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Comment by princetontiger | Hacker News Reader

The USA has already started a long-term decline. Peak was 1998/1999 if you go by peak productivity and real GDP/capita.

Unfortunately, not much can be done. We're in a situation similar to that of the British Empire prior to 1915.

The British Empire was completely and totally infeasible at the time. This was largely and widely known, at least in the U.S. I had grandparents who were born around 1900, give or take, and the dominant idea about Europe and Britain was that it was corrupt, that the principle seat of corruption as the royal system and that they could go to hell in their own way.

It took Considerable Doing ( and a lot of John Wayne movies ) to sell WWII to the mothers of America. And you know what? One grandmother had one son of five serve in WWII and two serve (in Germany) after. One in the early '50s, the other in the '60s.

The sort of American Exceptionalism that emerged after WII was ( I would say ) completely unknown prior.

That was a stock bubble. The peak was somewhere between the end of WWII and 1980, when we decided to start funding the country through a continuing trade deficit.

It was the late 1960s and early 1970s, when our trading partners got their bombed-out domestic industries back in working order after a decade or two of producing junk.

I see what you're saying, but the British didn't have metrics like 'broadband access' to work with. Hopefully we can do better.

The internet was supposed to be that new tool to save or even boost democracy. What's been happening lately is the opposite: mass surveillance and using the data to manipulate the population.

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