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The entire world has too much riding on the US not collapsing. I think it’s a 5% chance over the next 100 years.
by paulcole 2y ago
The entire world has too much riding on the US not collapsing.
I think it’s a 5% chance over the next 100 years.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago5 over 100 feels high to me but not order-of-magnitude off. I'm at maybe a 2 myself. I agree that's an entirely unreasonable amount of risk for everyone to just be waving off though.
- paulcole 2y agoI think 5 in 100 is totally reasonable to wave off. I’m not giving it a second thought personally. If it happens it will be so bad that I’ll almost certainly die as a result (due to chronic illness) so I should just keep on living as-is and not worry about it.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoAn, to be precise I really meant everyone, like including national banks and giant corporations and stuff. Ordinary folk like you and me can almost certainly ignore it, it's just weird I rarely hear people talk about how to price this kind of thing in for very long term assets.
- fsckboy 2y agothe "very long term" property of assets has very little present value with any reasonable discount rate, and fewer experienced people to actually care about it.
- financypants 2y agoI think any government has q 2% chance of collapse at any moment
- zmgsabst 2y ago5% over 100 years is historically incredibly low. On average, governments last 250 years — which means we have a 0.4% chance per year. Using that figure, 100 years has a 33% chance of collapse — as our background. Or roughly 4% per decade. People wave off that risk because there’s not a lot that can be done: we don’t know how to make perfect governments and we’ve never discovered a good way to, eg, eliminate the ratcheting tax burdens that destabilize society.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoYeah, part of my argument is that that 250 year number is heavily skewed by past civilizations where life was much worse and so people were much more apt to just tear everything apart. I don't think it holds for countries at current First World standards of living. As we improve living standards further the number of years regimes will last for will stretch out even more. I'm not too crazy about this as an anarchist, mind you, I think there are better stable equilibria we could get to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I guess.
- aaronblohowiak 2y agoI used to think this, but lately I'm not so sure. Beyond financial services, What does "the entire world" rely on US for anymore?
- csa 2y ago> Beyond financial services, What does "the entire world" rely on US for anymore? Our market.
- Loughla 2y agoThe fact that we buy so much of everything.
- jes5199 2y agopetroleum wealth
- nouripenny 2y agoThe US government has many military bases and troops stationed in other countries. It can project violence across the planet. Any entity with that power has strong ability to dictate what others do, and induce dependency. https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/us-sending-more-troops-middle-east-where-world-are-us-military-deployed https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/us-sending-more-troops-...
- ambicapter 2y agoThat isn't something that people "rely on" though. If that power is lost, some other power will come in to fill the vacuum.
- tonyhart7 2y agothey aren't, EU is keeping busy with Russia, while China is growing uncheck on Asia
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
- Jedd 2y agoCan you think of any long-lived ( > 100 years), empire-scale civilisations that have collapsed despite a firm belief they were non-collapsible and/or essential to all surrounding nation states? Without consulting wikipedia, I can only think of about 17 off the top of my head.
- paulcole 2y agoI am impressed that you are so well versed in history. What % chance do you think there is that the US collapses in over the next 10, 25, 50, and 100 years?
- LoganDark 2y ago> I am impressed that you are so well versed in history. You know, schools used to teach this type of stuff.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoThis is a salient point, I don't know how other countries handled it but American schools as an institution were absolutely wrecked by covid, a significant portion of the youths just straight up stopped attending school, and I'm in a bubble but most parents I know are homeschooling at least part time now, when they wouldn't think of doing so just 5 years ago Does not bode well for the future of informed populi
- tmpz22 2y agoFollow this chain of events: * The US economy nearly requires a degree for economic success * US demographics cliff results in a heavy short fall of student enrollments * US Federal government deeply cuts funding for universities * US higher education offers remote learning to attract students and reduce costs, much of which deeply lowers the standard of education * LLMs are deeply integrated into social products including snapchat and twitter * LLMs are capable of completing a significant amount of curriculum * The US Department of Education is removed, including teams responsible for tracking academic success on a national and state level Words like collapse are I think not the right word. But the long term institutional harm of this sequence of events may hit the country very hard. Bringing back factory jobs ain't gonna fix it, if tariffs are even capable of doing that.
- nebula8804 2y agoWhat do you think of a worldwide collapse? The lazy argument is that China will take over everything, that they think in 100 year increments. However they have terrible demographics, have serious risks like food security, and have mucked up their economy through their real estate collapse. We all know of the US's issues and there is no other country that is really challenging these two....so how about everyone fails and we are all poor and destitute together?
- amrocha 2y agoChina had no intention to take over anywhere. They’re happy where they are.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoNo intention to take over? So they’ll walk away from Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan? Also, leading countries in Asia and Africa into debt traps and dependence on them through the BRI is not very different from taking over.
- amrocha 2y agoHK and Xinjiang are already part of china. Tibet and Taiwan have historical ties. China has no expansionist ambitions, they just want what they perceive as theirs. And like, idk if you know this, but the world bank and the IMF are the ones offering the predatory loans. Countries choose to work with China instead exactly because the terms of their loans are better than the western alternatives.
- csomar 2y agoThat is true and a big part of the reason why the world let the US get away with lots of stuff. But I think if the nature of the economical relation changes too much (ie: the US demand more juice to flow back to it), I can see how these countries might seriously consider (and maybe go for it) to break from the system. Will be a very wild ride.
- mpreda 2y agoBut the US is efficiently disentangling itself from the entire rest of the world as we speak; so that argument may not hold anymore in the near future.