Serving the Quantitative Finance Community

 
User avatar
Collector
Topic Author
Posts: 2572
Joined: August 21st, 2001, 12:37 pm
Contact:

30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 5th, 2021, 1:37 pm

Ray Dalio is a smart man

"Hedge fund founder Ray Dalio predicts there is a 30% chance of US Civil War the next 10 years because of 'emotional' political polarization"

I think could significant chance also in several other countries, the many people and politicians that talks big about how to  "save the world" and that are emotional polarising and think everyone with different opinions than them are idiots will likely not even be able to save themselves or their own people. They have lost contact with the ground.

democrats against republicans
vaxed against unvaxed
races against each other
Christians against atheists 
Atomists against BigBangRelgious people
The indivisible particles will survive, they cannot be divided!


the big soup civil war. Lets hope not, even Ray think it is 70% chance it not will happen!
 
User avatar
Collector
Topic Author
Posts: 2572
Joined: August 21st, 2001, 12:37 pm
Contact:

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 5th, 2021, 1:53 pm

"A survey found 15% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats believes the country would be better off if a majority of the opposing political party 'just died' "

I think we have seen such posters here, people often get what they wish for, but unfortunately they forgot that Newtons law works also here, there is no action without re-action.
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 5th, 2021, 4:12 pm

I think Dalio is more right than wrong here, although I struggle a little with the logistics of a civil war in a nuclear armed country. I’m vaguely reminded of Warren Buffett’s prediction in October 2001 that the probability of NYC being hit by a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction within 5 years was 100%. And he wasn’t talking about derivatives that time.

Another relevant line of separation is geographic: Trump country is a nearly contiguous mass of land in the South and Midwest, speckled with a handful of urban islands of sanity. Of course, residents of said islands increasingly find their voting rights restricted and are about to face a ban on abortions. You would have to offer me a lot more than a tax cut to move to that part of the country…
 
User avatar
Marsden
Posts: 787
Joined: August 20th, 2001, 5:42 pm
Location: Maryland

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 7th, 2021, 6:25 pm

Fringe elements get amplified.

The January 6 seditionists apparently thought that they would be joined by throngs of tens of thousands across the country; didn't quite happen that way.

The Trumpublican Party remains as described by Jonathan Chait: "The Republican Party is constructed as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white working class as grist, and out the other end pops The Wall Street Journal editorial-page agenda as the finished product."

What I think has really been happening is that the moneyed interests who are the core of the Trumpublican Party have been strategically investing in controlling the country for decades. They have exploited the strongly anti-democratic aspects of the Senate -- where podunk Idaho gets as much representation as California -- and the laziness of disengaged voters who don't show up in off years when state governments are chosen, but I think more than anything else they have just bought up all the cheap media markets across the country and inundated them with idiocy presented as truth.

So in al-Abama "everyone knows" that the Democrats' "socialist agenda" is going to force them to marry someone of the same sex (... but a different race! :o) and then have an abortion, all while giving military secrets away to the Chinese.

And part, I think, of what has turned Georgia (Georgia -- !) purple is that Atlanta has just become an expensive media market, and it is no longer a matter of just buying a half dozen minor radio stations and a few television stations to be able to control the information people receive; Texas (Texas -- !) is starting to move along the same path.

And underlying it all is that Americans are extremely fat and happy. It's very easy to imagine that you'll live in a lean-to in the woods, drinking stump water and eating roadkill, while every night you slip into the nearest communist libtard city to kill the enemy and sabotage their economy.

But then you get pissed off because your cable provider isn't covering the American football game that you want to watch and the pizza you ordered hasn't arrived yet ... and it's been twenty minutes! And one of the springs in your La-Z-Boy recliner keeps getting stuck.

Average Americans aren't going to fight any kind of war anywhere for any reason. The military could, but there is not going to arise a civil war-level split in the military that would get them there before anyone took notice; the military prior to the 19th century American Civil War was organized state-by-state, and we do not have that any longer to any degree worth mentioning.

Plus, for all the tribalism, there is no singular issue around which anyone with even an eighth of a lick of sense would feel was worth going to war over, as there was with slavery.
 
User avatar
Alan
Posts: 2958
Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
Location: California
Contact:

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 7th, 2021, 8:47 pm

I can't see it in California -- unless they close the beaches again!
 
