6 ms·

> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we canno

by runako 1y ago

> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.

soulofmischief 1y ago
China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully. There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money. Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
- cassepipe 1y ago
  They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity. I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.
  - throwaway29812 1y ago
    [dead]
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts. But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility. Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle? And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      > China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime? I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life.... > major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
      - ordinaryradical 1y ago
        You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else. It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead. The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.
        cjbgkagh 1y ago
        I’ve been hearing it’s eminent because China is not a democracy, I hear the western perspective. I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA. Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.
        1y ago
- cempaka 1y ago
  A good measure of where China really stands is the fact that it continues to do business with Israel, even though it would be quite trivial to cut ties.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    countries have no friends or enemies, only national interests
    - throwaway29812 1y ago
      Dictatorships do they best to make everyone convinced of this. That way their way of doing business isn't questioned.
      - bdangubic 1y ago
        sure, that makes sense… they will do the business that jeopardizes national interest is the way to go /s also I was not talking about dictatorships at all but all countries
        throwaway29812 1y ago
        [dead]
    - cempaka 1y ago
      "Countries" as such do not have interests, no. This is a line the ruling class puts out when it wants to obscure the fact that its own interests are always prioritized, often to the great detriment of the vast majority of the country. One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
      - soulofmischief 1y ago
        Governments have interests, people have interests, both are interested in the future of their country, which is just land. This is why I am careful to delineate my patriotism as to my country, land and people, but specifically not my corporate government, who are greedy, genocidal, parasitic traitors to the Constitution and to humanity. A kangaroo court controlled by organized crime.
- ben_w 1y ago
  > China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. 75 years is a long time. At lot can change. 75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy". > increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US. Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted. Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    > Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Lucky us, we get both. Not only both spying but both blackmailing us. No good for the common person can come from a panopticon.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      I think you're underestimating the scope/magnitude of the problem. But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally. For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month. If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons. A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Yes the ever impending Chinese financial collapse I've been reading about since 2017 Any day now, right?
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    If you're incapable of recognizing the signs of an empire's collapse, slow as it may be initially, then you're trading a feeling of superiority in the present for being totally blindsided in the future when suddenly things accelerate and the world's governments begin to struggle under increasingly untenable energy and resource demands in the name of meeting quarterly growth quotas. The fact is that the signs are there, whether you want to learn to recognize them or not. And the signs go way further back than... 2017. Furthermore, "financial collapse" is a strawman. Who knows what will happen, and if the resulting government at the end is still technically "China". We're talking about increased economic strife and lack of resources for the common man.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      I was referring specifically to "reports of bank closures" that were they actually happening with such frequency and scale as has been reported on since 2017 or so, would surely have already caused a financial collapse. Any day now though, surely.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      I do feel the need to point out that there is in fact a reason that the US media has boldly proclaimed the impending financial collapse of China every month for the last ten years, and it's precisely to give you a feeling of superiority
      - soulofmischief 1y ago
        You don't know what my sources are, or my motivations. I don't have this opinion because of US media, and I always try to get to direct sources and not trust publications blindly. Who gives a fuck about feeling superior, I just want to understand what is happening around me. So now that we've dispensed with that, we can return to discussing a very real phenomenon and not dismiss it by insinuating it's all propaganda.
UncleOxidant 1y ago
> in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief... that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. But lots of things are and it's best to have your defenses up.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  It's a self fulfilling prophecy. When you believe others are out to take advantage of you, you can justify taking advantage of others, which causes them to believe others are out to take advantage of them. So on and so forth. Those who resist this cycle are labeled "naive".
- runako 1y ago
