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The decline of the Roman Empire, depending on how you define it, played out over centuries, if not a millennium. It is such a bad analogy for the kind of within
by c7b 2mo ago
The decline of the Roman Empire, depending on how you define it, played out over centuries, if not a millennium. It is such a bad analogy for the kind of within-our-lifetimes collapse that is being speculated about here that it undermines the original concern. The decline of Germany as the leading scientific powerhouse in the first half if the 20th century would be a better case study imho.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago> The decline of the Roman Empire, depending on how you define it, played out over centuries, if not a millennium. Sure, and before COVID-19 pandemics often took years/decades to spread around the globe. Agriculture took thousands of years to develop; iPhones were invented twenty years ago. Things move faster in a world of eight billion people who can get anywhere on the planet in 24 hours.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoSure, but it's also likely that some (but not all) historians will put the peak of the American Empire in the 1960's somewhere, perhaps onat the moon landing. Declines often start out slow and are often indistinguishable from random noise until well after the fact, and there will be rises and falls after the peak.
- senordevnyc 2mo agoit's also likely that some (but not all) historians will put the peak of the American Empire in the 1960's somewhere Based on what metric?
- ceejayoz 2mo agohttps://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/61z8jv/oecd_life_expectancy_vs_health_expenditure_over/ https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/61z8jv/oecd_life_...
- senordevnyc 2mo agoYes, historians notoriously focus all of their analysis of the rise and fall of an entire country on the ratio of worker pay to productivity. The health care cost one is so dumb I won't even bother with it.
- ceejayoz 2mo agoScroll bar doesn't work, huh? There's… substantially more than one chart on that page.
- senordevnyc 2mo agoFair, I did not see that :) I would assume that you can take virtually any society that goes through rapid change over the course of a few decades and make all manner of cherry-picked charts like this. Just ignore all the charts with shapes that don't fit your hypothesis (like they show divergence way outside 1971, or gasp, they show positive changes!). Honestly, I find the attitude that the best times in America were 50-60 years ago to be baffling. So let me ask it this way: you can be born at a random place as a random person in America. You can't control your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, your intelligence, your socioeconomic standing, your family, your health, nothing. The only thing you can pick is the year. What year are you going to choose? I'd love a serious answer too. I never seem to get one that supports the idea that America's best days are behind us, but maybe you'll provide some reasoning.
- specproc 2mo agoThe US isn't Rome, it's Constantinople. Rome was Europe, the 20th century was about the colonial appendage achieving supremacy over the former imperial centre. If you want a lesson in what to avoid to maintain dominance, it's internal conflict, that's what wrecked the European empire. Good luck with that. Trump and Co will dig in. When they fall, there will be blood.
- pjc50 2mo ago> The decline of Germany as the leading scientific powerhouse in the first half if the 20th century Go on? WW1 and its consequences?
- c7b 2mo agoI think the educational policies are most interesting to compare. There was systematic attrition of academic talent driven by xenophobic ideologies. It started slowly and well before the 1930's, before it turned into an all-out purge. There was also ideological alignment of academia in multiple ways. The timing might not perfectly line up with what we're discussing now, but it definitely qualifies as within-lifetime, and I think the overall parallels are interesting.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2mo agoWW2 and it's consequences will be a big part of this. Consider the Oppenheimer movie. The majority of physicists depicted there are people who left Europe around that time. It's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210165
- TFNA 2mo agoHistorians today tend to emphasize that, even if the Western Empire ended in the fifth century, ultimately everything goes back to the Crisis of the Third Century. That took place with a short enough space that it must qualify as a within-our-lifetimes collapse.
- c7b 2mo agoI would agree with that stance and that classical antiquity ended then. But you still have to acknowledge that the Roman state, its culture and institutions not only survived but arguably came out even more dominant (with the exception of pagan religion), e.g. with a second political stronghold in the East. There are many episodes in Roman history that people would have experienced as decline or even collapse within their lifetimes, including multiple sackings of the city of Rome itself. But in most of those cases things actually did bounce back and the Empire continued to dominate. That's kind of the point I was making. Empires would seem to be far more resilient than contemporary observers would think if one only looked at Roman history. But the problem is that the Roman Empire is a bit of an outlier in that regard. Ancient cultures of Central America would be interesting to study there (there were far more than just the Mayas, Inkas and Aztecs, most of them relatively short-lived, hence good case studies for the question of collapse). Unfortunately much less is known about them than about Romans.
- roncesvalles 2mo agoIt is highly unlikely that the US is going to collapse any time in our lifetimes. Or even those of our children. Also, let's not forget that the Trump admin is a problem of 2.5 years at most. Trump has greatly stressed the safeguards in our system, but I don't think that he has broken them. That is actually an optimistic instead of a pessimistic signal -- an anti-statesman even in the highest office couldn't meaningfully damage the country.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- ceejayoz 2mo ago> Trump has greatly stressed the safeguards in our system, but I don't think that he has broken them. His sentencing for 34 felonies was voided because the justices he personally appointed to run some of those safeguards decided he should be immune to them. Come on.
- ben_w 2mo ago> Also, let's not forget that the Trump admin is a problem of 2.5 years at most. If he invades Greenland, the US not only loses all NATO allies, but may be at actual war (rather than merely trade war) with them; the Asian allies are also getting worried because of how he's interacting with China. This administration is also somehow managing to piss off Israel despite having gone into a war as a co-belligerent with them against Iran, also pissing off all the other American allies in the middle east, and the Iran conflict is currently making people question the benefit of even having the US as an ally in the first place because the US can't keep them safe from Iranian counterstrikes, but even more broadly the US don't seem to be able to keep Iran from charging tolls on Hormuz so everyone else with a similarly strategic strait may be wondering if they can do the same. The administration also has problems with re-emergence of diseases due to a combination of cutting funding and chaos (e.g. while screwworm may have come back anyway, the government response was suboptimal), and in some cases actively promoting disinformation (e.g. vaccinations). It takes a lot more work to eradicate some disease than to keep it away. And this is without any of the current, justifiable, concerns that Trump may use ICE or similar to interfere with even this year's elections, let alone the end of his term. Trump may not kill the US outright in just this term, the ships of state are slow to turn let alone sink, but he may do a Great Leap Forward.