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No, America is not collapsing
- jleyank 4y agoNo, but rather than being united to face an external threat it’s disunited to deal with imagined or self-constructed internal threats. It’s moved from a manufacturing to a post-manufacturing society, concentrating on finance, information and consumption. Basically recapitulating the uk in the Victorian and Edwardian periods (complete with morality concerns). Backwards-looking, growing more conservative countries are not the most appealing to the young or the economically mobile. See Paul Kennedy “decline and fall of the great powers”.
- rvz 4y agoWell said and explained. Constant hysteria, screeching, panic, outrage and doomerisim towards thinking 'America is collapsing' is yet another downward spiral towards demoralising each other into believing nonsense like this especially when the media likes feeding them the same garbage on every outrage event. Next thing you know, they will find a new villain of the month to screech at and cause outrage towards.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mgh2 4y agoGood example of the disparity between public perception vs. reality - subjective and qualitative vs. objective and quantitative data.
- eqNotEq 4y agoThere’s no guarantee this author chose the right data points. Just because you feel satiated does not mean the end of RvW won’t spark a sudden social meltdown. We could be one stupid political decision away. We’re not property of the elites. None of the bank tellers by me own the banks. Mortgage strikes, wfh worker strikes could follow further erosion of human rights. Good luck going door to door, Jamie Dimon and co. There’s a broader distribution of possible triggers than the ones in this post. People still need to eat so certain behavior will look the same. That doesn’t mean they aren’t ready to eat the rich.
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
- erellsworth 4y agoI have a hard time taking this seriously when it doesn't even the biggest mention climate change. Talk to me when Lake Powell stops being able to generate electricity and the West coast runs out of water.
- jimmaswell 4y agoWhy is that relevant to America in particular here? Shouldn't the whole world be "collapsing" then?
- ncmncm 4y agoIt is wholly possible for one country to collapse, and another not, in the face of identically the same threat.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoFood shortages fuelling inflation, and extreme events putting further burden on an already aging and dysfunctional infrastructure come to mind.
- erellsworth 4y agoDon't worry, we'll get there if we don't get climate change under control.
- pjc50 4y agoTexas has been focusing a lot more effort on abortion bounty hunting than it has on grid resilience.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- suture 4y agoHe says America is not collapsing despite the failed coup and the growing chorus of people who perceive things are fundamentally wrong within the country. He talks about the economy and in this case it’s not about the economy. It’s about soon living in a country where in one state you can do something that is legal while in another state you can be executed for it. It’s about living in a country in which voting rights have systemically been watered down and in which neither the House or Senate has proportional representation. We are entering a period of religious minority rule. The sum of these things indicates that absent major structural reforms in how apportionment occurs indicates that a breakup is a realistic outcome.
- jimmaswell 4y ago> It’s about soon living in a country where in one state you can do something that is legal while in another state you can be executed for it. As a gun owner, we've been dealing with this for a long time.
- bluejekyll 4y agoGuns are legal in every single state.
- jimmaswell 4y agoStates like California, NY, NJ basically try to inconvenience you out of owning them, banning normal capacity magazines and random arbitrary features on rifles, and making it difficult to impossible to get a handgun permit. The tactics are often similar to those of anti-abortion states. The last remaining gun store in Los Angeles (or some similar area) was forced to close a while ago.
- pixelatedindex 4y agoAs someone who has been reading about the stoic philosophy recently, this article has a good sense of the “discipline of assent”, where we should not be caught up in the storm of illogical and emotional thinking. A lot of doomerism that’s prevalent these days (on both sides of the political spectrum, to a lesser or greater degree) really try to prey on our irrational or emotional aspect of how we react to events around us (which is further compounded by how easy and fast information travel). All that to say, this was a good read - so thank you for posting.
- troyvit 4y agoThat's a good way to put it. I think the fact that he used tweets to illustrate examples of doomerism exemplifies that. Twitter was written from the ground up to prey on our irrationality and emotions.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoI truly abhor this trend that views authoritative detachment as a virtue. Do you read things the stoic philosophers wrote on other subjects? Do you read about the actions of their lives? This article claims it's not endorsing passivity but it is. It is reassuring you that doing nothing is the correct course, and that you are noble for having the detachment and self-knowledge to choose not to act. It's no different and no better than the appeals to emotion that you believe you're above.
- pixelatedindex 4y ago> It is reassuring you that doing nothing is the correct course That was definitely not my take. It is reassuring me that things will be ok, and that definitely doesn’t mean I should be doing nothing. Quite the opposite actually - I should vote, organize and protest - do things that are in my control. It is moot to worry about things that may happen in the future, which is what doomerism tends to be.