  One doesn't even have to look to salespeople knocking to find scams. It's widely accepted that key pillars of the way we choose to organize our society have scam-like elements. Healthcare. Zero job security. Virtually nonexistent support for parents. Retirement. Education. Switching to the American form of any single one of these would cause mass civil unrest in most rich countries, but Americans don't believe things can or should be better. Many believe the lie that we (poorest state has a higher GDP per capita than France) cannot afford the things other rich countries have. The pessimism is pervasive.
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago
    [flagged]
- evklein 1y ago
  I have no empirical evidence of this to present, but if you view every transaction as existing on some scale of scam-iness, where one side is you lose your house and wife and kids and the other is an amazing deal for you, the average position on that scale has shifted toward the backside pretty much the entirety of my life. Anything that comes to me first, I pretty much always write off as a scam. Email from someone I don't know? Scam. Car dearlership advertising 0% APR for 5 years on a brand new car? Scam. Even something like my workplace offering a new optional benefit - probably a scam. Did things always feel like this?
ryeats 1y ago
This is not true. Your rose colored glasses of Chinese culture, and the current state of Chinese economy and society need a reality check.
- runako 1y ago
  Pointedly, I did not make any points about the state of the Chinese economy etc. Rather, I observe that the Chinese continue to make large investments that will not pay off in the next couple of quarters. As the Chinese economy has expanded over the last 25 years, the average standard of living for Chinese people has increased. They continue to invest in infrastructure as if there will be a future. This all stands in contrast to the United States, where eating seed corn (the OP reference) is a very good analogy for our policies and actions.
- cogman10 1y ago
  It isn't perfect, but it's also undeniable that China is dumping a ton of money into infrastructure. It also has and has been executing multiple long-term initiatives (for example, high speed rail, renewable build out). Chinese culture isn't perfect by a long shot, in particular it's both pretty isolationist with a strong slash and burn mentality for resource acquisition. We can see both the positives and negatives of a country. I think it is a positive that china isn't as focused on short term results as the US political ecosystem is.
pavel_lishin 1y ago
> This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.
- throw0101b 1y ago
  > I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans […] You just need the right/wrong ones to think that way and get a critical mass of folks that want "change" and want it now: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
- runako 1y ago
  First, I am glad you are here. Since you mention that you are an immigrant, it's worth noting that the ascendant anti-immigrant fervor is a direct expression of pessimism about our future. It's a statement that there's not enough to go around, that growth is not possible. It says that in order for me to do better, I must shrink the denominator because the numerator cannot get bigger. The optimistic USA of the 1980s saw better days ahead, and so the presence of immigrants did not have the salience it has today. Ronald Reagan even had the latitude to enact an amnesty on the undocumented. > I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans Here I would just ask you to look at our realized policy as the best expression of our characteristics. We don't build, or even really believe that building is possible. When we are asked to choose, we routinely cut education and healthcare. These are not signs of optimism. The pessimism has only grown; twenty years ago, it was considered possible that Americans could enjoy universal healthcare of the sort that exists in the (generally poorer) countries of Western Europe. Today, in a much wealthier America, even the suggestion has vanished from the realm of the possible and we are headed in the opposite direction.
- gaze 1y ago
  The place where this perspective is most prevalent is socialized healthcare. It's either slippery slope evil socialism, or it's too impractical to ever be implemented here because America is too big and complicated, or it's never gonna happen due to regulatory capture.
hollerith 1y ago
>This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed. Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has. Here is one man's summary of this dynamic: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations Oh, wait: could it be that you are disappointed with the US (and see China in a favorable light) because the US isn't becoming Leftist quickly enough?
- runako 1y ago
  > Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation More or less, I agree with this part of the thesis. > Western Europe has proven much better at responding intelligently to the limits of growth than the US has This is kind of my point -- we don't do the things other countries do to respond because those things would broadly be perceived as improving the lot of most citizens, and Americans do not generally believe that is possible anymore. (Also: "socialism is bad!") But there is no reason for a country where economic measures of growth of wealth and income are so consistently strong should be so hesitant to invest in the future, and should be actively disinvesting in long-term initiatives. What's especially painful is that some of the same policy choices we make that result in more distress for citizens are also likely to reduce the long-run growth of the economy. We make choices that hurt us now and also make things worse in the future. (Generally not going to respond to the political dig because this really isn't a direct outgrowth of the typical left/right political divide in the US or its projections on other countries. For example, right-leaning Hungary has universal healthcare and free college tuition, but nobody is accusing Hungary of being Leftist.)
paleotrope 1y ago
Please, the fatalism you see if concentrated in the overproduced elite. Overrepresented on the internet.

