12 ms·

Impending Collapse: Our System Is on the Cusp of Failure

38 points by myshpa 3y ago

jollyllama 3y ago
>there are currently 28 vacant housing for every homeless person in America. Ok, now factor in all the millenials and gen z living at home while working. Or other under-housed invididuals.
- belval 3y ago
  Honestly those calculations are always misleading in nature. There are 28 vacant units per homeless person in America, where are those 28 units, in what state are they? If housing in some abandoned part of Detroit was interesting then homeless people would not be pooling in Los Angeles. It reminds me of the yearly "Jeff Bezos made 4 billions today" because Amazon had a good day or the (very Canadian) "Average Canadian is 100k in debt" (because they factor in mortgages). It's sensationalistic journalism that completely avoid any type of critical thinking because it's much easier to ignore all the rational explanations in the pursuit of clicks.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    IIRC these numbers also include things like months that a unit sits empty while trying to rent it out.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    Those numbers always include houses vacant for any reason. Includes houses for sale, that need to be tourable, and houses that sold, that about to be occupied by new owners. Same applies for houses for rent.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  And factor in how long it takes for someone to move out, the place to go on the market and the next person to move in. My city currently has about 5% vacancy rate. That means a given unit on average is empty about a month every two years. That alone can be reasonably eaten up just by people moving. This leaves very little room for choosing where to live and in what type of unit. We really need to be closer to 10%
- sloreti 3y ago
  Whenever someone cites the fact that there are millions of vacant homes across the US as evidence of either oversupply or an inequitable distribution, they're almost always misunderstanding that real estate has a "natural vacancy rate" of ~6%. With real estate, there is inherently time in which it lays empty between tenants moving in and out or being sold. When a place like California has over a million of vacant homes, that still makes for a vacancy rate below the "natural vacancy rate"! The other big category of vacant housing is in places that are depopulating due to lack of jobs. We could be giving decaying homes in the Rust Belt, but they'd be more of a liability to the new owner than anything else.
  - gremlinsinc 3y ago
    are short term rentals part of that 6 percent? Because I'm sure it's way more than that if you calculated homes vacant that do not have a permanent resident with at least a 6 to 12 month lease.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  This is a stupid metric trying to compare 2 unrelated things. An increase could mean a better housing supply or a drop in homelessness. A decrease could mean more homeless people or less rental turnover. It would be infinity with no homeless problem. Which way am I supposed to want this number to go?
paulpauper 3y ago
Oh man, another one of these "America is going to collapse or has collapsed" articles. The evidence shows the opposite: by almost every metric, the US is in a better position and stronger compared to the rest of the world, but also stronger on an absolute basis too such as real GDP, corporate profits, stock market gains, low unemployment rate, tech/innovation (such as electric cars, AI, etc.), etc. Even in regard to inflation or unrest, things are still worse elsewhere, such as protests in France, or even higher inflation in Germany, the UK, and Turkey. if America does collapse, it will only be after the rest of the world or conditional on the rest of the world collapsing too and likely first. Anyone who has strong conviction otherwise of collapse can put up money right now and bet on such as outcome, such as with put options on the S&P 500 , or puts on the dollar , or shorting the S&P 500 and going 'long' foreign markets. Many have, and it put it bluntly, has ended badly.
- myshpa 3y ago
  The article is not solely about the US.
  - distortionfield 3y ago
    But the comparison is clearly the main case in their argument.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  If America does collapse, it will likely be for political reasons. Maybe the people in power will let it crash and burn for some misguided principle, or they will do something immensely stupid with unforeseen consequences. American economy is strong, and the society is robust enough, but there are serious risks due to the combination of dysfunctional politics and a high degree of centralization.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > and the society is robust enough, but there are serious risks due to the combination of dysfunctional politics Aren't America's dysfunctional politics evidence against the idea that "[American] society is robust enough"? Politics and society are not distinct entities in a democracy.
fallingknife 3y ago
The amount of mental gymnastics it takes to compare the US in 2023 to Rome post sacking in 410 AD is staggering. Stop reading when you see a mention of the "arc of history" is a generally good rule that I should have followed here.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  the virality of this article and others, as well as careers and books built off it, suggests a large market and captive audience for such 'doom porn' even if factually dubious.
aedocw 3y ago
For a related but MUCH deeper dive into this subject, check out the book "The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" by Peter Zeihan.
- justrealist 3y ago
  Ehhhhhhhh. He has some interesting thoughts, and it's worth exploring his end of the spectrum but... I'd read in the same way you'd read "What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War". It's a linear projection of the future ignoring basically all technological advances, market responses, or ability to work around logistical barriers. The world is just not that dramatic, and people mostly muddle through. (yes, I read the book).