User avatar
kc11415
Posts: 72
Joined: March 16th, 2003, 10:02 pm
Location: Indiana, USA

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 1:00 am

Take a look at the key image on the following page being a pair of scatter plots of all US counties.
On both charts X-axis is %-percentage vote for Trump.
1st chart has Y-axis of % of adults vaccinated
2nd chart has Y-axis of deaths per 100K since May 1.
EVERYONE already knows what these charts show without clicking on the link :-/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate
All standard disclaimers apply, and then some.
 
User avatar
kc11415
Posts: 72
Joined: March 16th, 2003, 10:02 pm
Location: Indiana, USA

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 1:09 am

As an aside, Ray Dalio does NOT walk on water.  Not everything he says is rational or empirically based.  Ray Dalio's organization believes in Myers Briggs personality tests which derive from Karl Jungian philosophy.  Karl Jung was a collaborator of Sigmund Freud.  I don't tend to follow folks who derive some of their inspirations from cocaine-fiends or sex fiends.
All standard disclaimers apply, and then some.
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 2:01 am

Take a look at the key image on the following page being a pair of scatter plots of all US counties.
On both charts X-axis is %-percentage vote for Trump.
1st chart has Y-axis of % of adults vaccinated
2nd chart has Y-axis of deaths per 100K since May 1.
EVERYONE already knows what these charts show without clicking on the link :-/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate
Yes, natural selection at work! It’s just a little slow in the context of the electoral cycle.
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 2:03 am

As an aside, Ray Dalio does NOT walk on water.  Not everything he says is rational or empirically based.  Ray Dalio's organization believes in Myers Briggs personality tests which derive from Karl Jungian philosophy.  Karl Jung was a collaborator of Sigmund Freud.  I don't tend to follow folks who derive some of their inspirations from cocaine-fiends or sex fiends.
Oh, and while I think he is pretty impressive in some dimensions, I definitely would not like to work for him.
 
User avatar
kc11415
Posts: 72
Joined: March 16th, 2003, 10:02 pm
Location: Indiana, USA

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 2:17 am

As of a month ago in America COVID-19 deaths in less than 2 years have exceeded America Civil War deaths over 4 years. Ironically(?) "For every three soldiers killed in battle, five more died of disease."  For anyone thinking civil war was glorious, civil war re-enactors would achieve greater accuracy with a simulated field hospital full of dysentery patients with each re-enactor 'patient' using that modern day medicine for prepping colonoscopy patients but without access to a toilet.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties
Jeff Foxworthy humorous take on colonoscopy prep procedure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN5Xpb4wmz4
All standard disclaimers apply, and then some.
 
User avatar
kc11415
Posts: 72
Joined: March 16th, 2003, 10:02 pm
Location: Indiana, USA

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 2:38 am

I have repeatedly seen how logistics supply chains are ridiculously fragile with minimal resilience.
I was in NYC on 9/11, and during the great Northeast power outage of 2003. I was in NYC in the key control room for the fixed-income markets sitting at the key control screen during the 2008 mortgage market meltdown. Same for Hurricane Sandy in 2012 when I reported for duty in a mandatory evacuation zone on the Hudson River sitting above petrol carried into our basement on the surface of flood waters.  I moved out of NYC 6 weeks after the 2016 election out to the middle of nowhere, where my daily 8 minute commute (door to door) runs past soybean & corn fields.  In December 2018 I publicly posted a prediction that a recession would arrive in late 2019 or early 2020, in time to affect the US Presidential election.  I learned how to raise hogs.  I learned the hard way that it is better to make a deal with a farmer to buy finished livestock and then take them to be processed at a small custom butcher.  When a local farmer broke his hand, I learned how to drive a tractor with a 3-point hitch and a PTO.  The precious metals in which I invest now are brass & lead & copper & occasionally some cheap steel-case stuff from Eastern Europe.  Oh, and also steel & polymer from names like Smith & Wesson, and Sturm Ruger, and Savage Arms, and other names most of you don't know.  I really hope it does not come to what some folks are speculating.  If it does, I have assets far more valuable than stocks or bonds.  (saying that as someone who worked inside datacenters & control rooms on Wall Street, Blackwall Yards [Docklands], Chicago, Philly, GVA, etc etc)

If you can find a source for ammunition reloading primers, then that is a store of value more strategic than palladium.  If SHTF (google it) ammunition primers will be a currency competitive with gold or platinum.  I'm pretty comfortable with my current portfolio of such things.
All standard disclaimers apply, and then some.
 
