Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse
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This thing of just randomly shooting at schools is new. Even in states with a lot of guns.
[1] https://thinkprogress.org/school-shootings-2018-e139b247474e...
Coupled with a media (traditional tv, print, modern online) whose purpose seems to be purely to exacerbate divisions and perceived social tensions; giving voice to only the most radical on any spectrum on any issue all in the name of getting clicks to sell ads to; it's again not hard to see how groups are drastically losing empathy and support for one another.
America has become a model of how not to approach the goal of creating and supporting a healthy society. One would hope that lessons would be learned from it, but it seems that Western Europe is gung-ho to follow almost every footstep.
As people in tech, there should be no doubt of the contribution we've made, or leadership provided, to the above.
Two questions:
1) How are you measuring that if not via the census?
2) Given the Wikipedia list of “Importance of religion by country” places the USA nowhere near the top or bottom of the list, and that nations which are less religious than the USA include socially aware and stable nations such as Canada, Switzerland, Germany, and all of the Scandinavian nations, why would declining religiosity be a cause or effect of national collapse?
The method is just making the assumption that you are observing a entity at a point in its lifetime that is randomly distributed with a uniform distribution. So there is a 75% chance that you are in the middle 75% of its lifetime (i.e. somewhere from 12.5% to 87.5% through its lifetime) and there is a 95% chance that you are in the middle 95% (somewhere from 2.5% to 97.5% through the lifetime).
The US is currently 242 years old, so the 75% confidence interval for its total lifespan is 276-1,936 years for an expected end date of 2052-3712. The 95% confidence interval end dates are 2024-11,456.
Applying it in reverse, the chance of it collapsing within my expected lifetime is 18%. That's not exactly comforting.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevalenc...
This data isn't up-to-date and the list is for opiates, not opioids But this still gives you a good sense for which countries to look up. IMO opiates are closer to marijuana or cocaine than to heroin -- i.e., an otherwise healthy, happy, intelligent, and drug-educated person using in a purely recreational context is unlikely to die or even become severely addicted. Different from opioids in that respect.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic#Outside_North_...
Not much info, but we get pointers to some of the same countries at the top of the opiates list.
So it's within reason for the article to say "[US] people abuse opioids en masse unlike anywhere else in the world"
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/15/ameri...
I found the article to be interesting but the weakest part by far was where he mentioned declining life expectancy as to do with the lack of public health care, and thus unique the USA except for the UK. But wait, the UK has an entirely nationalised healthcare system, it's the literal opposite of the USA. So if the UK is seeing the same thing, that suggests it can't be due to the funding mechanism used. It's more likely that we've hit some sort of life expectancy peak in the most highly developed western nations and if the UK and USA go first, it's very likely that other countries aren't far behind.
Except that the US hasn't reached the peak—life expectancy in other nations is up to 5-10 years higher (depending on gender).
Example:
> what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.
EDIT: Here [1] is more by the author on how making America more like Europe is the key to solving all of America's problems.
1. https://eand.co/the-american-dream-is-over-this-is-the-age-o...
Make no mistake, America's main export is war. Europe? Central Europe has been at peace since WWII - thanks mostly to the EU. America on the other hand hasn't stopped waging wars since WWII
The EU was not founded until 1993.
This is not a 'rah rah America' statement, however, the European continent after WWII was rebuilt via the economic engine and output of the United States.
You can take a look at the rebuilding post-war effort of Western Europe vs Eastern Europe to see the clear delineation of success. Does no-one remember the Balkan wars, and post war scarcity that existed to a more extreme detriment in Eastern Europe than Western?
I do agree with the statement that America has not stopped waging wars, this is a factual statement.
You could not be more wrong. The EU was built from the ashes of WWII: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en
the European continent after WWII was rebuilt via the economic engine and output of the United States.
This has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, so I'll take that as a "rah rah America" statement.
Does no-one remember the Balkan wars, and post war scarcity that existed to a more extreme detriment in Eastern Europe than Western?
Well, everybody that survived the balkan wars are sure to remember, and so do their offspring. Again, nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Somehow the author wants to tie school shootings to lack of healthcare, I assume he thinks a single payer system would fix this.
However, it's not as if we went from a national healthcare system to a market based system and things disintegrated, the opposite is true.
Healthcare regulations and government intervention has increased of the last 50 years and things have gotten worst, and by worse, I mean expensive.
Having a family member with mental issues, I can assure you of what the real problem is...and you're not going to like it.
The real problem with mental health in the US is the institutions have been shut down and we no longer commit the mentally ill in mass. Instead they get forcefully drugged for a few weeks in a hospital, then they start behaving better, then they're released with a prescription, then they stop taking their meds. Wash, rinse, repeat.
You're making a common error—Correlation does not imply Causation. The author is correlating these phenomenon, but not implying a causal relationship. Instead, he's positing that there's an additional cause to both—that America is in the midst of a societal collapse.
Asia and Africa are mentioned, a couple times, as examples of places that don't suffer from the same problems as America.
* How did America’s elderly end up cheated of dignity? After all, even desperately poor countries have “informal social support systems” — otherwise known as families and communities. But in America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria.*
Any honest examination of the destruction of the social family unit easily shows that this was not due to capitalism, but progressive and socialist legislation that encouraged disintegration of the family units.
Three of the largest 'capitalism endorsed' holidays in the USA are Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter (though Easter in the last few decades has decreased significantly in its importance and stature).
If anything, capitalism's endorsement of these holidays brings families CLOSER together, than they normally exist during the rest of the year. Left policies and statements about 'patriarchal structures' and why they need to be disassembled have contributed far more to family unit disintegration than capitalism.