  - gpapilion 3y ago
    This. I think he under estimates the arrival of solutions based on economic pressure. He sights platinum as an example of extremely limited resources. I think if supplies are cut off new solutions will be found, and new mines. It’s just the best current mines are priced low enough further exploration isn’t sensible. Same with silicon production. Oil production in the us is a good example of this. We slowef producing oil because costs were too high, and exploration wasn’t worthwhile. When costs caught up, new techniques were developed, and new fields were discovered.
chanakya 3y ago
There are several fundamental differences between a democracy in a nation and one at a workplace: - Someone owns the workplace. No citizen owns the nation. - If you don't like a workplace, you can switch to another, or start your own. You mostly can't do that with a nation. - There's nothing preventing people from starting workplaces with a "democratic model" (and there are a few around). They just don't seem to work very well.
- oofdoof 3y ago
  The “nation” is a fairly new concept and what was there before did have owners. The future he talks about might be one where workplaces don’t have an owner either.
  - RichEO 3y ago
    Ironically it was once much easier to change nations as well. Or, under some limited circumstances to even start your own. Hard borders are a relatively new thing taking into account the breadth of human history.
merpnderp 3y ago
Imagine thinking the world is going to collapse the same year we get extremely useful AI, Starship will likely circle the Earth, LK-99, huge leap in fusion global wind and solar grow faster than ever, incredibly low unemployment, massive GDP growth, plus a major prospect for curing cancer. Has the future ever looked this bright?
- vidanay 3y ago
  The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  extremely useful AI unless you believe the AI will destroy us
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    Depending on point of view, that may qualify as useful.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Technological progress is amazing, yes. But it comes at the cost of destruction of the natural environment that supports us. Some of that is unavoidable in order to have progress. Much of it is just wasteful, stupid practices driven by selfishness & pursuit of short-term profit. I hope humanity can cut that waste & move towards long-term thinking. Where personal interests are more or less inseparable from the interests of society as a whole. Improve society, the natural environment, and you (& all your loved ones) profit.
- johnea 3y ago
  Yea, it looks pretty bright for the shareholders of those technologies. but it's sucking for vast majority of the population. That's what the article is about. You did see the graph right? The disconnect between wages and productivity growth in 1972?
- Eji1700 3y ago
  Well to throw it out there, I disagree with the article author's pessimism and most of your beliefs as well? I think AI is going to be a very very mixed bag and mostly encourage even more obnoxious behaviors/practices as it's adopted, I think starship is heavily overblown, LK-99 is interesting but looking to not be a superconductor, and while we've had leaps in fusion we're still 10-50 years from a a reactor.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
The strongest argument is buried towards the end of the article and even then its not touched on directly. Due to compound interest, our financial system requires exponential growth. Exponential growth isnt possible in a finite world. Thats the fundamental contradiction woven into the fabric of our society. Perfectly effective capitalists may be able to stave off government intervention till they own everything but at that point growth will basically cease.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  How finite is the world? Where will we stop making efficiency gains? Is colonizing the solar system impossible? Great breakthrough sound impossible till we make them. Yet, we have antibiotics, eradicated polio, invented the phone, the airplane and the internet and maybe soon the superconductor.
- sublinear 3y ago
  > Exponential growth isnt possible in a finite world. That the world and its resources are finite is irrelevant. You probably mean "finite economy". Resources and work done upon them may be the basis of cost, but the economy is not so tightly coupled to resources because cost is not equal to price. Price is whatever the market accepts. If we have a finite economy you're not wrong about this, but you're omitting a few corollaries. 1) A finite economy implies a zero-sum game. 2) "Exponential growth" is only exponential for a window of time. Nothing lasts forever. 3) Bankruptcy exists. It's the safety valve that releases the pressure of compound interest. So, for there to be exponential winners there must also be one or more losers. This allows for the growth you're skeptical of. You see this all the time on the stock market. "Growth" is most often money being moved around. Assume the trivial case where there's one "loser" and one "winner". If the loser is worth a lot more, a tiny drop in its value can be a massive win for the winner. If it keeps accelerating for a while it will look like "exponential growth" for the winner. As for bankruptcy, that loss is someone's gain. The value can be recovered and growth at any rate can still occur. Just because the loser couldn't keep up with their debt doesn't mean their assets aren't enough to pay it back plus interest with different people driving. Anyway, the total value of the world economy is not really finite. It doesn't go up just because of inflation, but also from new value being added. New value can be due to efficiency gains on work, not just the discovery of new resources. The rate at which new value is created is unpredictable though. Whew ok final nail here: before modern capitalism, economic systems of the past definitely had these same properties and successfully operated in scarce environments before the industrial revolution. Shuffling money around to keep things afloat is not a new idea. It might be the oldest idea we've got and all modern economic systems have this in common. What you quoted from the article is not a strong argument against capitalism. It's an argument for anarchy.
