natural pendulum at any particular time may be a function of both our recent history and a range of internal and external sociotechnological developmental trends. While it seems an admirable goal to try to dampen its swing, the central dynamic of the political-economic pendulum may be impossible to eliminate. Like our diurnal rhythm, this pendular cycle may represent an optimal approach to developing political economies in which biological human beings play an integral part.

Several Greek philosophers first observed a natural political cycle from democracy to plutocratic dictatorship/ tyranny, and then to revolution or reform that restores a measure of democracy and restarts the cycle. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, among others, describes a similar developmental cycle in emerging economic sectors, beginning with multiple new enterprises, moving to oligopoly and near monopoly and rigidity, followed by a phase of "creative destruction" and divestiture as the dinosaurs either learn to reinvent themselves or are replaced in a world of rapidly changing technologies and business models. But even though it was first observed more than two thousand years ago, the pendular swing from democracy to plutocracy and back through reform is quickly forgotten in the heat of day-to-day debates.

We presently inhabit a highly plutocratic era. Furthermore, while there are some signs of growing citizen empowerment, those willing to look closely will find that most of today's trends are still working predominantly against greater democracy at the present time. As Fareed Zakaria notes in The Future of Freedom, 2003, even with the best of our social activism we continue to subtly drift into an increasingly "illiberal democracy" in the United States, as measured by growing elite and special interest privilege, growing corporate and institutional power versus personal rights, increasing media centralization and social conservatism, U.S. unilateralism on the world stage, and relative loss of resources and standards for the development of the education, skills, and leadership capacity of our youth.

History reveals that our country has experienced several prior periods of high plutocracy, of poor citizen empowerment and comparably few educational resources, of economic policies that favored various social elites, the rich, and big business at the expense of the common person. We have experienced both "hands off," government-minimizing plutocracies, passively transferring control to the wealthy, and ones that actively used state power to advance the interests of the privileged over the common citizen. In either case, plutocratic periods can be defined by a move from relative political freedom to relative control, and the loss of personal wealth of the majority relative to those of elites. But as we will note, the political-economic system always swings back from hierarchical (plutocratic) to network (democratic) control whenever social and technological conditions have sufficiently advanced.

Recounting our country's arc of history, first recall the extreme plutocracy in 18th century America under King George III, the government that incited the American Revolution of 1776. This dynamic was a classic example of the Greek cycle mentioned earlier. The many generations of active democratic action seen after our revolution were rooted in the passion of populists like Thomas Paine and Adam Smith, and egalitarian presidents like Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and James Madison (1809-1817). The reforms of this era became engrained in our constitution and its amendments, and a climate that guaranteed greater political and economic freedoms here than in any other previous environment. Along with an open immigration policy for the type of self-driven people drawn to our country, an unparalleled program of multiethnic integration, and our abundant natural resources, these revolutionary reforms have been the foundation of the U.S. economic miracle during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Consider next the racial plutocracy that was broken by the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). This war also led to a sharp decrease in state's rights, however, so we may note that while one political issue swings democratic, another may swing plutocratic at the same time. Political pendulums that involve historically underrepresented groups are also often slow to build momentum. One example is the gender plutocracy that persisted in America from 1776 to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Perhaps most importantly with regard to the political climate, historians like Ronald Inglehart (The Silent Revolution, 1977, Cultural Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, 1990, Modernization and Postmodernization, 1997), Michael Schudson (The Good Citizen, 1999 (author's followup)) and others make the case that maturing industrial societies are continually reforming, broadening and refining their political values. As Inglehart's global surveys show, the most prominent effect of technological development is that it makes every developed nation more tolerant and focused on individual advancement over nationalist or ideological causes. As our technology runs ever faster each year, in diverse and subtle ways it prods us to exercise our personal rights, and to establish increasingly local autonomies. We move from coarse-grained to fine-grained control of the quality of our environment. The evolutionary development of technology, while it does alternate between plutocratic and democratic applications, does not itself appear to be on a pendulum like political and economic systems. Instead, technology seems to be engaged in an accelerating phase transition to a substantially new regime. This transition, the technological singularity, is considered at length in other essays. I refer the reader to those for more information.

