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> Western country... very big societal changes... It's already happened. Contrary to popular belief, Western countries are not uniformly rich and successful pl
by pjlegato 10y ago
> Western country... very big societal changes...
It's already happened. Contrary to popular belief, Western countries are not uniformly rich and successful places where everyone drives a Ferrari and owns three houses.
This stereotype is really annoying to those of us who suffered through the industrial collapse and saw the society of whole regions destroyed (larger than most eastern European countries.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindustrialisation_by_country#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindustrialisation_by_country...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_(1964%E2%80%9380)#.22Stagflation.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_(...
* etc.
- paganel 10y agoI know about the Rust Belt meltdown and also about what happened to Northern England and Scotland during the Thatcher years, but trust me when I'm telling you that high inflation and the whole damn country (nor merely a region) being on the brink of collapse feels at least a hundred times worse.
- pjlegato 10y agoYes, I'm sure the collapse of the state was quite terrible. Nobody is trying to diminish the horror of that experience. The point is that "westerners," even HN readers, are not all a bunch of naive rich people who have never experienced and cannot understand large scale social change.