megaman821 3y ago
These type articles are like the Marxist version of the Christian Rapture. I expect the same things to be written about the impending collapse of capitalism a thousand years from now.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism. It's only accelerating and IMO it is impossible to stop. And we shouldn't try.
booleandilemma 3y ago
Looks like he's been blogging about America's collapse for about two years now.
throwawayjoy 3y ago
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davewritescode 3y ago
I think acknowledging that the US has fundamental issues that need to be address is a completely fair statement. What nobody can ever seem to answer is, where does the threat to US hegemony come from? China is fundamentally unstable and while it will absolutely be the dominant power in that part of the world, it's unclear whether or not China's growth is sustainable in the long term and nothing good ever comes from leaders who stay in power for decades. The US still has one fundamental superpower that the doomsday economists always fail to account for. The US can take immigrants from nearly anywhere in the world and within a generation, their children will become 100% culturally American. There's no other country in the world that brings people into our culture the way Americans do. Is it perfect? Absolutely not.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  We have seen the enemy and it is us. Hyper partisanship and the culture war are tearing the very fabric of America apart.
  - locopati 3y ago
    If only people would stop voting for the extremist right wing party responsible for both of those things.
    - lockhouse 3y ago
      There is plenty of hyper partisan vitriol and culture war that comes from the extremist left as well. You just might not see it because you agree with their positions on the issues. For example, there are some on the left that very seriously want to label all Republican voters as far-right extremists, which is itself a very extreme position to take.
      - Eji1700 3y ago
        It also ignores the reality that there's some level of conservative who's not really represented right now. I've known people who straight up left the party after voting red their entire lives because of Trump. They, sincerely, believe in smaller government and less spending, both things the party has totally abandoned even ignoring Trumps horrific actions. They're, for the most part, liberal in other aspects to varying degrees (abortion, drugs, whatever. Lots of "I may not like all of it but if that's the way it is i'll live with it"), but are tired of being told they're equivalent to the KKK because they're not sure how they feel about gender pronouns. Focusing on questions that'll never have clear answers has been one of the best things to split apart power for reasonable and critical change. The little discussion that occurs seems to be around nebulous goals rather than concrete examples like housing, food, science.
Fatty123 3y ago
> 2008 was the beginning of the end.... Bitcoin was created in response to the reasons cited in this article.
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nemo44x 3y ago
This is such a poorly thought out essay I'm surprised to see it here. No citations to previous historians,m thinkers, philosophers, etc. until we get to Marx. And then this beauty: > The less employers pay out in wages, the fewer consumers there will be for their products. This fundamental contradiction means there is a ticking countdown clock built into the capitalist system of production. Yeah, because the people who lose their jobs to technology just sit there and never recover? No, luddite, new work is discovered. Technology boosts productivity. > Top tax brackets were taxed at 95% during this period, which many Americans identify as a Golden Age. WW2 had to be paid for. Let's avoid that again. There was a long period when we had little to no Federal income tax. > The monetization of this debt, euphemistically referred to as “Quantitative Easing”, has been going on ever since No it has stopped. I love that the premise of this essay is in 100BC Rome had wealth inequality and it collapsed 500 years later. Yeah, imminent. > The passage of old systems into the dustbin of history is a normal part of the millennia-long trend of gradual improvement that characterizes the human story. It’s inevitable. LOL. I'm happy I didn't have a sip of tea in my mouth as it would be all over my screen right now. > The central idea behind this System Failure newsletter is that we could have the kind of revolution were there is dancing in the streets and the cafes are open all night. Yeah, so romantic. You mean the kind where millions of people suffer. This essay, I can't believe it, was written but a human adult. This would be C level work in a Sophomore high school class. This person really needs to read a lot more philosophy and history and maybe layoff the Marx as clairvoyant thing. Especially when his main thing was shown empirically to be completely wrong.
- deleted 3y ago
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- paulpauper 3y ago
  "do you want to be popular or do you want to be right" because these are not always mutually inclusive.
neilk 3y ago
I wanted to know if the author has any credentials that might support an otherwise unsourced thesis about civilization. https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanknopp https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanknopp Accountant, developer for a few years, now bills himself as a “staff writer” on his own Substack. I browsed the titles of his Substack. At one point he offhandedly asserts that Gloria Steinem was a CIA spook who had a role in undoing the New Deal. He asserts that the thesis of his blog is that we have become entrapped in debt by suppressing the truth of hallucinogens. To support his thesis he touches on everything from “the eternal feminine” to early Christianity to the Knights Templar to Karl Marx. ChatGPT, please write something with the cultural theorizing of Jordan Peterson, the hallucinogen/conspiracy interests of Joe Rogan, and the debt/collapsarian virality of Zero Hedge.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
