Additional References
The Elliott Wave Theorist, September 2003
A SOCIONOMIST LOOKS AT THE BLACKOUT
The largest electricity-service failure in the history of North America occurred on August 14, 2003. While this event has its roots in socionomics — social action resulting from social mood — those roots extend into the past over a century to the formation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first federal regulatory agency and the beginning of governmental interference in U.S. production and services. The electrical production industry has suffered the same stultification as the railroad industry and for the same reason. It is not as far gone, but it is moving in that direction.
The social-mood roots of the blackout run so far back in history that, in terms of its relationship to current human behavior, we may treat the blackout itself as an isolated disaster, like a hurricane or tornado. The point of primary socionomic interest with regard to this event is not so much what caused the blackout, but how people used it to express the current social mood.
One of the interesting aspects of the behavior surrounding this event is the good feelings expressed by many of those caught in the middle of it.
The Blackout Experience of 2003
—“In city after city, people offered help to those they did not know.”5
—“In New York, some risked life and limb to direct traffic when stoplights were paralyzed. Stores passed out free milk rather than allow it to spoil in the heat. Hotels passed out bedding to folks sleeping on the street.”5
—“Residents banded together, sharing candles, radios, and stories.”6
—“No-one’s panicking. Everyone’s cool. We’re all helping each other. I love this.”7
—“Detroit mayor Kwame Kirkpatrick said he believed the city was ‘the calmest of all the cities that have been hit by this crisis.’”5
The Blackout Experience of 1977
The contrast between crowd behavior in the recent experience and that of 1977 is dramatic. It is so striking that it made headlines in many media, including USA Today and Bloomberg news. Here are some representative comments from the articles:
Description of 1977 blackout:
—“The mood in the sweltering city quickly turned ugly. Looters destroyed sections of Brooklyn, Harlem and the South Bronx, with 2,000 stores picked clean.”8
—“Police arrested 3,700 people. A headline in the July 16 New York Times read, ‘Ravaged Slums Facing a Future of Uncertainty.’”8
—“’Uptown was trouble, uptown was looting.’ said a pianist and artistic director of New York’s Festival of Song. ‘It saddened me. The blackout shouldn’t have been an occasion for violence.’”8
—“[N]eighborhoods throughout New York exploded into violence. Stores were ransacked, looted and destroyed. Buildings were set ablaze. And the police, for the most part, stood helpless. In these stark contradictions, an unusual yet definitive moment left its mark on New York history-the night the lights went out.”9
—“News broadcasts reported outbreaks of violence, looting, and fires. Areas of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx experienced the most damage, where thousands of people took to the streets and smashed store windows looking for TVs, furniture, or clothing. In one report, 50 cars were stolen from a car dealership in the Bronx. The police made 3,776 arrests, although from all accounts, many thousands escaped before being caught. 1,037 fires burned throughout the City, six times the average rate, while the fire department also responded to 1,700 false alarms.”9
—“The summer of 1977 permanently [sic] altered New York’s self-image, and, perhaps as important, its self-confidence. Not only did crime and economic strain transform the City, but the blackout fused the significance of the two in a perception that New York, the largest city in the United States, was on the road to ruin. It had become the standard-bearer for the urban crisis. In future years, when New York would make dramatic strides to address the problems that surfaced in the seventies and forge a new image of national and world leadership, the memories of these times would linger as a reminder of how hard it could be to fall from skyscraper heights.”9
Contrast between 1977 and 2003 blackouts:
—“The nation’s worst blackout generated not the ‘night of terror’ that followed a lesser blackout in New York in 1977, but a moment in which strangers became allies.”5
—“Anna Ramirez, 70, looked out from her apartment on Manhattan’s upper West Side when New York lost power shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday and feared a repetition of the violence that ravaged her neighborhood and others in the city during a 25-hour blackout on July 13, 1977. ‘I was so scared,’ Ramirez said, ‘Looking out my window, it was like living in a war zone. Everything was on fire. But last night, people were so much calmer. They shared flashlights and helped me up the stairs.’”10
—“‘In 1977, the city was on the edge of bankruptcy and people were at one another’s throats,’ Koch said. ‘We had huge racial anger, which evaporated long ago. Now this city is just about the most civil place you could go to. And even though the city has fiscal problems, the city doesn’t have the feel that it’s out of control the way it was back then.’”10
—“‘Last time I saw them carrying out furniture and appliances. This time my neighbors gave me flowers, candles and flashlights.’”10
—“‘Instead of anger and fear, they saw grateful customers and smiling faces of customers whom they knew, Tony Kumer said, ‘People were really happy,’ he said, ‘they really appreciated us being open.’”10
—“The director of the Blackout History Project at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., notes that the same grievances still exist in many neighborhoods. ‘It’s really telling that we haven’t seen looting and rioting. It’s deeply significant,’ he says.”5
Yes, it’s significant. But why?