The remainder of this essay will consider pendular swings in political and economic systems, and suggest that simple and self-correcting patterns may be discerned.

In at least four clear periods since the birth of our republic, the political and economic pendulum has pushed us toward either monied special interest control (a political plutocracy) or wealth concentration (an economic plutocracy) or some combination of both. As we will see, we are currently in the throes of the fourth major political-economic plutocratic surge. But before we become unduly alarmed, it helps to realize that during each of the prior three surges either wealth concentration or elite privilege or both were effectively reversed soon after, both by the vagaries of a competitive and technologically changing environment and through scores of new democratic laws and institutions. Let's now consider each of the four periods in greater detail.

The first major swing to extreme political-economic plutocracy (1780-1900), emerging as it did in the aftermath of the world's greatest democratic revolution, took over a century to reach its extreme. Big business favoritism grew steadily after the American Revolution, but it markedly accelerated after 1865 in the post-Civil War era of industrial revolution, peaking during the Gilded Age (Mark Twain's derisive term for this period), the last quarter of the 19th century, when the monied interests and the new multi-state corporate trusts rose to great power.

Publicly, big business excess peaked during the scandal-plagued administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877), but plutocratic conditions continued for a while further under the mixed presidencies of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison (1885-1897), which were nominally against special interests but also actively against labor, and which were responsible for the passage of an initially useless and toothless Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. The democratic reversal finally came at the end of William McKinley's smoothly pandering, Ronald Reagan-like tenure of 1897-1901. At this point the balance swung back during reform president Theodore Roosevelt's (1901-1909) trust-busting and "Square Deal" administration. A wave of populism, reacting to the robber barons of the late 1800's, initiated a broad series of reforms beginning in the 1890's, including the first clearly successful strikes of the U.S. labor movement (1890's-1920), the first child labor law (1906), and perhaps most crucially, the Sixteenth Amendment, which created the progressive federal income tax of 1914, a fundamental strategy to counter the natural, gravitational, plutocratic tendency for "property to attract property."

Since then it has turned out that such democratic instruments as income, property, and estate taxes, and the requirements of social insurance are more than sufficient to control the rich-poor gap, given that they are always augmented in the long run by turnover resulting from competition and the natural unpredictability of the market. Furthermore, as scholars like Gary Hamel ("The Quest for Resilience," 2003, Harvard Business Review) have argued, this natural volatility and wealth turnover increases as technological change accelerates.

Brad DeLong, in his 1997 essay "Robber Barons," summarizes the work of a number of scholars who have shown that wealth concentration steadily increased in the top 1% (5%, etc.) of U.S. society from 1776 to the 1865 civil war. This unexpected calamity caused wealth to drop significantly acutely, but the postwar reconstruction agenda maintained the underlying plutocratic political economic climate, which fostered substantial wealth concentration again from 1870 to 1900. Only in the new century was the trend effectively reversed.

The second major swing to an extreme of political-economic plutocracy (1920-1930) was much shorter. While wealth concentration was eroding after 1900 (and especially after 1914 and the new taxation and regulation environment), the elite were doing their best to avoid their new economic strictures by increasing their political influence in government. This influence was stemmed for a time during the progressive eras of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), and the uniquely far-sighted Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921, our only Ph.D. president). But it pushed forward again under Republican William H. Taft (1909-1913) and especially under the combined laissez-faire capitalist Republican tenure of a scandal-plagued Warren Harding, a passive Calvin Coolidge, and a protectionist Herbert Hoover (1921-1933). During this period leading up to the Great Depression, the country increasingly gave way to political plutocracy, special interest pandering, small business Ponzi schemes (named after Charles Ponzi's massive fraud with his Security and Exchange Company in 1920), and generalized big business unaccountability and favoritism.