The US has to fail or come close to it so that things can be reformed. The ignorant right refuse to be educated and keep making decisions based on ignorance, fear and nonsense, decisions that can't be sustained and are at odds with the direction most of the country needs to go. Something has to happen since friction keeps building, it has to erupt at some point.
- porkbeer 3y ago
  Thats a mighty big strawman you got there. It will get better once you stop dehumanizing people for their percieved political views.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    lol. It's not a strawman at all, and if you think it is please illustrate how. And calling out ignorance as ignorance isn't dehumanizing anyone.
Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
The "American Empire" ended with the Philippines' independence in 1946. It's easy to proclaim the demise of something that never actualy existed. The claim is always that America had this vast empire by using its power to influence the word economy and other countries decisions. But that isn't an empire. The evidence is that when these countries become more developed the "empire" immediately "collapses." So was that an empire? Certainly not a classical case of an empire. It seems like these people want there to have been an American Empire just so that they can say it collapsed. On Rome, the issue of Rome wasn't that Romans were poor, far from it. The source of the Roman Emperor's power was by feeding Egyption wheat to the Romans.[0] If the author is looking for a cause to the fall of Rome, one explaination is that the people chose to exchange thier freedom for government subsidized food. They pretended that the Princeps ("first among the equals") had thier intrests in mind, while the system slowly eroded an collapsed over the course of 500 years. Over that time, the traditional Roman ethic of responsibilty, the one that made them reject Monarchy, was replaced by neglect and indifference. This said, boiling down the fall of the Roman Empire to one dimension is foolish anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae
huksley 3y ago
While the topic is hot and resonates, that Wikileaks reference was very controversial.
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FpUser 3y ago
>"This in a city of 5 million." Seriously? Rome had that many people? Cut the bull
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  From what I can find, Rome (the city) ca. 100 AD had a population around 1 million; 5 million seems about right if you swap BC in for AD and the whole area ruled from Rome (60-75 million by 100 AD) in place of the city of proper.
johnea 3y ago
Some great quotes from the article: ...as Wikileaks revealed, in 2008 the incoming Obama administration submitted his cabinet positions to Citigroup for approval. ...according to the United Way, there are currently 28 vacant housing for every homeless person in America.
- sgammon 3y ago
  > One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet. That sentence isn't exactly warranted from the evidence. Citigroup submitted recommendations that happened to line up with reality, and they were sent to the Obama campaign, not the other way around.
  - johnea 3y ago
    What about the fact that the Obama cabinet went on to implement the exact billionaire bailout architected by the Bush administration? In fact, with the Bush arcitect of the plan as the Obama secretary of treasury...
RichEO 3y ago
I have my general reservations about this piece, but one thing the author does raise that isn’t commonly spoken about (perhaps because it’s taken for granted) is how credit affects the housing market. Low interest rates correlate pretty directly with housing market booms.
inawarminister 3y ago
>That general improvement, over the long haul, in the material conditions of people lends an arc to the human story. History is not cyclical, like the seasons of the year. Rather, history is the story of a fundamental inversion in progress. We are slowly graduating from top-down systems of political control to bottom-up systems. Like an iceberg rolling over in the open oceans, human society has been transiting from despotism toward democracy over the millennia. Very much disagree. He talked about Roman Empire's (and late Republic) massive inequality, but he forgot about Athens, where Western notions of democracy were born and strangled by kings and republics (then Emperors). We have had peasants republics in Dark Age Europe (Frisia, San Marino, even Venezia and Genoa and a dozen elective city-states). In Asia, my tribe has had majestic maharajas that spun the entire region, who then retreated to their mountain refuges to rule as sacral kings, only to lose power to bottoms-up tribal and village councils that revolted into theocracy only to be subsumed into the colonial state. Politics is downstream of culture and economics, not the cause of the latter.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
This person has some serious misunderstandings about the world. That theres an inevitable progress happening organcially, that democracy gives people the ability to fold reality and make anything true, that money is a circle... It's all overarticulated communism and malthusianism. The truth is, our current governing system is collapsing, but not due to some hidden hand that guides us towards communism in the long run. It is due to something much more interesting and dynamic, the fact that people think they can organize chaotic systems without entropy occurring somewhere, basically the exact opposite of what the author thinks is happening, and the future looming over the horizon has much more potential for beauty than their one dimensional imagination can envision.