User avatar
kc11415
Posts: 72
Joined: March 16th, 2003, 10:02 pm
Location: Indiana, USA

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 3:20 am

As for Dalio's number of 30% probability, I'd love to see his math.  In a long distant past :-/  there was this guy named Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wrote an obscure /s little book FbR (Fooled By Randomness).  Perhaps one or two of you might have heard of that book?  /s  He mentioned Russian Roulette as a catastrophic outcome.  That got me to thinking about the mathematics of repeated exposures to risks of catastrophic outcomes.  I determined this was related to the mathematics of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
With a 6-cylinder revolver, Russian Roulette (as most westerners understand it with one bullet in the gun) has a 17% chance of catastrophic outcome after one iteration.  It takes 4 iterations (not 3) to reach the point of 50/50 probability of catastrophic outcome.  All that is rather macabre so far.  However, that can serve as a model for repeated exposures to miniscule risks of catastrophic outcomes. The question is how many iterations are needed to exceed a 50/50 probability of catastrophic outcome for various ranges of miniscule risks of catastrophic outcomes.  A participant here on wilmott.com forums https://forum.wilmott.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=12433&p=107768&hilit=17%25#p107768 worked out the math as follows: Each of the following will just barely exceed a 50% cumulative risk of at least one catastrophe per year:
0.2% risk once per day
1.43% risk once per week
6% risk once per month
17% risk once per quarter
In other words, it becomes more likely than not, that a catastrophe will happen at least once per year if the above odds are accepted repeatedly over the times indicated.

Point being, if we categorize civil war as a catastrophic outcome, then I want to see what assumptions Ray Dalio baked into the math for his 30% number.  Equally important, I want to know if that is the aggregate risk for all iterations of risk exposure, or just the risk for a single iteration of risk exposure.  A nice round number like 30% seems challenging to get out of a model with repeated exposures to catastrophic outcomes.
As such, I am skeptical about Ray Dalio's math.
All standard disclaimers apply, and then some.
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 3:23 am

We’ve clearly traveled in the same circles (and I was across the street from the 1993 WTC bombing), but you took real action after the Trump election. I mostly just swore. Good for you. Hopefully, we won’t learn how valuable those primers can be.
 
User avatar
kc11415
Posts: 72
Joined: March 16th, 2003, 10:02 pm
Location: Indiana, USA

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 10:34 am

This comment is primarily for those in the USA, in jurisdictions where Second Amendment rights still mean something.  It is IMPERATIVE that you read up on your local laws to ensure compliance.   There are a lot of Rambo-wanna-be self-proclaimed experts in the gun enthusiast crowd.
There is somebody that I respect highly because of his down-to-earth approach with lots of disclaimers, and willingness to approach different students on their respective terms.  He is on YouTube, and his name is Paul Harrell.  He was in: the US Army and the US Marine Corps, and the Oregon National Guard, and was a firearms instructor in the military.  [...]  If you are in America and know nothing about guns, then may I respectfully encourage you to view the following videos from Paul:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiE1pUXEAHM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC9b1iZEo6I
All standard disclaimers apply, and then some.
 
User avatar
kc11415
Posts: 72
Joined: March 16th, 2003, 10:02 pm
Location: Indiana, USA

Re: 30% chance of US Civil War in the next 10 years

December 10th, 2021, 10:52 am

As for the wanna-be civil war revolutionaries, As a data nut, I like pivot tables which can distill large datasets down to readable size. _IF_ the below link is accurate, then cases against Jan.6 participants tally up as follows, as of Nov.11,2021.
Note growing backlog of convictions not yet resulting in a sentence.
https://seditiontracker.com/suspects/by_status
Image
For anyone still claiming the Capitol rioters were peaceful protesters, the following guy only got caught because his gun fell out of his holster while wrestling and fighting with police at the Capitol.  It took them until November to track this guy down but they eventually got him.  It seems like the main bottleneck is the sheer number of cases to get through.https://seditiontracker.com/suspects/mark-mazza.html
All standard disclaimers apply, and then some.