There is presently no definitive theory of the factors that catalyzed the Great Depression of 1929-1939, but for a reasonably good one, let me recommmend the 1995 Forbes documentary "Happily Ever After?: The 20th Century Struggles for Democracy." The combination of speculator's excess (and the underregulation of margin trading, not mentioned in the film) of the late 1920's, which would be expected to lead naturally to a recession and readjustment in the 1930's, was in this case greatly worsened by the political shortsightedness and global economic ignorance of the Hoover administration. Though consensus on this point is not uniform, several economists have argued that the signing of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act in June 1930 incited a global tariff war and the immediate evaporation of millions of local jobs and economic expectations, as all other developed countries followed the U.S. lead in trade strategy.

What initiated the tariff war is a fascinating and little-appreciated side story. Apparently it was the market and job disruptions induced by greatly increased agricultural automation of the 1920's, perhaps exemplified best by the Fordster tractor coming in large numbers off Henry Ford's new assembly line into American farming communities. Automation always causes short term economic and political disruption, and when the powerful U.S. farm lobby went looking for relief from massive automation-induced deflation in agricultural prices during the 1920's by scapegoating "foreign imports," a shortsighted political administration was unfortunately willing to acquiesce. By mid 1929 (still pre-crash, it must be noted) there were no less than twenty five different industries aggressively seeking legislative protection from global competition. Given the government's ignorance of the nature of the new network paradigm of global economics, and willingness to acquiesce to powerful plutocratic actors, a "perfect storm" of two major negative forces (speculative correction and global tariff war) ensured a major dampening of nonzero sum economic activity in the years ahead.

In the end, the traumatic decade of the 1930's allowed an opportunist reformer, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) and his "New Deal," in a series of dramatic new statutes and guarantees for the common citizen, to rapidly reverse economic and power stratifications that had been accumulating for decades. Among many other advances (and some predictable boondoggles), his administration introduced the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which institutionalized the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, and numerous other democratic firsts. Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) continued this pushback toward democracy with such acts as racially integrating the armed forces under significant opposition, firing an errant General Douglas MacArthur, which reasserted civilian control over an increasingly powerful military, and guiding the Marshall Plan for Europe to become a policy of redevelopment, not of punitive reparations or political control. But during Truman's second administration the elites again began to gain noticeable privilege and power.

The third swing to extreme political-economic plutocracy (1950-1965) was also comparatively brief. During this era we saw the rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the multinational corporations (MNC's) under Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61). This was accompanied by increasing civil rights abuses in the 1950's under McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC), and the Red Scare. The ominously restrictive feel of this period climaxed during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 18-29, 1962, historically the closest the U.S. would ever come to open military engagement with our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. But these plutocratic-autocratic excesses were again broadly rolled back, beginning during the presidency of John F. Kennedy (1961-63), and the pushback was accelerated by the escalating catastrophe of the Vietnam War (1961-70). Even during the Republican and often control-oriented presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (1963-74), this new era was marked by dramatic civil rights reforms, leading to generalized racial integration, women's rights, equal opportunity in employment, and many other substantial civil liberties and economic advances for the common citizen. It also saw permanent cultural revolutions in youth attitude, sexuality, and tolerance of sexual diversity.

In U.S. political history, perhaps the greatest lesson of the return back from the third swing is that we can change the balance rapidly (in ten short years, in this case) if we collectively determine our government is too restrictive or our economy is too unregulated. The shifts always seem to be catalyzed either by particularly egregious plutocratic mismanagement (British tyranny, Robber Baron excess) or some opportune social catastrophe (Civil War, Great Depression, Vietnam War) that the citizenry use to suggest that political or economic authorities have temporarily overstepped their legitimacy and need to be democratized by the network in which they are embedded.