38 points by myshpa 3y ago

>there are currently 28 vacant housing for every homeless person in America. Ok, now factor in all the millenials and gen z living at home while working. Or other under-housed invididuals.

belval 3y ago
Honestly those calculations are always misleading in nature. There are 28 vacant units per homeless person in America, where are those 28 units, in what state are they? If housing in some abandoned part of Detroit was interesting then homeless people would not be pooling in Los Angeles. It reminds me of the yearly "Jeff Bezos made 4 billions today" because Amazon had a good day or the (very Canadian) "Average Canadian is 100k in debt" (because they factor in mortgages). It's sensationalistic journalism that completely avoid any type of critical thinking because it's much easier to ignore all the rational explanations in the pursuit of clicks.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  IIRC these numbers also include things like months that a unit sits empty while trying to rent it out.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Those numbers always include houses vacant for any reason. Includes houses for sale, that need to be tourable, and houses that sold, that about to be occupied by new owners. Same applies for houses for rent.
ajmurmann 3y ago
And factor in how long it takes for someone to move out, the place to go on the market and the next person to move in. My city currently has about 5% vacancy rate. That means a given unit on average is empty about a month every two years. That alone can be reasonably eaten up just by people moving. This leaves very little room for choosing where to live and in what type of unit. We really need to be closer to 10%
sloreti 3y ago
Whenever someone cites the fact that there are millions of vacant homes across the US as evidence of either oversupply or an inequitable distribution, they're almost always misunderstanding that real estate has a "natural vacancy rate" of ~6%. With real estate, there is inherently time in which it lays empty between tenants moving in and out or being sold. When a place like California has over a million of vacant homes, that still makes for a vacancy rate below the "natural vacancy rate"! The other big category of vacant housing is in places that are depopulating due to lack of jobs. We could be giving decaying homes in the Rust Belt, but they'd be more of a liability to the new owner than anything else.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  are short term rentals part of that 6 percent? Because I'm sure it's way more than that if you calculated homes vacant that do not have a permanent resident with at least a 6 to 12 month lease.
fallingknife 3y ago
This is a stupid metric trying to compare 2 unrelated things. An increase could mean a better housing supply or a drop in homelessness. A decrease could mean more homeless people or less rental turnover. It would be infinity with no homeless problem. Which way am I supposed to want this number to go?

paulpauper 3y ago

Oh man, another one of these "America is going to collapse or has collapsed" articles. The evidence shows the opposite: by almost every metric, the US is in a better position and stronger compared to the rest of the world, but also stronger on an absolute basis too such as real GDP, corporate profits, stock market gains, low unemployment rate, tech/innovation (such as electric cars, AI, etc.), etc. Even in regard to inflation or unrest, things are still worse elsewhere, such as protests in France, or even higher inflation in Germany, the UK, and Turkey. if America does collapse, it will only be after the rest of the world or conditional on the rest of the world collapsing too and likely first. Anyone who has strong conviction otherwise of collapse can put up money right now and bet on such as outcome, such as with put options on the S&P 500 , or puts on the dollar , or shorting the S&P 500 and going 'long' foreign markets. Many have, and it put it bluntly, has ended badly.

myshpa 3y ago
The article is not solely about the US.
- distortionfield 3y ago
  But the comparison is clearly the main case in their argument.
jltsiren 3y ago
If America does collapse, it will likely be for political reasons. Maybe the people in power will let it crash and burn for some misguided principle, or they will do something immensely stupid with unforeseen consequences. American economy is strong, and the society is robust enough, but there are serious risks due to the combination of dysfunctional politics and a high degree of centralization.
- tivert 3y ago
  > and the society is robust enough, but there are serious risks due to the combination of dysfunctional politics Aren't America's dysfunctional politics evidence against the idea that "[American] society is robust enough"? Politics and society are not distinct entities in a democracy.

fallingknife 3y ago

The amount of mental gymnastics it takes to compare the US in 2023 to Rome post sacking in 410 AD is staggering. Stop reading when you see a mention of the "arc of history" is a generally good rule that I should have followed here.

paulpauper 3y ago
the virality of this article and others, as well as careers and books built off it, suggests a large market and captive audience for such 'doom porn' even if factually dubious.

aedocw 3y ago

For a related but MUCH deeper dive into this subject, check out the book "The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" by Peter Zeihan.

