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Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse
- splintercell 9y agoTL;DR: America is failing as a state because it is not a good European welfare state. School shootings, lack of public investment, lack of nationalized healthcare, opioid crises, income inequality, extreme capitalism, oligarchy. We need more Europe, less America in order to save America. EDIT: Here [1] is more by the author on how making America more like Europe is the key to solving all of America's problems. 1. https://eand.co/the-american-dream-is-over-this-is-the-age-of-the-european-dream-71c668bef945 https://eand.co/the-american-dream-is-over-this-is-the-age-o...
- lafar6502 9y agoEurope will collapse much faster and in much more spectacular ways. Remind me, how many years have passed since last war in Europe vs America?
- mdekkers 9y agoRemind me, how many years have passed since last war in Europe vs America? Make no mistake, America's main export is war. Europe? Central Europe has been at peace since WWII - thanks mostly to the EU. America on the other hand hasn't stopped waging wars since WWII
- shillno1138 9y agoThis comment is ahistorical to an extreme degree. The EU was not founded until 1993. This is not a 'rah rah America' statement, however, the European continent after WWII was rebuilt via the economic engine and output of the United States. You can take a look at the rebuilding post-war effort of Western Europe vs Eastern Europe to see the clear delineation of success. Does no-one remember the Balkan wars, and post war scarcity that existed to a more extreme detriment in Eastern Europe than Western? I do agree with the statement that America has not stopped waging wars, this is a factual statement.
- shinryuu 9y agoWhile the european union was formally established 1993 it was built on European Economic Community which was established 1951. In other words the European countries have worked on coming closer and closer over the past half century.
- mdekkers 9y agoThis comment is ahistorical to an extreme degree. The EU was not founded until 1993. You could not be more wrong. The EU was built from the ashes of WWII: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en the European continent after WWII was rebuilt via the economic engine and output of the United States. This has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, so I'll take that as a "rah rah America" statement. Does no-one remember the Balkan wars, and post war scarcity that existed to a more extreme detriment in Eastern Europe than Western? Well, everybody that survived the balkan wars are sure to remember, and so do their offspring. Again, nothing to do with the subject at hand.
- refurb 9y agoYou act like Europe played no part in the first gulf war, the second gulf war or Afghanistan. That's not true at all.
- zip1234 9y agoAlso, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Georgia, and Ukraine...
- dang 9y agoCould you please not use HN for ideological battle? These disputes are always all the same, which makes them off topic here. On HN only the diffs count as interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lafar6502 9y agoAre you disagreeing with what, exactly?
- IanDrake 9y agoThat seems like an accurate TL;DR to me. Somehow the author wants to tie school shootings to lack of healthcare, I assume he thinks a single payer system would fix this. However, it's not as if we went from a national healthcare system to a market based system and things disintegrated, the opposite is true. Healthcare regulations and government intervention has increased of the last 50 years and things have gotten worst, and by worse, I mean expensive. Having a family member with mental issues, I can assure you of what the real problem is...and you're not going to like it. The real problem with mental health in the US is the institutions have been shut down and we no longer commit the mentally ill in mass. Instead they get forcefully drugged for a few weeks in a hospital, then they start behaving better, then they're released with a prescription, then they stop taking their meds. Wash, rinse, repeat.
- mcphage 9y ago> Somehow the author wants to tie school shootings to lack of healthcare, I assume he thinks a single payer system would fix this. You're making a common error—Correlation does not imply Causation. The author is correlating these phenomenon, but not implying a causal relationship. Instead, he's positing that there's an additional cause to both—that America is in the midst of a societal collapse.
- ken 9y agoI didn't get that at all. The author doesn't mention Europe in this article, except for noting that the UK in the only other country with a declining life expectancy. Asia and Africa are mentioned, a couple times, as examples of places that don't suffer from the same problems as America.
- splintercell 9y agoYou must be new to the author, but check out his other articles, nearly every article is written the same way. And plenty of them mention Europe.
- shillno1138 9y agoI do not ever comment, but this article is rife with misconceptions. A specific example would be: * How did America’s elderly end up cheated of dignity? After all, even desperately poor countries have “informal social support systems” — otherwise known as families and communities. But in America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria.* Any honest examination of the destruction of the social family unit easily shows that this was not due to capitalism, but progressive and socialist legislation that encouraged disintegration of the family units. Three of the largest 'capitalism endorsed' holidays in the USA are Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter (though Easter in the last few decades has decreased significantly in its importance and stature). If anything, capitalism's endorsement of these holidays brings families CLOSER together, than they normally exist during the rest of the year. Left policies and statements about 'patriarchal structures' and why they need to be disassembled have contributed far more to family unit disintegration than capitalism. Edit: Not to belabor the point either, but referencing Pakistan and Nigeria in this quote shows the authors bias. Both of these countries are great examples where patriarchy is absolutely thriving, strong familial bonds, led by men in those nations, with a subjugated women class.