Another implicit lesson in this long-term pendular dynamic is that both plutocracy and democracy can develop to excess. Consider that if too much power is given too quickly and too broadly to the hierarchy, as occurred in restrictive McCarthyism, or to the popular network, as occurred during the idealistic 1960's, we discover that most of the plans being made in that state of the system's development simply won't work for the long term. Think of either HUAC blacklists or Hippie communes as two classic examples of idealistic unsustainability at both poles of the pendulum. Consider also the meme of "mobocracy," or Fareed Zakaria's (The Future of Freedom, 2003) observations on the dangers of giving too much voting power, on complex issues, directly to the citizens of illiberal democracies, without the insulation of plutocratic elected representatives. Balance and tolerance must be maintained in order to create any lasting political-economic structure that integrates all the important social actors.

The fourth swing out to excessive political-economic plutocracy (1975-2004) while not nearly as long as our first 120-year swing, has lasted a surprisingly long time at almost three decades to date. Beginning in the mid-1970's, upper class wealth begun to accelerate upwards again. Recapping causes of the swing back to economic democracy prior to the 1970's, DeLong notes:

"After 1900 the concentration of wealth began a slow decline. Wars — and the higher taxes and inflation that accompanied them — took a heavy toll of the financial wealth of the rich. Stock market booms (like the 1920s and the 1960s) saw wealth concentration take a step upward; but prolonged bear markets (like the 1930s and the 1970s) eroded wealth concentration. The coming of the social-democratic social insurance state eroded wealth concentration: near-universal education boosted the productivity and wages of those near the bottom of the pyramid, progressive income and estate taxes trimmed some wealth off the top, and explicit government wage policy — minimum wages, restrictions on connections between finance and industry, and support for union-centered collective bargaining — shifted the distribution of income and wealth toward labor without producing mammoth amounts of classical unemployment (see Lindert and Williamson, 1976) …Whatever the causes, wealth concentration fell, and further in the 1960s as a result of the expansion of social democracy and in the 1970s as a result the collapse of the real value of the stock market and the inflation of the 1970s."

But now, in 2004, we have returned to a strongly plutocratic era, in both political and economic terms. The activist Ralph Nader was among the first to chart what he terms a widening "democracy gap" that has been growing in the U.S. since 1979. Kevin Phillips, in Wealth and Democracy, 2002, makes a similar case (with much lamenting). The NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman has also written a valuable book, The Great Unraveling: Losing our Way in the New Century, 2003, that rails against the plutocratic excesses of the Bush presidency (again, perhaps too darkly to be fully accurate), painting the picture of an unusually centralized and privilege-loving United States here in the early 21st century.

Such chronicles are enlightening but too many are also jeremiads, predicting that today's excess will continue unchecked to the ultimate ruin of the nation, unless we heed the author's prescription for salvation. Such manifestos almost always ignore, perhaps for dramatic effect, the fact that complex adaptive systems, whether they be weather systems or world economies, always re-correct themselves. Perhaps the primary function of jeremiads is to provide a reform attitude to rally around, however caricatured or exaggerated it might be in its specific claims.

Perhaps the most important question, given the pendular dynamic, is when and where the balance should be, or will likely be restored. We've seen shrill calls to social action in other areas (environment, overpopulation, nuclear weapons proliferation, sexual liberation, women's rights, social norms) in increasing frequency during the twentieth century. While these often help us to effect important change, their sky-is-falling perspective always has the ring of inauthenticity to it. Complex systems are much more subtle and resilient than that.

When one realizes the pendular nature of political-economic systems, these predictions can be put in the context of self-balancing dynamics. Books like Paul Ray's Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World, 2001, Stephen Moore and Julian Simon's It's Getting Better All the Time, 2000, or Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001, highlight the stunning material and social advances that the average person has continued to reap under our increasingly centralized, plutocratic, special-interest capitalism.

Yes, we've seen ridiculous increases in corporate pay at the top of the economic hierarchy, again since the early 1980's. When groups like United for a Fair Economy report, arguably, that the richest 1% of the population owns 38% of it's wealth, while the poorest 40% owns only 0.2%, we know that today's extreme plutocratic trend is again ripe to reverse itself. But when? We've recently seen the encouraging rise of initiative politics, which, with the help of rich opportunists, the general public is increasingly using to recall any politicians, regardless of party, who preside over economic downturns, as occurred with California Governor Gray Davis in 2003. This new political accountability is one of several soft signs of the growing power of the citizen in our increasingly communication-enabled environment.