justrealist 3y ago
Ehhhhhhhh. He has some interesting thoughts, and it's worth exploring his end of the spectrum but... I'd read in the same way you'd read "What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War". It's a linear projection of the future ignoring basically all technological advances, market responses, or ability to work around logistical barriers. The world is just not that dramatic, and people mostly muddle through. (yes, I read the book).
- gpapilion 3y ago
  This. I think he under estimates the arrival of solutions based on economic pressure. He sights platinum as an example of extremely limited resources. I think if supplies are cut off new solutions will be found, and new mines. It’s just the best current mines are priced low enough further exploration isn’t sensible. Same with silicon production. Oil production in the us is a good example of this. We slowef producing oil because costs were too high, and exploration wasn’t worthwhile. When costs caught up, new techniques were developed, and new fields were discovered.

chanakya 3y ago

There are several fundamental differences between a democracy in a nation and one at a workplace: - Someone owns the workplace. No citizen owns the nation. - If you don't like a workplace, you can switch to another, or start your own. You mostly can't do that with a nation. - There's nothing preventing people from starting workplaces with a "democratic model" (and there are a few around). They just don't seem to work very well.

oofdoof 3y ago
The “nation” is a fairly new concept and what was there before did have owners. The future he talks about might be one where workplaces don’t have an owner either.
- RichEO 3y ago
  Ironically it was once much easier to change nations as well. Or, under some limited circumstances to even start your own. Hard borders are a relatively new thing taking into account the breadth of human history.

merpnderp 3y ago

Imagine thinking the world is going to collapse the same year we get extremely useful AI, Starship will likely circle the Earth, LK-99, huge leap in fusion global wind and solar grow faster than ever, incredibly low unemployment, massive GDP growth, plus a major prospect for curing cancer. Has the future ever looked this bright?

vidanay 3y ago
The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.
paulpauper 3y ago
extremely useful AI unless you believe the AI will destroy us
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Depending on point of view, that may qualify as useful.
RetroTechie 3y ago
Technological progress is amazing, yes. But it comes at the cost of destruction of the natural environment that supports us. Some of that is unavoidable in order to have progress. Much of it is just wasteful, stupid practices driven by selfishness & pursuit of short-term profit. I hope humanity can cut that waste & move towards long-term thinking. Where personal interests are more or less inseparable from the interests of society as a whole. Improve society, the natural environment, and you (& all your loved ones) profit.
johnea 3y ago
Yea, it looks pretty bright for the shareholders of those technologies. but it's sucking for vast majority of the population. That's what the article is about. You did see the graph right? The disconnect between wages and productivity growth in 1972?
Eji1700 3y ago
Well to throw it out there, I disagree with the article author's pessimism and most of your beliefs as well? I think AI is going to be a very very mixed bag and mostly encourage even more obnoxious behaviors/practices as it's adopted, I think starship is heavily overblown, LK-99 is interesting but looking to not be a superconductor, and while we've had leaps in fusion we're still 10-50 years from a a reactor.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

The strongest argument is buried towards the end of the article and even then its not touched on directly. Due to compound interest, our financial system requires exponential growth. Exponential growth isnt possible in a finite world. Thats the fundamental contradiction woven into the fabric of our society. Perfectly effective capitalists may be able to stave off government intervention till they own everything but at that point growth will basically cease.

ajmurmann 3y ago
How finite is the world? Where will we stop making efficiency gains? Is colonizing the solar system impossible? Great breakthrough sound impossible till we make them. Yet, we have antibiotics, eradicated polio, invented the phone, the airplane and the internet and maybe soon the superconductor.
sublinear 3y ago
> Exponential growth isnt possible in a finite world. That the world and its resources are finite is irrelevant. You probably mean "finite economy". Resources and work done upon them may be the basis of cost, but the economy is not so tightly coupled to resources because cost is not equal to price. Price is whatever the market accepts. If we have a finite economy you're not wrong about this, but you're omitting a few corollaries. 1) A finite economy implies a zero-sum game. 2) "Exponential growth" is only exponential for a window of time. Nothing lasts forever. 3) Bankruptcy exists. It's the safety valve that releases the pressure of compound interest. So, for there to be exponential winners there must also be one or more losers. This allows for the growth you're skeptical of. You see this all the time on the stock market. "Growth" is most often money being moved around. Assume the trivial case where there's one "loser" and one "winner". If the loser is worth a lot more, a tiny drop in its value can be a massive win for the winner. If it keeps accelerating for a while it will look like "exponential growth" for the winner. As for bankruptcy, that loss is someone's gain. The value can be recovered and growth at any rate can still occur. Just because the loser couldn't keep up with their debt doesn't mean their assets aren't enough to pay it back plus interest with different people driving. Anyway, the total value of the world economy is not really finite. It doesn't go up just because of inflation, but also from new value being added. New value can be due to efficiency gains on work, not just the discovery of new resources. The rate at which new value is created is unpredictable though. Whew ok final nail here: before modern capitalism, economic systems of the past definitely had these same properties and successfully operated in scarce environments before the industrial revolution. Shuffling money around to keep things afloat is not a new idea. It might be the oldest idea we've got and all modern economic systems have this in common. What you quoted from the article is not a strong argument against capitalism. It's an argument for anarchy.