Edit: Not to belabor the point either, but referencing Pakistan and Nigeria in this quote shows the authors bias. Both of these countries are great examples where patriarchy is absolutely thriving, strong familial bonds, led by men in those nations, with a subjugated women class.
Can you give concrete examples of legislation that "encouraged disintegration of the family units"?
> If anything, capitalism's endorsement of these holidays brings families CLOSER together, than they normally exist during the rest of the year
How so? Would Christmas have faded in significance if it weren't "endorsed" by capitalism"?
> Left policies and statements about 'patriarchal structures' and why they need to be disassembled have contributed far more to family unit disintegration than capitalism.
The canonical American nuclear family unit doesn't even include multi-generational housing.
Absolutely. I am not going to link to any analysis right now, but take a look at the requirements placed on familiy units for welfare consumption, WIC, etc. In order to obtain the optimal amount of benefit, the family unit must already be in a disintegrated state, eg non-married, non-cohabitating, with offspring present. This encourages an anti-marriage, anti-stable family pattern.
>The canonical American nuclear family unit doesn't even include multi-generational housing.
This is where you will need to link me to concrete proof of anything having to do with the 'canonical American nuclear family'. This appears to be a statement that is clearly subjective from family to family.
Doesn't appear to be a problem in, say, Scandinavian countries, those hotspots of unbridled socialism. Pretty much every quality of life ranking lists those right at the top, along with other socialist troublemakers like Canada, The Netherlands, etc.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-f...
Welfare state is not "let's financially encourage the disintegration of families". It's "let's help individuals that suffer from the lack of a family support system".
People on unemployment benefits still look for a job, because they value their dignity over money. Similarly, most people want to be loved and cared, and wouldn't destroy their own family over a (meager, by the way) monetary gain.
In policy, outcomes are at least as important as intentions. The question is whether welfare has this effect, not whether the original/current proponents of welfare intend for this effect.
There's the kernel of a reasonable idea here [1]. Unfortunately for your parent post, even the studies most favorable to this conclusion find only a modest effect and cite factors like relationship quality and access to decent paying jobs as much better predictors of marriage success.
> People on unemployment benefits still look for a job, because they value their dignity over money.
Even the studies that are used to justify your parent post's viewpoint ultimately conclude that this is true for the vast majority of people. Interestingly, those studies also find that the poorer you are, the less likely you are to consider loss of welfare benefits when making a decision about marriage.
Aggressive means-testing is a compromise outcome, as attributable to conservatives as to liberals/socialists.
> This encourages an anti-marriage, anti-stable family pattern.
Most of the think-tank pieces pushing this assertion cite the same sociologist, W. Bradford Wilcox, whose work is supported by AEI's Institute for Family Studies. Here's what Wilcox says about what his empirical work demonstrates [1]:
> one of the study’s co-authors, said the study’s findings show that welfare is “not the most important factor in explaining why we see a pretty marked increase in single parenthood and unmarried childbearing in the last 40 years.”
Discussed at greater length in [2], reaching the conclusion that
> Taken together, these results suggest that marriage penalties associated with American social-welfare programs play only a modest role in shaping the marriage decisions of contemporary couples with new children
So even the primary academic proponent of this theory, when pressed, admits his own empirical studies don't justify his favored causative hypothesis -- that the effect is mild at best.
It's unsurprising, then, that these think thank pieces focus on logical deductions about homo economicus rather than empirical datasets and statistical tests. Social science at its best ;-)
Now, none of this is to say that means testing shouldn't be reformed in order to encourage marriage! And in fact, I agree with Wilcox that welfare shouldn't discourage marriage.
But we have to respect the science here. Your causative assertion about causes of structural changes to American families isn't justified, even by the people most eager to prove such a link. And as a result, we don't have any reason to believe that reforming welfare will have anything other than a "modest" effect on the structure of American families.
So, what variables do effect family structure? Even according to [2], the answer isn't welfare, but "stable, decent-paying work and good relationships are far more important predictors of marriage and childbearing decisions for such couples than are calculations related to social-welfare benefits."
Which, incidentally, dovetails nicely with the article's conclusions: lack of access to stable, decent-paying work and a breakdown in social relationships.
So the article may be "rife with misconceptions", as you say, but its root cause analysis appears closer to the mark than your assertions. And that's even true when we only consider evidence from people who are most aligned with your world-view!
[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/3/welfare-disc...
[2] https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/welfare-and-marria...
You mean the two major holidays where people are busy on their phones, and flyers planning what they are going to buy because retailers decided to keep their stores open and start their "blockbuster/doorbuster" sales the day of and the day before those holidays? Yep, those "progressive and socialist legislation" and nothing to do with capitalism, right? /s
1.) US GDP is 19.73 trillion in 4th quarter 2017, best in the world. https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-gdp-5-latest-statistics-and-h... second best is EU, at 17.1 trillion.
2.) US GDP per capita is $57,000, pretty impressive considering it has a population of 330+ million people and growing. compare that with $8000 for China.
3.) US ranked 3rd in GDP per hours worked, pretty productive for such a big nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
4.) Dollar is still the hegemony
5.) US military is the biggest in the world, and has the most combat experiences. It has provoked many wars over the years, some good (toppling dictators, preventing communisms from spreading, advocating democracies), as well as some bad (instilling instabilities in regions)
6.) US innovation is everywhere, in tech (internet, hardware, software), finance, entertainment (games, tv, movies, music), lifestyle, education, services, etc
7.) there's a bigger upper middle class than ever, lower middle class has shrank . http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-cl...
8.) With tariffs punishing China, Apple/Amazon investments of billions into american cities, and fines levied on China for unfair tech transfers, US will revive manufacturing and economies in middle America
C.f. SF Bay and rural Oklahoma.