- waterlaw 4y agoLost me at wages keeping up with inflation. In Canada (unrelated to article, but similar.) I'd need a 16% raise to keep pace with inflation. Since 52% tax bracket. Meanwhile homeowners do nothing and have tax-free returns. Yearly returns larger than my net salary. Collapse is a matter of perspective. Being in the working class sucks and everyone knows it. This is a much better article: Collapse Won’t Reset Society https://palladiummag.com/2022/04/11/collapse-wont-reset-society/ https://palladiummag.com/2022/04/11/collapse-wont-reset-soci...
- jimmaswell 4y ago> Meanwhile homeowners do nothing and have tax-free returns. Yearly returns larger than my net salary. What do you mean, their theoretical home value going up? What good is that until or if they sell, better home equity loans?
- s1artibartfast 4y agoIn the US at least, there are many ways to avoid paying any taxes on home sales. You get a 500k tax deduction every 2 years for primary residence swaps, or do a 1031 exchange to avoid taxes on rentals. I had a peer and we both made 120k with 35% taxes. In the last 10 years he made 2.5 million trading up houses tax free. Roughly 2x our salary per year tax free. A lot of jealousy going around. I try to say good for him, but a lot of people have more trouble with that.
- zionic 4y ago>35% taxes at 120k Your real tax rate is likely close to 50%. You’re almost certainly not including payroll tax, sales tax, and property taxes in that number at that income level.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI was talking abut income tax, so Parole yes, sales and property no. I also excluded registration and Licensing fees, and capital gains.
- immigrantheart 4y agoThere are people who believe that America is collapsing if Roe v Wade isn’t overturned.
- ncmncm 4y agoA quite small minority
- bitshiftfaced 4y ago> The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters would approve of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, including 32% who would Strongly Approve. Forty-five percent (45%) would disapprove of overturning Roe v. Wade, including 35% who would Strongly Disapprove. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/public_surveys/roe_v_wade_voters_divided_about_repealing_decision https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/pub...
- camgunz 4y agoI've tried to stay out of this and I'll continue to do so, but here's a couple problems: - Rasmussen isn't a pollster so much as a right-wing polling window shifter (we sample the "real" America). They're consistently tilted to the right, on purpose. - Sampling "likely" voters also biases heavily toward the right (something between 4-9 points). Sampling "registered" voters has a similar leftward bias, which is why pollsters have to control for it, or sample Americans and not simply "voters" (when doing election polling you want voters, when doing opinion polling you want Americans, if you're doing voters for opinion polling you're gaming the results). Gallup's poll is a much better resource on this [0], specifically 58% oppose "the Supreme Court overturn[ing] its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision". [0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
- bitshiftfaced 4y agoIt's true. If I wanted to make a stronger argument that people who held the opposite opinion weren't "a quite small minority," then I could've used another poll like you've suggested. It would make the same argument, but wouldn't be open to your tangent argument, which doesn't contradict the underlying point.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gaze 4y agoThe fact that Noah is saying this means America is absolutely collapsing.
- Cd00d 4y agoI'm not familiar with the author, so maybe you can add context for this comment. I'm reading it as snark that posits the author has no credibility, which isn't a very valuable comment in itself.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 4y agoThe political unrest is increasing, though. The risk of an election being rigged, overturned, or having the losing party refuse to acknowledge the result and have parts of the state acceed to that is much higher than comfortable levels. When you see a system that fails through four levels of safeties, and is stopped by a fifth, do you see that as "good the system is working" or "we need to re-examine the first set of safeties"?
- eschulz 4y agoYes it's unsettling that public figures in the current and previous administration have publicly expressed their belief that the 2016 and 2020 elections, respectively, were stolen. I wish that could be changed.
- turtledove 4y agoThat's a false equivalence, however. In 2016, stolen meant "gerrymandering, winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college, voter suppression" - real and measurable impacts to the outcome. In 2020, stolen meant conspiracy theories about people cheating at the polls with absolutely zero evidence that anything untoward had happened. In both cases, "stolen" is the wrong word, but to casually lump them together is also incorrect.
- skizm 4y agoThere absolutely was evidence for the 2020 election of Trump telling state officials to "find the votes" and giving them an exact number of votes he needs them to "find" for him to win.
- eschulz 4y agoI think many public figures, including Karine Jean-Pierre, pushed the narrative that Russia helped Trump cheat in 2020. But yes, the gerrymandering issue is also at play. Using the term "stolen" is very serious, and people in authority certainly must understand the power of their words.