megaman821 3y ago

These type articles are like the Marxist version of the Christian Rapture. I expect the same things to be written about the impending collapse of capitalism a thousand years from now.

nemo44x 3y ago
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism. It's only accelerating and IMO it is impossible to stop. And we shouldn't try.

booleandilemma 3y ago

Looks like he's been blogging about America's collapse for about two years now.

throwawayjoy 3y ago

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davewritescode 3y ago

I think acknowledging that the US has fundamental issues that need to be address is a completely fair statement. What nobody can ever seem to answer is, where does the threat to US hegemony come from? China is fundamentally unstable and while it will absolutely be the dominant power in that part of the world, it's unclear whether or not China's growth is sustainable in the long term and nothing good ever comes from leaders who stay in power for decades. The US still has one fundamental superpower that the doomsday economists always fail to account for. The US can take immigrants from nearly anywhere in the world and within a generation, their children will become 100% culturally American. There's no other country in the world that brings people into our culture the way Americans do. Is it perfect? Absolutely not.

lockhouse 3y ago
We have seen the enemy and it is us. Hyper partisanship and the culture war are tearing the very fabric of America apart.
- locopati 3y ago
  If only people would stop voting for the extremist right wing party responsible for both of those things.
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    There is plenty of hyper partisan vitriol and culture war that comes from the extremist left as well. You just might not see it because you agree with their positions on the issues. For example, there are some on the left that very seriously want to label all Republican voters as far-right extremists, which is itself a very extreme position to take.
    - Eji1700 3y ago
      It also ignores the reality that there's some level of conservative who's not really represented right now. I've known people who straight up left the party after voting red their entire lives because of Trump. They, sincerely, believe in smaller government and less spending, both things the party has totally abandoned even ignoring Trumps horrific actions. They're, for the most part, liberal in other aspects to varying degrees (abortion, drugs, whatever. Lots of "I may not like all of it but if that's the way it is i'll live with it"), but are tired of being told they're equivalent to the KKK because they're not sure how they feel about gender pronouns. Focusing on questions that'll never have clear answers has been one of the best things to split apart power for reasonable and critical change. The little discussion that occurs seems to be around nebulous goals rather than concrete examples like housing, food, science.

Fatty123 3y ago

> 2008 was the beginning of the end.... Bitcoin was created in response to the reasons cited in this article.

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nemo44x 3y ago

This is such a poorly thought out essay I'm surprised to see it here. No citations to previous historians,m thinkers, philosophers, etc. until we get to Marx. And then this beauty: > The less employers pay out in wages, the fewer consumers there will be for their products. This fundamental contradiction means there is a ticking countdown clock built into the capitalist system of production. Yeah, because the people who lose their jobs to technology just sit there and never recover? No, luddite, new work is discovered. Technology boosts productivity. > Top tax brackets were taxed at 95% during this period, which many Americans identify as a Golden Age. WW2 had to be paid for. Let's avoid that again. There was a long period when we had little to no Federal income tax. > The monetization of this debt, euphemistically referred to as “Quantitative Easing”, has been going on ever since No it has stopped. I love that the premise of this essay is in 100BC Rome had wealth inequality and it collapsed 500 years later. Yeah, imminent. > The passage of old systems into the dustbin of history is a normal part of the millennia-long trend of gradual improvement that characterizes the human story. It’s inevitable. LOL. I'm happy I didn't have a sip of tea in my mouth as it would be all over my screen right now. > The central idea behind this System Failure newsletter is that we could have the kind of revolution were there is dancing in the streets and the cafes are open all night. Yeah, so romantic. You mean the kind where millions of people suffer. This essay, I can't believe it, was written but a human adult. This would be C level work in a Sophomore high school class. This person really needs to read a lot more philosophy and history and maybe layoff the Marx as clairvoyant thing. Especially when his main thing was shown empirically to be completely wrong.