The popularity of reformers like John McCain (and democratic issues like the McCain-Bradley campaign finance reform bill) also shows that we are ready to make some progressive changes, even though the momentum has not yet gathered major force. All it takes is to look at some significantly more egalitarian countries, like Finland, to see just how much farther we might eventually go. In 2004, Finnish police gave a record $216,900 speeding ticket to Jussi Salonoja, 27, one of their country's richest men under a system where traffic fines are linked to an offender's income.

Not only traffic, but all kinds of fines and judgments under tort law might one day be treated in this highly democratic manner. But don't expect that level of legal progressivism here in the U.S. for many years to come, as it would take away the privilege to selectively ignore the law that our elite have long enjoyed.

The internet-driven appeal of talented populists like Howard Dean in 2003-4 is another indicator that countervailing democratic tendencies can rapidly come to the fore when we want them to. Curiously, the Dean phenomenon occurred with only email and today's primitive social software (e.g., Meetup.com), and without electronic democracy and secure digital identities, which are at least another decade or two away from implementation. At the same time, the fact that Dean, the true reformer, could not generate long term momentum within the Democratic primary is another soft indication that the plutocratic swing, though slowing down, is still not ready to shift its direction, for now at least.

How much further can the present plutocratic swing go? Will it require the convergence of a broader network of progressives, an emerging "Digital Democracy," and an appropriately timed catastrophe (e.g., a milder variant of our historical Great Depression or Vietnam War) to help us reverse the shift? If so, we may be in for a surprisingly long wait, as there is nothing currently transpiring, not our Middle East military activities, not our presently accelerating tech outsourcing economic disruption, nor apparently even our continued deficit spending debacle, that presently looks to be disruptive enough to catalyze reversal of the cycle, though time will tell, of course.

Should there be significant and sustained economic repercussions to the U.S., based on economic globalization, our tremendous deficits, or other unpredictable factors (war, terrorism), we would likely see a powerful response by the citizenry to bring democratic reform politicians into office. But if we don't see a five or ten year recession while we rebalance our budget, and are instead able to "grow through" the deficit, which seems at least possible, if highly uncertain in these still very human-dependent, pre-singularity years, then our country's current plutocratic trajectory might continue on through several more political administrations, slowed but not yet checked.
While we might look forward to a progressive revolt during a second Bush term with a sour economy and an associated catastrophe, today's smooth and media-oiled plutocracy might instead profitably continue well into the 2010's, perhaps even all the way to the citizen-empowering intelligent internet, conversational user interface (CUI era) of the 2020's. But once we reach that incredibly networked environment (see http://www.Acceleration Watch.com/lui.html for more on the CUI) the pendular dynamic must surely shift back toward the democratic pole, at least far enough to correct many of the worst social, economic, and political imbalances have accrued in the favor of elites over the latest plutocratic swing.

So in our ongoing civil liberties debates about the incursions of Patriot Act and other potentially alarming centralizations of power, it helps to remember that the McCarthy Era led to the Civil Rights Era within one decade. Consider how quickly the reversal can occur when we all decide we want it. It helps to remember the slowly but steadily growing voting power of the average citizen in an increasingly networked nation. It helps to remember that these issues have pendular dynamics, and the pendulum can swing back as rapidly as circumstances require.

Finally, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay, regardless of the state of the political-economic cycle we can expect that global technological acceleration will continue unchecked. For now, the progression to a technological singularity (http://Acceleration Watch.com/), an imminent era of human-surpassing electronic intelligence, remains the most important and least understood story of the present era of human history.

Now that we have discussed the political economic dynamic behind our great nation's present environment, I'd like to briefly venture into some analysis and policy considerations regarding an important social problem in applied futurism, the education of our country's youth. As practical, change-oriented futurists, we must consider our activism in the context of our present highly plutocratic and unilateral political era, several decades before the arrival of both the CUI and any subsequent greater-than-human computer intelligence.