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I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Ger

I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans. Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.

rayiner 10mo ago
Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
- monero-xmr 10mo ago
  I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
  - rayiner 10mo ago
    If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
    - eastbound 10mo ago
      The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
      - potato3732842 10mo ago
        >The US was also much more unified at the time Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy" If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant. We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
    - pjmlp 10mo ago
      The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
      - nostrademons 10mo ago
        So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers. I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
        ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
        Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
  - roenxi 10mo ago
    The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength. The modelling I've seen is that any US-China war will take place in Asia and China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help (always possible). And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India and there isn't a lot they can do about it in the short term. They certainly don't have a military option to use against that grouping. At least not one that hasn't already been used in the case of Russia and failed to coerce them into cooperating.
    - kiba 10mo ago
      America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that. Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine. As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
      - the_gipsy 10mo ago
        America is on a isolation downward spiral. Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.
        pfdietz 10mo ago
        Some would dispute the "downward" part there. Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense. Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
        the_gipsy 10mo ago
        "World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions. At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
  - usrnm 10mo ago
    You cannot keep a good military for very long when you enter the economic decline stage, this has been proven by every empire in history.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rcarr 10mo ago
    Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.
    - Qem 10mo ago
      > Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. I didn't know about this. Can you share a link?
      - rcarr 10mo ago
        https://youtu.be/7MkAs99O1LQ https://youtu.be/7MkAs99O1LQ
  - usrusr 10mo ago
    The US military is as clueless as any other (except those two) about combat in the age of disposable drones.
  - sharts 10mo ago
    100x and yet it only took a couple of decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
  - amrocha 10mo ago
    I’m supposed to be scared of the military who has spent the last 80 years losing wars against nations a fraction of its own size? The US couldn’t “seize” afghanistan in two decades, what makes you think it could “seize nearly every country on earth in days”?
- hollerith 10mo ago
  The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.
  - amrocha 10mo ago
    If all US internet companies stopped existing tomorrow the world would be no worse off for it. The internet infrastructure is great. Networking hardware is great. Private internet companies built on top of it? Big whoop
    - hollerith 10mo ago
      The big whoop is the 100s of billions of dollars of revenue that flow to American internet companies from the rest of the world every quarter (and the high profit margins on that revenue—much higher than the margins of say Foxconn or DJI).
      - amrocha 10mo ago
        And that money would stay in their countries respective economies and everyone would be better off for it. Maybe someone would start a local alternative. It would be used productively instead of on ads that make everyone’s lives worse.
        hollerith 10mo ago
        My purpose was to cast doubt on Rayiner's assertion that "Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today." I was not commenting on whether the world would be better off if the US were less economically dominant.
        amrocha 10mo ago
        And I’m saying that that dominance is mostly in irrelevant categories like ads and entertainment, so it would be at best an annoyance if those companies were to disappear. There’s very few internet companies doing truly unique, irreplaceable work.
0xDEAFBEAD 10mo ago
>things are seriously politically messed up I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice%2Cwhiteness%2CDonald+Trump&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice... The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college. What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me. The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
- seec 10mo ago
  That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school. A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail. And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
maxglute 10mo ago
> in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Has anymore wealth actually been created tho? You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost. This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
  - mlinhares 10mo ago
    I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance. As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory. The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
bildung 10mo ago
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
- phillipcarter 10mo ago
  Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.

rayiner 10mo ago

Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.

monero-xmr 10mo ago
I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
- rayiner 10mo ago
  If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
  - eastbound 10mo ago
    The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
    - potato3732842 10mo ago
      >The US was also much more unified at the time Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy" If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant. We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
  - pjmlp 10mo ago
    The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
    - nostrademons 10mo ago
      So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers. I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
      - ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
        Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
- roenxi 10mo ago
  The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength. The modelling I've seen is that any US-China war will take place in Asia and China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help (always possible). And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India and there isn't a lot they can do about it in the short term. They certainly don't have a military option to use against that grouping. At least not one that hasn't already been used in the case of Russia and failed to coerce them into cooperating.
  - kiba 10mo ago
    America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that. Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine. As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
    - the_gipsy 10mo ago
      America is on a isolation downward spiral. Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.
      - pfdietz 10mo ago
        Some would dispute the "downward" part there. Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense. Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
        the_gipsy 10mo ago
        "World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions. At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
- usrnm 10mo ago
  You cannot keep a good military for very long when you enter the economic decline stage, this has been proven by every empire in history.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- rcarr 10mo ago
  Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.
  - Qem 10mo ago
    > Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. I didn't know about this. Can you share a link?
    - rcarr 10mo ago
      https://youtu.be/7MkAs99O1LQ https://youtu.be/7MkAs99O1LQ
- usrusr 10mo ago
  The US military is as clueless as any other (except those two) about combat in the age of disposable drones.
- sharts 10mo ago
  100x and yet it only took a couple of decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
- amrocha 10mo ago
  I’m supposed to be scared of the military who has spent the last 80 years losing wars against nations a fraction of its own size? The US couldn’t “seize” afghanistan in two decades, what makes you think it could “seize nearly every country on earth in days”?
hollerith 10mo ago
The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.
- amrocha 10mo ago
  If all US internet companies stopped existing tomorrow the world would be no worse off for it. The internet infrastructure is great. Networking hardware is great. Private internet companies built on top of it? Big whoop
  - hollerith 10mo ago
    The big whoop is the 100s of billions of dollars of revenue that flow to American internet companies from the rest of the world every quarter (and the high profit margins on that revenue—much higher than the margins of say Foxconn or DJI).
    - amrocha 10mo ago
      And that money would stay in their countries respective economies and everyone would be better off for it. Maybe someone would start a local alternative. It would be used productively instead of on ads that make everyone’s lives worse.
      - hollerith 10mo ago
        My purpose was to cast doubt on Rayiner's assertion that "Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today." I was not commenting on whether the world would be better off if the US were less economically dominant.
        amrocha 10mo ago
        And I’m saying that that dominance is mostly in irrelevant categories like ads and entertainment, so it would be at best an annoyance if those companies were to disappear. There’s very few internet companies doing truly unique, irreplaceable work.

0xDEAFBEAD 10mo ago

>things are seriously politically messed up I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice%2Cwhiteness%2CDonald+Trump&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice... The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college. What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me. The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.

seec 10mo ago
That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school. A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail. And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.

maxglute 10mo ago

> in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.

potato3732842 10mo ago
Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Has anymore wealth actually been created tho? You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost. This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
- mlinhares 10mo ago
  I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance. As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory. The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.

bildung 10mo ago

> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.

phillipcarter 10mo ago
Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.