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paulpauper 3y ago
"do you want to be popular or do you want to be right" because these are not always mutually inclusive.

neilk 3y ago

I wanted to know if the author has any credentials that might support an otherwise unsourced thesis about civilization. https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanknopp https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanknopp Accountant, developer for a few years, now bills himself as a “staff writer” on his own Substack. I browsed the titles of his Substack. At one point he offhandedly asserts that Gloria Steinem was a CIA spook who had a role in undoing the New Deal. He asserts that the thesis of his blog is that we have become entrapped in debt by suppressing the truth of hallucinogens. To support his thesis he touches on everything from “the eternal feminine” to early Christianity to the Knights Templar to Karl Marx. ChatGPT, please write something with the cultural theorizing of Jordan Peterson, the hallucinogen/conspiracy interests of Joe Rogan, and the debt/collapsarian virality of Zero Hedge.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

The US has to fail or come close to it so that things can be reformed. The ignorant right refuse to be educated and keep making decisions based on ignorance, fear and nonsense, decisions that can't be sustained and are at odds with the direction most of the country needs to go. Something has to happen since friction keeps building, it has to erupt at some point.

porkbeer 3y ago
Thats a mighty big strawman you got there. It will get better once you stop dehumanizing people for their percieved political views.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  lol. It's not a strawman at all, and if you think it is please illustrate how. And calling out ignorance as ignorance isn't dehumanizing anyone.

Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago

The "American Empire" ended with the Philippines' independence in 1946. It's easy to proclaim the demise of something that never actualy existed. The claim is always that America had this vast empire by using its power to influence the word economy and other countries decisions. But that isn't an empire. The evidence is that when these countries become more developed the "empire" immediately "collapses." So was that an empire? Certainly not a classical case of an empire. It seems like these people want there to have been an American Empire just so that they can say it collapsed. On Rome, the issue of Rome wasn't that Romans were poor, far from it. The source of the Roman Emperor's power was by feeding Egyption wheat to the Romans.[0] If the author is looking for a cause to the fall of Rome, one explaination is that the people chose to exchange thier freedom for government subsidized food. They pretended that the Princeps ("first among the equals") had thier intrests in mind, while the system slowly eroded an collapsed over the course of 500 years. Over that time, the traditional Roman ethic of responsibilty, the one that made them reject Monarchy, was replaced by neglect and indifference. This said, boiling down the fall of the Roman Empire to one dimension is foolish anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

huksley 3y ago

While the topic is hot and resonates, that Wikileaks reference was very controversial.

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FpUser 3y ago

>"This in a city of 5 million." Seriously? Rome had that many people? Cut the bull

dragonwriter 3y ago
From what I can find, Rome (the city) ca. 100 AD had a population around 1 million; 5 million seems about right if you swap BC in for AD and the whole area ruled from Rome (60-75 million by 100 AD) in place of the city of proper.

johnea 3y ago

Some great quotes from the article: ...as Wikileaks revealed, in 2008 the incoming Obama administration submitted his cabinet positions to Citigroup for approval. ...according to the United Way, there are currently 28 vacant housing for every homeless person in America.

sgammon 3y ago
> One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet. That sentence isn't exactly warranted from the evidence. Citigroup submitted recommendations that happened to line up with reality, and they were sent to the Obama campaign, not the other way around.
- johnea 3y ago
  What about the fact that the Obama cabinet went on to implement the exact billionaire bailout architected by the Bush administration? In fact, with the Bush arcitect of the plan as the Obama secretary of treasury...

RichEO 3y ago

I have my general reservations about this piece, but one thing the author does raise that isn’t commonly spoken about (perhaps because it’s taken for granted) is how credit affects the housing market. Low interest rates correlate pretty directly with housing market booms.

inawarminister 3y ago

>That general improvement, over the long haul, in the material conditions of people lends an arc to the human story. History is not cyclical, like the seasons of the year. Rather, history is the story of a fundamental inversion in progress. We are slowly graduating from top-down systems of political control to bottom-up systems. Like an iceberg rolling over in the open oceans, human society has been transiting from despotism toward democracy over the millennia. Very much disagree. He talked about Roman Empire's (and late Republic) massive inequality, but he forgot about Athens, where Western notions of democracy were born and strangled by kings and republics (then Emperors). We have had peasants republics in Dark Age Europe (Frisia, San Marino, even Venezia and Genoa and a dozen elective city-states). In Asia, my tribe has had majestic maharajas that spun the entire region, who then retreated to their mountain refuges to rule as sacral kings, only to lose power to bottoms-up tribal and village councils that revolted into theocracy only to be subsumed into the colonial state. Politics is downstream of culture and economics, not the cause of the latter.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

This person has some serious misunderstandings about the world. That theres an inevitable progress happening organcially, that democracy gives people the ability to fold reality and make anything true, that money is a circle... It's all overarticulated communism and malthusianism. The truth is, our current governing system is collapsing, but not due to some hidden hand that guides us towards communism in the long run. It is due to something much more interesting and dynamic, the fact that people think they can organize chaotic systems without entropy occurring somewhere, basically the exact opposite of what the author thinks is happening, and the future looming over the horizon has much more potential for beauty than their one dimensional imagination can envision.