by runako 1y ago

soulofmischief 1y ago

China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully. There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money. Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.

cassepipe 1y ago
They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity. I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.
- throwaway29812 1y ago
  [dead]
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts. But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility. Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle? And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    > China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime? I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life.... > major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
    - ordinaryradical 1y ago
      You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else. It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead. The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        I’ve been hearing it’s eminent because China is not a democracy, I hear the western perspective. I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA. Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.
        1y ago
cempaka 1y ago
A good measure of where China really stands is the fact that it continues to do business with Israel, even though it would be quite trivial to cut ties.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  countries have no friends or enemies, only national interests
  - throwaway29812 1y ago
    Dictatorships do they best to make everyone convinced of this. That way their way of doing business isn't questioned.
    - bdangubic 1y ago
      sure, that makes sense… they will do the business that jeopardizes national interest is the way to go /s also I was not talking about dictatorships at all but all countries
      - throwaway29812 1y ago
        [dead]
  - cempaka 1y ago
    "Countries" as such do not have interests, no. This is a line the ruling class puts out when it wants to obscure the fact that its own interests are always prioritized, often to the great detriment of the vast majority of the country. One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
    - soulofmischief 1y ago
      Governments have interests, people have interests, both are interested in the future of their country, which is just land. This is why I am careful to delineate my patriotism as to my country, land and people, but specifically not my corporate government, who are greedy, genocidal, parasitic traitors to the Constitution and to humanity. A kangaroo court controlled by organized crime.
ben_w 1y ago
> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. 75 years is a long time. At lot can change. 75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy". > increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US. Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted. Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
- giantrobot 1y ago
  > Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Lucky us, we get both. Not only both spying but both blackmailing us. No good for the common person can come from a panopticon.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    I think you're underestimating the scope/magnitude of the problem. But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally. For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month. If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons. A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.
queenkjuul 1y ago
Yes the ever impending Chinese financial collapse I've been reading about since 2017 Any day now, right?
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  If you're incapable of recognizing the signs of an empire's collapse, slow as it may be initially, then you're trading a feeling of superiority in the present for being totally blindsided in the future when suddenly things accelerate and the world's governments begin to struggle under increasingly untenable energy and resource demands in the name of meeting quarterly growth quotas. The fact is that the signs are there, whether you want to learn to recognize them or not. And the signs go way further back than... 2017. Furthermore, "financial collapse" is a strawman. Who knows what will happen, and if the resulting government at the end is still technically "China". We're talking about increased economic strife and lack of resources for the common man.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    I was referring specifically to "reports of bank closures" that were they actually happening with such frequency and scale as has been reported on since 2017 or so, would surely have already caused a financial collapse. Any day now though, surely.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    I do feel the need to point out that there is in fact a reason that the US media has boldly proclaimed the impending financial collapse of China every month for the last ten years, and it's precisely to give you a feeling of superiority
    - soulofmischief 1y ago
      You don't know what my sources are, or my motivations. I don't have this opinion because of US media, and I always try to get to direct sources and not trust publications blindly. Who gives a fuck about feeling superior, I just want to understand what is happening around me. So now that we've dispensed with that, we can return to discussing a very real phenomenon and not dismiss it by insinuating it's all propaganda.

UncleOxidant 1y ago

> in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief... that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. But lots of things are and it's best to have your defenses up.

ModernMech 1y ago
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. When you believe others are out to take advantage of you, you can justify taking advantage of others, which causes them to believe others are out to take advantage of them. So on and so forth. Those who resist this cycle are labeled "naive".
runako 1y ago
One doesn't even have to look to salespeople knocking to find scams. It's widely accepted that key pillars of the way we choose to organize our society have scam-like elements. Healthcare. Zero job security. Virtually nonexistent support for parents. Retirement. Education. Switching to the American form of any single one of these would cause mass civil unrest in most rich countries, but Americans don't believe things can or should be better. Many believe the lie that we (poorest state has a higher GDP per capita than France) cannot afford the things other rich countries have. The pessimism is pervasive.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  [flagged]
evklein 1y ago
I have no empirical evidence of this to present, but if you view every transaction as existing on some scale of scam-iness, where one side is you lose your house and wife and kids and the other is an amazing deal for you, the average position on that scale has shifted toward the backside pretty much the entirety of my life. Anything that comes to me first, I pretty much always write off as a scam. Email from someone I don't know? Scam. Car dearlership advertising 0% APR for 5 years on a brand new car? Scam. Even something like my workplace offering a new optional benefit - probably a scam. Did things always feel like this?