- throwawayjava 9y ago> Any honest examination of the destruction of the social family unit easily shows that this was not due to capitalism, but progressive and socialist legislation that encouraged disintegration of the family units. Can you give concrete examples of legislation that "encouraged disintegration of the family units"? > If anything, capitalism's endorsement of these holidays brings families CLOSER together, than they normally exist during the rest of the year How so? Would Christmas have faded in significance if it weren't "endorsed" by capitalism"? > Left policies and statements about 'patriarchal structures' and why they need to be disassembled have contributed far more to family unit disintegration than capitalism. The canonical American nuclear family unit doesn't even include multi-generational housing.
- shillno1138 9y ago
- lafar6502 9y agoAt the moment people would rather collapse with America than prosper somewhere else
- cheschire 9y agoPeople would rather HODL their investments in retirement, networking, and social constructs than uproot and jump into the deep end of another nation which presumably has its own pitfalls just waiting to trap naive gaijin.
- devnonymous 9y agoHere's your big reveal, the choice between uprooting oneself from where you've lived all your life versus sticking it out in the hope that things would get better existed through all generations, including your grandparents and mine... Irrespective of where they were. The US simply had one extra generation of a buffer where Americans didn't have to really think hard and long about these matters... But trust me, the risk assessment you allude to, that was real and hard for every immigrant, irrespective of the country of origin.
- jv22222 9y agoThis article is so full of fear mongering language, yet it makes some salient points. I wish the same article existed that was stripped of the hyperbole. Example: > what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.
- ajb 9y agoI don't think such an article would have the same meaning. The whole point of the article is that this is something you (Americans) should take seriously as an existential threat.
- Animats 9y agoThe school shooting thing is strange. Here's a summary of school-related shootings so far in 2018.[1] The most common event is bullets fired at a school or school bus without any clear target. Five of those. One suicide by a non-student near a closed school. One case of bad gun handling during gun training. Two students shooting other students. One frat party shooting. This thing of just randomly shooting at schools is new. Even in states with a lot of guns. [1] https://thinkprogress.org/school-shootings-2018-e139b247474e/ https://thinkprogress.org/school-shootings-2018-e139b247474e...
- devnonymous 9y agoHah, I guess this is what is called normalisation. Gawd,in both, where I come from (a ^developing^ country) and where I live (a European ^first world^ country), a gun at a school (let alone a shooting) would qualify for national news.
- to_bpr 9y agoGiven the increase in fractured heterogeneity and the fall of Christianity in the USA, or at least adherence to its teaching and participation (i.e. census stats disregarded), it's not hard to see how people feel socially isolated and free of any debt to any form of "community". Coupled with a media (traditional tv, print, modern online) whose purpose seems to be purely to exacerbate divisions and perceived social tensions; giving voice to only the most radical on any spectrum on any issue all in the name of getting clicks to sell ads to; it's again not hard to see how groups are drastically losing empathy and support for one another. America has become a model of how not to approach the goal of creating and supporting a healthy society. One would hope that lessons would be learned from it, but it seems that Western Europe is gung-ho to follow almost every footstep. As people in tech, there should be no doubt of the contribution we've made, or leadership provided, to the above.
- ben_w 9y ago> the fall of Christianity in the USA, or at least adherence to its teaching and participation (i.e. census stats disregarded) Two questions: 1) How are you measuring that if not via the census? 2) Given the Wikipedia list of “Importance of religion by country” places the USA nowhere near the top or bottom of the list, and that nations which are less religious than the USA include socially aware and stable nations such as Canada, Switzerland, Germany, and all of the Scandinavian nations, why would declining religiosity be a cause or effect of national collapse?
- wrongc0ntinent 9y agoAnyone writing opioid epidemics only happen in the US is either poorly informed or is intellectually dishonest. I assume the second here, since this reads like contemporary agitprop.
- solidsnack9000 9y agoWhere else are they happening?