- 4y ago
- eatonphil 4y agoThe more that I read of (US) history the less extremely worried I am. Maybe I should be more worried about climate change. But other than that, we've been doing crazy stupid stuff, some evil stuff, some good stuff for a long time. Yet the general trend has been to become more democratic, more socialist, more multi-ethnic/multi-cultural, more scientific, etc. I'm not defending any of the bad parts historically or that still exist today, just trying to understand better what the US is and was. I think that this is a good article reminding everyone of all of this.
- akie 4y ago[flagged]
- vt85 4y ago
- eropple 4y ago
- pessimizer 4y agoWhat made it the "greatest country on earth" was not being in Europe when WWII was fought.
- nivenkos 4y agoA whole lot of imperialism. The intervention in Panama and construction of the Panama Canal was huge too - redirecting a lot of wealth from Argentina.
- gonzo41 4y agoYeah, this was a really big edge for the USA, not having to rebuild a second time in 40 years after massive wars that killed a majority of your working men. And you got to keep all the scientists (operation paperclip), and take reparations in technology transfers (250K ton break presses used in aircraft manufacturing).
- bmitc 4y agoI think "muddling" in the subtitle is a key point, because that's exactly how things are going. These reversions, due to in effect religious fundamentalism and pandering to what I only hope are minority crowds emboldened by gerrymandering and the electoral college, are concerning. The U.S. will continue to stagnate if all we ever discuss and rabble about are fringe issues. Why is abortion literally a major topic in every presidential election over decades? Abortion is a tough issue no matter what, and so a compromise is needed. There will never be a totally clean solution. Why are people so damn concerned with decisions others make? In Texas, last time I looked, anybody can initiate a lawsuit against a doctor on abortion related issues, making doctors frozen due to legal worries and even reverting to communicating on paper notes that they then throw away. It's insane. We're taking decision making from the educated and giving it to the uneducated. Education in the country is a major concern and has domino effects that take decades to correct, but the more the less educated come into power, the harder it gets to revert. And we're trending in the wrong direction. I also think the section on inequality is greatly misleading. Inequality keeps getting worse and worse by basically any measure. Picking out any data over the past two years is likely to be very, very biased, because the economy has been wildly swinging back and forth. Data can be picked to basically back up any position. The middle class is getting absolutely hammered by taxes while the rich just keep on keeping on in a tax-free world not experienced by others. > Bloomberg reports that the world’s richest 500 people have lost a total of $1 trillion this year. I can't view the article, but aren't those "losses" likely to be paper losses, i.e., unrealized losses? When lower and middle class people have losses, they are realized. People lose jobs, money, homes, etc. Rich people "losing" money in the various markets and their investments continue to reap dividends and other monetary gains and will eventually recuperate. Articles like this are akin to burying one's head in the sand and consist of cherry-picked data to say everything's okay.
- skizm 4y ago> Why is abortion literally a major topic in every presidential election over decades? Abortion is a big issue that will continue to come up because one group of people view it as literally murdering a child and another group see it as a minor medical procedure. In reality the debate should just be "how many weeks into pregnancy should it be allowed?", but that's hard to sell in a campaign so politicians will go hard one way or the other.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ipnon 4y agoEverytime I wonder if we're doomed I just remember we were locked in mortal combat with ourselves only 140 years ago. Sociopolitical relations seem absolutely rosy in comparison! America has been through a lot (to put it mildly), this is far from the worst of our historical challenges.
- lom888 4y agoIn the 1930s a large section of the country was undergoing an ecological collapse that caused mass migration. There was a sustained occupation of the capital by an army of former soldiers that was dispelled by force of arms. Unemployment was at 25%. Reproductive rights were not a thing. It seemed axiomatic to many in the educated classes that the more (apparently) efficient anti-democratic ideologies of communism and fascism would eventually displace the capitalist liberal democracy that had been the midwife of the depression. The Supreme Court overturned popular legislation for apparent political reason. And by 1946 the US was moving to the apogee of its power. I think the popularity of the collapse narrative over the past 10 years or so speaks more to the emotional salience of the topic and the ability of the web to supercharge emotionally potent topics than to the likelihood of any sort of collapse of the American state.
- dncornholio 4y agoAll I see is 2 tweets from random Karens and we need a blogpost for them?