ryeats 1y ago

This is not true. Your rose colored glasses of Chinese culture, and the current state of Chinese economy and society need a reality check.

runako 1y ago
Pointedly, I did not make any points about the state of the Chinese economy etc. Rather, I observe that the Chinese continue to make large investments that will not pay off in the next couple of quarters. As the Chinese economy has expanded over the last 25 years, the average standard of living for Chinese people has increased. They continue to invest in infrastructure as if there will be a future. This all stands in contrast to the United States, where eating seed corn (the OP reference) is a very good analogy for our policies and actions.
cogman10 1y ago
It isn't perfect, but it's also undeniable that China is dumping a ton of money into infrastructure. It also has and has been executing multiple long-term initiatives (for example, high speed rail, renewable build out). Chinese culture isn't perfect by a long shot, in particular it's both pretty isolationist with a strong slash and burn mentality for resource acquisition. We can see both the positives and negatives of a country. I think it is a positive that china isn't as focused on short term results as the US political ecosystem is.

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.

throw0101b 1y ago
> I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans […] You just need the right/wrong ones to think that way and get a critical mass of folks that want "change" and want it now: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
runako 1y ago
First, I am glad you are here. Since you mention that you are an immigrant, it's worth noting that the ascendant anti-immigrant fervor is a direct expression of pessimism about our future. It's a statement that there's not enough to go around, that growth is not possible. It says that in order for me to do better, I must shrink the denominator because the numerator cannot get bigger. The optimistic USA of the 1980s saw better days ahead, and so the presence of immigrants did not have the salience it has today. Ronald Reagan even had the latitude to enact an amnesty on the undocumented. > I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans Here I would just ask you to look at our realized policy as the best expression of our characteristics. We don't build, or even really believe that building is possible. When we are asked to choose, we routinely cut education and healthcare. These are not signs of optimism. The pessimism has only grown; twenty years ago, it was considered possible that Americans could enjoy universal healthcare of the sort that exists in the (generally poorer) countries of Western Europe. Today, in a much wealthier America, even the suggestion has vanished from the realm of the possible and we are headed in the opposite direction.
gaze 1y ago
The place where this perspective is most prevalent is socialized healthcare. It's either slippery slope evil socialism, or it's too impractical to ever be implemented here because America is too big and complicated, or it's never gonna happen due to regulatory capture.

hollerith 1y ago

>This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed. Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has. Here is one man's summary of this dynamic: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations Oh, wait: could it be that you are disappointed with the US (and see China in a favorable light) because the US isn't becoming Leftist quickly enough?

runako 1y ago
> Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation More or less, I agree with this part of the thesis. > Western Europe has proven much better at responding intelligently to the limits of growth than the US has This is kind of my point -- we don't do the things other countries do to respond because those things would broadly be perceived as improving the lot of most citizens, and Americans do not generally believe that is possible anymore. (Also: "socialism is bad!") But there is no reason for a country where economic measures of growth of wealth and income are so consistently strong should be so hesitant to invest in the future, and should be actively disinvesting in long-term initiatives. What's especially painful is that some of the same policy choices we make that result in more distress for citizens are also likely to reduce the long-run growth of the economy. We make choices that hurt us now and also make things worse in the future. (Generally not going to respond to the political dig because this really isn't a direct outgrowth of the typical left/right political divide in the US or its projections on other countries. For example, right-leaning Hungary has universal healthcare and free college tuition, but nobody is accusing Hungary of being Leftist.)

paleotrope 1y ago

Please, the fatalism you see if concentrated in the overproduced elite. Overrepresented on the internet.