- throwawayjava 9y agoIDK. A few data sets that might make for good starting points: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevalence_of_opiates_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevalenc... This data isn't up-to-date and the list is for opiates, not opioids But this still gives you a good sense for which countries to look up. IMO opiates are closer to marijuana or cocaine than to heroin -- i.e., an otherwise healthy, happy, intelligent, and drug-educated person using in a purely recreational context is unlikely to die or even become severely addicted. Different from opioids in that respect. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic#Outside_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic#Outside_North_... Not much info, but we get pointers to some of the same countries at the top of the opiates list.
- fulafel 9y agoThis WaPo article[1] has references to UN data sources and says: "United Nations data provide one important benchmark against which to judge how much more or less opioid consumption might be appropriate for a given country. And what it finds about the United States is jaw-dropping: Even when the list is restricted to the top 25 heaviest consuming countries, the United States outpaces them all in opioid use." So it's within reason for the article to say "[US] people abuse opioids en masse unlike anywhere else in the world" [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/15/americans-use-far-more-opioids-than-anyone-else-in-the-world/?utm_term=.d9785f5d743e https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/15/ameri...
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- jonbarker 9y agoI am increasingly hearing that the US is in a state of impending collapse from a variety of sources, and I always ask, well if it is, how much time do we have? In the absence of any method for accurate forecasting, I defer to J. Richard Gott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Richard_Gott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Richard_Gott. According to his method, which he used successfully to predict when the Berlin Wall would come down, the US probably has about 800 years left, based on a 75% chance it has lived about a quarter of its life.
- TheCoelacanth 9y agoYou aren't applying that method correctly. The method is just making the assumption that you are observing a entity at a point in its lifetime that is randomly distributed with a uniform distribution. So there is a 75% chance that you are in the middle 75% of its lifetime (i.e. somewhere from 12.5% to 87.5% through its lifetime) and there is a 95% chance that you are in the middle 95% (somewhere from 2.5% to 97.5% through the lifetime). The US is currently 242 years old, so the 75% confidence interval for its total lifespan is 276-1,936 years for an expected end date of 2052-3712. The 95% confidence interval end dates are 2024-11,456. Applying it in reverse, the chance of it collapsing within my expected lifetime is 18%. That's not exactly comforting.
- devnonymous 9y agoNo. I'm sorry but what of Gott's methods are you specifically using to justify that claim?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- leoc 9y agoBe wary of anything that seems to suggest that social pathology or social evil must lead, or must even tend to lead, to social collapse. Civilisation can roll from strength to strength, serene and happy and proud in itself, while (sometimes even because) the marginal, unloved, non-compliant or just unlucky are crushed pitilessly and unceasingly beneath its wheels. In fact that's the normal state of affairs. Providing examples from US history is left as an exercise for the reader: and that's not to suggest that the US is very much, or perhaps even at all, exceptional in its historical level of social brutality.
- anthonyleecook 9y agoLet's use some bigger, current metrics to measure whether or not US is collapse or not, instead of some random stats about shooting, or observations about US collapse. 1.) US GDP is 19.73 trillion in 4th quarter 2017, best in the world. https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-gdp-5-latest-statistics-and-how-to-use-them-3306041 https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-gdp-5-latest-statistics-and-h... second best is EU, at 17.1 trillion. 2.) US GDP per capita is $57,000, pretty impressive considering it has a population of 330+ million people and growing. compare that with $8000 for China. 3.) US ranked 3rd in GDP per hours worked, pretty productive for such a big nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_hour_worked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... 4.) Dollar is still the hegemony 5.) US military is the biggest in the world, and has the most combat experiences. It has provoked many wars over the years, some good (toppling dictators, preventing communisms from spreading, advocating democracies), as well as some bad (instilling instabilities in regions) 6.) US innovation is everywhere, in tech (internet, hardware, software), finance, entertainment (games, tv, movies, music), lifestyle, education, services, etc 7.) there's a bigger upper middle class than ever, lower middle class has shrank . http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-class/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-cl... 8.) With tariffs punishing China, Apple/Amazon investments of billions into american cities, and fines levied on China for unfair tech transfers, US will revive manufacturing and economies in middle America
- throwawayjava 9y agoAmerica is the most powerful and impressive developed country in the world, attached to a vast and profoundly depressing failed developed state. C.f. SF Bay and rural Oklahoma.
- solarkraft 9y agoI don't like that this is a semi-paywalled article.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ldiracdelta 9y ago"Why we're writting click-bait article titles that assume an extreme minority-held premise."
- zbentley 9y agoThe article's format and tone remind me of a US high-school speech and debate "radio" speech: http://www.msdlonline.org/radio-broadcasting.html http://www.msdlonline.org/radio-broadcasting.html. Not good or bad per se, just a familiar style.