Media Contacts:
Aaron Berstler
and Dustin Sadnick
(651) 228-9141
Will a New Bear Market
Bring Eugenics Movement Back?
New Study from Socionomics Institute Says It's Happened in the Past, Could Happen Again
GAINESVILLE, Ga. / November 20, 2009 – A new study by The Socionomics
Institute shows a link between bear markets and the rising popularity of
eugenics movements over a span of 225 years.
"Although most people think that society has dumped eugenics on the
trash heap of bad ideas," says analyst Alan Hall, "its core ideology
of top-down reproductive control is likely to regain popularity in the upcoming
bear market. There are already signs of resurgence."
For example, during the long bear market from 1966-1982, India sterilized
more than
8 million poor people, China instituted its "One Child Policy,"
and sterilizations of Navajo Indians more than doubled from 1972-78. During
the recent bear market that started in 2008, the more controlling aspects
of eugenics have begun to reappear. In 2008, the Dutch Labor Party MP proposed
forced sterilization of women deemed "unfit to procreate" (it
didn't pass), and, in September 2009, Poland passed a law mandating that
convicted pedophiles be castrated.
Hall finds that today's ideological undercurrents are similar to those
of the early eugenics era, when popular culture and the educational system
embraced the eugenics movement and many prominent people – such as Alexander
Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, William Randolph Hearst, Woodrow Wilson,
Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Irving Fisher, George Bernard
Shaw and Helen Keller – espoused compulsory reproductive control. Observing
that today’s setup is similar, he identifies several popular beliefs, including
environmentalism, that could form the rationale for eugenics-like campaigns
in the future.
In his study for the November issue of The Socionomist, Hall explores
the history of eugenics and explains how declining social mood morphed it
into a method to control propagation by race and class. "The desire
to improve the human condition is a positive, bull-market impulse,"
he writes, "but eugenics is about influencing or controlling others'
reproductive choices. This reflects a desire for social control, a bear-market
impulse."
In two charts, Hall shows parallels between the ebb and flow of the eugenics
movement and the waves of social optimism and pessimism reflected in stock
market prices. He argues that eugenics is history’s clearest lesson in how
societies recast legitimate science, such as genetics, to justify class
or race-based ideology during deep social-mood declines.
The eugenics movement began in the late 1800s and became a wildly popular
ideology in the early 1900s. In 1893, a succession of ever-larger bear markets
began. Each of these brought increasingly negative expressions of eugenics.
Profoundly negative mood drove the third of these bear markets, which began
in 1929 and culminated in the genocides of the 1930s and 1940s, the ultimate
expression of eugenic ideology to date.
Hall argues that another bear market is due that will be larger than the
1929-1932 decline, based on Elliott wave analysis, which charts stock markets
as wave patterns. Some possible results of a future depression in terms
of eugenics? Euthanasia, Kervorkianism and tax breaks for signing a "Do
Not Resuscitate" consent form.
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About The Socionomics Institute
The Socionomics Institute, based in Gainesville, Ga., studies social mood
and its role in driving cultural trends. The Institute’s analysis is published
in the monthly research review, The Socionomist. Learn more at
www.socionomics.net.
Note to Media: For a copy of the study in the November 2009 issue
of The Socionomist or to arrange an interview with Alan Hall, call
Aaron Berstler or Dustin Sadnick at Kohnstamm Communications, (651) 228-9141