- logicalmonster 4y agoI can't exactly predict the future other than giving my opinion about the divisions and what I suspect is going to happen, but historically speaking, even the strongest empires ultimately get displaced by other powers and collapse. I'm sure there were Moscow-based Communist writers who wrote things towards the end of the Soviet system writing about how the CCCP would reign forever. I'm sure there were some Roman historians towards the end writing about how the Empire would be eternal.
- nivenkos 4y agoThe US is about to become wealthier than ever with the new LNG exports to Europe and the lend lease terms, etc.
- waterlaw 4y agoHalf the population has low to no income. Manufacturing was gutted and sent overseas in an effort to integrate China into the world order. Russia exports way more resources and has decrepit living conditions. LNG will not make up for a fall in GDP due to supply chain, monetary or political issues. The risks are piling up for a black swan, but it's not a collapse. Western Civilization is far from collapse, but it might be entering its long decay. That's difficult to quantify.
- halfjoking 4y ago
- thebean11 4y agoI thought the pandemic was technically over, and Covid is now considered endemic.
- halfjoking 4y agoHopefully it is over. If nothing happens next winter I think we’re good. Unfortunately politicians are keeping up hostile rhetoric towards unvaccinated. They do not admit to any mistakes, still hold onto false assumptions about what does/does not work (cloth masks?). If they don’t change their tone it makes me think they’re ready to bring it back. Even Bill Gates is going around saying there will be a new, more deadly variant.
- cosmiccatnap 4y agoI can't believe this kind of conspiracy nonsense gets posted to HN.
- halfjoking 4y agoI could call the US government spending trillions on this pandemic the last two years a conspiracy. It seems pretty outlandish given US track record of doing things in the name of public health. US food subsidies are for the unhealthiest food, healthcare policies result in the worst health outcomes at highest cost, protective environmental regulations have been stripped away hurting public health. Yet this time… it’s different. That seems like a crazy conspiracy to me.
- paganel 4y agoNot so sure about that, for the first time in my adult life (I'm in my early 40s, I've been reading the "serious" print media on and off for about 20 years now) I saw a magazine like The Economist seriously suggesting that the State governors ignoring a Supreme Court decision might actually happen and, on top of that (and the thing which made it interesting for me), that there was nothing wrong with that (or at least that seemed like the subtext of the article to me). Again, this was the first time for me reading in a MSM entity that a decision/action that would de facto mean the (at least) partial dissolution of the idea of the United States would not mean the end of the world. Dark times ahead. (if it matters I'm not from the US nor have I set foot in there, but I do love the country and I have been trying to read the most that I could find when it came to its history and its institutions).
- chubot 4y agoI tend to ignore the "endless screeching", and I've long had an optimistic world view somewhat aligned with say Steven Pinker -- we're living through the best times, roughly monotonic progress, with some temporary setbacks. But this recent video by Ray Dalio made me think a lot, and led me to his books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8 Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order He did a bunch of quantitative research and came up with a model for the prosperity of countries, and "the world order". In the model, there were 4 world leaders at various points: Dutch, British, Americans, and Chinese. The basic pattern is that they were productive and industrious, gained military power, and grew to hold the world's reserve concurrency. After they hold the world's reserve concurrency, they stop being as productive. The rich parents can bend the rules and corrupt society for their kids. And there is more internal conflict about how to divvy up a fixed or declining pie. There can be more external conflict once rivals see weakness. In Dalio's view, China is obviously on the rise economically, and you also see signs of their increased military power. There is more to it than that -- see the video and books, but that's my short summary. ----- It sounds a little too "clean", but after some reflection, a lot of it is hard to argue with. (I'd definitely be interested in criticisms -- this presentation / framing is pretty new.) This doesn't mean America is "collapsing". But I would now say it's clearly "declining". Our energies are directed more at fighting amongst ourselves than producing things. It always boggled my mind that everything we buy is made in China -- how could that not have an effect? Well it does appear that having the world's reserve concurrency is a huge advantage. That was established long ago, before we were born, and now we're coasting off of it. But then again, Britain and the Netherlands "declined" and they seem to be doing OK. They lost their empires, but they recovered to some degree of civilized society and prosperity. And I'm pretty sure I would not want to live in China right now, e.g. especially with what I hear about the COVID lockdowns. (even though I'm ethnically Chinese) But yeah I think I need to take the idea of decline a lot more seriously. I think the blog post is also "overcorrecting" from the screeching. I think what decline looks like is a bunch of little collapses in all areas of life, and people endlessly arguing about it, while doing little to correct it.