Conventional Views
Conventional sociologists have offered many explanations for why most people were in a good mood and on their best behavior during the recent blackout. Let’s review those that made it to press:
—“In retrospect, the social and economic conditions of 1977 provide many clues to the conflicting blackout experiences. The fiscal crisis and the ensuing cutbacks had been precipitated by a crippling economic recession which intensified growing public expressions of mistrust and consternation, leading some communities to lash out in the darkened night. [Why would a recession make you “lash out”?] Growing crime rates, [Why were they growing?] coinciding with a City government unable to grapple [Why was government impotent?] with escalating social and economic problems, also provided the backdrop for the explosion of violence. Contrasting with the good memories most New Yorkers had of a peaceful blackout only twelve years prior [in 1965], the garish images of the 1977 blackout confirmed just how much the City had changed in a decade. [Correct! But why?] The ‘urban crisis’ had become a permanent [sic] national emergency, claiming New York as its latest victim.”9
—“It seems, say researchers who study America’s psyche, that the country learned something profound from terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.”5 [What terrorist attack taught America to be civil in 1965?]
—“’Someone noted that the terrorists hoped after 9/11 they had changed America forever, and they were right,’ says a professor of psychiatry at Pennsylvania State University. ‘They did.’”5 [“Forever”? Like the way “the summer of 1977 permanently altered New York’s self image”?]
—“After 9/11 there was a ‘growing feeling that people needed to hang together to take care of each other,’ said [a researcher of] post-traumatic stress disorder at Florida State University. ‘Passengers immediately began to talk about 9/11. We got into that spirit, and appreciated how lucky we were’ not to be in the middle of another terrorist horror. [He] describes their relief as ‘post-traumatic euphoria’ and says their relief ‘enabled them to activate that part of themselves that wants to help others.’”5 [What determines whether we have “post-traumatic stress” or “post-traumatic euphoria”?]
—“Another peaceful Rust Belt blackout that occurred in 1965 may help explain why. It occurred during the Cold War, another time when Americans felt themselves under threat. ‘Americans in general are in a state of mind that’s much closer to the Cold War,’ he says. ‘There’s a sense of community that wasn’t there in the ’70s, and a greater respect for authority. And I wouldn’t underestimate the fear factor’”5 [If you throw in the Cold War, there is hardly a period in the past 70 years when Americans did not “feel themselves under threat.”]
—“Former New York Mayor Edward Koch, who took office in 1978, said the disparities were striking and attributable to the changes in the city’s economic, ethnic and political circumstances.”10 [What brought about these changes?]
—“Kelley said the Police Department, with 37,000 officers, is 15,000 over its 1977 staffing levels and uses more sophisticated technology, communications and personnel management techniques.”10 [Did more cops diffuse tension at Kent State in 1970?]