- mywittyname 4y agoIt will happen gradually, then suddenly. I suspect there's a lot more discontent with the country than people are recognizing. I'd be curious to hear peoples' honest opinion on the maintaining the union, because I do think that a large number of Americans from both political parties are increasingly considering a break up to be the only real solution. Climate change is a substantial omission here: forest fires and droughts in the west, heat waves/cold snaps in the south, increasing floods and hurricanes in the south east. Those are drastically changing the population landscape of the country. Then there's the whole change with SALT deductions. This was a lot more insidious than a lot of people credit it with being. The long-term effects are hard to predict. We are going to see a repeat of 2020 in 2024. Except this time, it will probably be successful. Will the next president continue trade wars against allies? Successfully withdraw from NATO? Again make military aid contingent upon corruption? Actively target "left wing" people with laws that allow them to be arrested, robbed, and have their children taken away? I think this article undersells how incredibly precarious our democracy is right now. I genuinely feel like I'll see the end of the USA in my lifetime. I just hope it is a peaceful dissolution.
- qalmakka 4y ago> America is not collapsing That what they were also saying about the USSR and look how it went. To be clear, I don't think the USA will collapse soon because I do not have the necessary skills to assess a claim like that. The one thing I think everyone gives too much credit to is our own ability to foresee events such as a country collapsing. How human crowds behave is notoriously very hard to predict, and people have a tendency to retcon their historical perception of events in order to justify what has just happened. Just look at the USSR, where the majority of experts in Russology scoffed at the idea that the Soviet regime was going to collapse, yet it did and afterwards everyone was like "well, that's obvious!". If the USA were to collapse tomorrow, future historians would probably point at things such as the current Supreme Court composition and the divide between political lines as the inevitable, unstoppable factors behind it. IMHO except the fact that every Empire some day inevitably falls, how and when countries implode is often too complex to predict, so most of these discussions about the impending (or lack of) doom of a polity basically boil down to white noise or fiction.
- rkk3 4y ago> my Latin teacher told me that America was declining and falling just like Rome, and that was back in 1995 > No, America is not collapsing A collapse is different than a protracted decline and fall. Historians could make a lot of similar points about Rome still being a successful superpower in the 3rd, 4th or even 5th century AD.
- incomingpain 4y agoAn opinion piece written by a rabbit? https://bigthink.com/the-present/5-reasons-why-america-will-not-fall-like-the-roman-empire/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/5-reasons-why-america-will-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/america-falling-apart.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/america-falling-a... https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/four-signs-america-is-a-failing-state-warning-about-the-future-of-the-us/news-story/5474ea6eba60bd42b97704b3efb79d69 https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/four-s... The contemporary assertion that america is collapsing is well established by the entire political spectrum as well as objective observers internationally. >I realize that to a large extent, “doomerism”, as the kids call it, is just self-expression. We just went through a massive pandemic that killed a million of us, we had an era of riots and coup attempts and random acts of terrorism, crime is high, inflation is eating away at people’s paychecks and savings, and there are rumblings of major war from overseas. That is the collapse... you just proved it's happening. There has been 2 years of racial unrest and so far minor insurrections. >Nor do I want to deny that the country faces real risks. If WW3 starts, that’ll be a calamity. We could also have a civil war in 2024-5 over a disputed presidential election result. It’s even possible that inflation could spiral out of control and turn us into Venezuela. Midterms are this year and we are going into another summer of racial unrest. It's inevitable another black person is killed by police brutality who doesnt get punished because of immunity. If the food shortages happen you're going to have riots which are hungry. BLM is only popular during elections and midterms are this year. >The economy is not collapsing Your first graph shows no peak since 2000? How terrible. Prime age working and there hasnt been a peak since 2000? >Once we control for the Baby Boomer retirement by looking only at the “prime age” population between 25 and 54, Because why? What does the boomer graph look like? Really bad eh? I know you looked and chose not to include. Wage growth tracker also peaked around 2000. 2 decades of failure? >Yes, we had some huge protests and riots in 2020. Yes, crime is way up. We even had a (shambolic, ridiculous, halfhearted) coup attempt. Yes, there’s even a slight danger that a disputed 2024 election could lead to civil war. I do not deny any of these things. Is this post meant to be sarcastic and it doesn't read like it? I assume your 'coup' attempt was Jan 6... the weaponless trespassing for a couple hours? Not a very good coup is it. Or are you referring the multiple insurrection autonomous zones that existed for days to weeks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest This roe vs wade thing is because of #metoo. It's only vaguely part of the collapse. Men vs women(and however incels fit in) isn't majorly part of the polarization and collapse.