—“In those days [1977], New York’s crime rate was soaring — a trend that would last until 1993, when former Major Rudolph Guiliani and then Police Commissioner William Bratton launched ‘Zero Tolerance’ policing, says [a professor at] Boston’s Northeastern University.”5
—“Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, who for 12 years was president of New York Urban League, said the city had undergone a change over the past decade in which ‘the consensus in minority communities has moved toward zero tolerance for anti-social behavior.’”10 [So we just decided not to tolerate rioting. As Sir Robin said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “That’s easy!”]
—“A study of the ’77 blackout by researchers at three New York institutions, including Columbia University, linked looting to an incendiary mix of poverty, unemployment, mistrust of the justice system and other grievances.”5 [Do the poverty-stricken unemployed of Appalachia stage riots when the lights go out? If it was the “mix” of social circumstances, how did it get there? Why didn’t New York’s poor and unemployed riot this time?]
—“Because many of the problems behind the urban crisis remain unsolved despite the prosperity of recent years, the memories of the 1977 blackout have taken on the quality of morality play or myth, with widely diverging views of what the myth means.”9
The 1965 Experience
One key to understanding the difference in behavior between the two events is available in reports of crowd behavior during the preceding major NYC blackout of November 1965. It is described this way:
—“‘Everybody was very cooperative and nobody panicked,’ he recalled. ‘It wasn’t as scary as it was maddening.’”8
—“It was remarkable for what didn’t happen: looting and violence. Police reported that the crime rate actually went down.”8
—“Despite the confusion and disarray, New Yorkers spent the night in peace. There were no riots or widespread looting. Instead, New Yorkers helped each other. Some directed traffic. Others assisted the New York fire department as they rescued stranded subway passengers. In many cases, New Yorkers just shared extra candles and flashlights with neighbors, reveling in the opportunity to get to know the people who lived across the hall.”11
—“This wasn’t the case a dozen years later when New York’s poorer boroughs turned ugly and violent, littered with broken glass and burned-out buildings.”8
The Socionomic Perspective
So the question is, why did the public behave well in 1965, poorly in 1977 and well again in 2003? If you are a long-time reader of our socionomic studies, you may already have guessed the answer: The years 1965 and 2003 are positioned near peaks of positive social-mood trends, and the year 1977 is positioned near the bottom of a negative social-mood trend, as evidenced in the following graph of the constant-dollar Dow. Shared good feelings near the two tops manifested in good behavior, and shared bad feelings near the bottom manifested in destructive behavior. The event was the same each time, so its nature is irrelevant to the behavior. So was “9/11” and any other event cited as a “reason” for the difference.
The expressions of social goodwill during the 2003 blackout are in perfect accordance with today’s readings on all the indicators of social mood that we maintain. Extreme optimism toward the stock market (see recent issues of EWT and EWFF) and net popular support for the President are but two of the other manifestations of the currently elevated social mood. Readings in 1965 were similarly elevated, and those in 1977 were depressed.
Americans did not “learn something profound from 9/11” or exhibit restraint because of a “fear factor” or “zero tolerance.” The proof of that will come when, near the ultimate bottom of the currently young bear market, a disaster occurs in New York and riots follow. People yearn to express both their good feelings and bad. A technical disruption simply provides an occasion to do so.
Socionomic Value
Not only can a socionomist use the position of the waves to determine the likely character of social events, but he can also use the character of social events to help confirm or contradict the presumed position of the waves. Judging from the sentiments revealed in the reaction to the recent blackout, can you deduce whether the stock market is closer to a major top than a major bottom? Look again at the chart and think about it.
Speaking of social sentiment, the next downturn will usher in a new phase in the developing world war. As mood deteriorates, tensions will mount, and bad news from Iraq, Al Qaeda, North Korea and perhaps new adversaries will be front page news.
REFERENCES
1 Southall, Brooke. (2003, September 1). “Deflation scare is losing air.” Investment News.
2 Hagenbaugh, Barbara. (2003, September 2). “A-list experts discuss threat of crippling deflation.” USA Today, 4B.
3 Salzer, James. (2003, September 7). “Mental hospitals face big cutbacks.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, E5.
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