The Changing World Order | Hacker News Reader

The Changing World Order

principles.com

118 pointsmtm7113 comments

I couldn’t tolerate this writing long enough to get through more than half the article. There’s the “history is cyclical” trope, the “I have learned how to read history” repeated self-aggrandizement without any specifics, despite going on long enough to repeat himself, and really obvious statements meant to read like profundity (“when there’s great inequality of wealth, there will be social tensions”, paraphrasing only slightly.)

I read a book by him once. It was short and vapid and full of pseudo-profundity. It was cheap and highly rated on Amazon, so I’d given it a try. I didn’t realize he was banking on his name as an investor. Now I understand why anyone would bother reading his writing once, but not why they would read it twice.

On the flip side, the writing has an increasingly rare property that the whole article (essay?) is divided into sections with proper titles. More often than not, I lose patience and give up on most articles these days, simply because there are no visual markers when scrolling through. I have no way to know where to stop and scan a few lines as I scroll through ... it's all just a continuous torrent of words and sentences.

Not everyone is a great messenger. I recommend Graham Allison Destined for War. Similar message but delivered differently.

The world order, in terms of socio-economic and politico-legal structures, is for sure changing, but it's more a matter of demographics and communication.

We have shattered certain assumptions about the world economy to ensure the continuing welfare of the oldest of us. This is an unprecedented act of selflessness by everyone younger than seventy-ish, because we love our elders so.

The real change in the world order is logistical, which has caused significant re-pricings of almost everything (even the things that are roughly the same price are so in a very different set of market conditions).

It is no longer a matter of how nations compete but how they collaborate, and the markets are adjusting accordingly.

I'm quite optimistic, but then I study Science.

[Edit (apart from mis-spellings)]:

The shattered assumptions pertain to debt management by governments, which are trivial compared to the volume of daily trading. We are in for a reckoning on resource measurement hopefully not of catastrophic proportions and this pandemic is merely a spur. In a nutshell: money fails dimensional analysis.

[Edit the second]:

By the way, if any of you would like to get together and discuss type theory and dimensional analysis and maybe reach out to the folk on the n-category cafe and lambdatheultimate and suchlike I'll happily help. We've a problem needs solving and Hacker News is populated by folk who like solving problems. I'll end (cheekily, give it a search engine result) with a reference to Terence Tao: A mathematical formalisation of dimensional analysis. I keep coming back to this blogpost. The subject kinda weirds me out.

[Edit the third]:

Removed the first paragraph as snarky, mea culpa

Lots of people seem to believe that Ray Dalio knows anything, with anymore certainty than we do.

In financial circles the man is not taken seriously, and allegations of fraud have been whispered for years now.

I would be curious to know why anyone believes that Ray Dalio should be taken seriously here?

I’ve worked personally w Ray and can attest he’s the real deal.

If the “financial circles” you run with don’t respect $100bn+ AUM, there not really “financial circles,” sorry.

If you want to make up your own mind, take a look at their work on debt crises. Sometimes hard to see how it connects to day to day trading, but not the hallmarks of a fraud.

https://www.bridgewater.com/big-debt-crises/Principles-For-N...

All that being said, still think he’s wrong about China.

Thanks appreciate the perspective. What kind of work did you do if you don’t mind saying?

> a rising world power (China) challenging the overextended existing world power (the US)

This is a pretty bold claim, at least for now. People have been claiming this is the case for decades, but I still don't see it.

Western (US / EU) demand is what drives China's growth.

Technology in China is still by and large imported / copied.

The West can move manufacturing back home (or anywhere else with cheap labor) and China's economic prowess will be severely undermined.

China doesn't have a whole lot of leverage – it's cheap and convenient, but its cheap labor is easily replaceable, while Western demand (mostly US, really) and its technology are not.

EDIT: Additionally, the balance of power used to change much more frequently back when we didn't have nuclear weapons. From the introduction, it seems this analysis is entirely economic when it ought to also factor in politics (domestic and international), strategy and military power.

I think at the end of the day if a country's strongest asset is its "demand", that is, its ability to consume goods and services instead of produce them, then i think that country is in for a world of hurt.

US is the "buyer" who has the money. China is the biggest supplier of goods. A statement like the above is overly simplistic. The US will exert power and influence in a buyer's market, and will lose influence in a seller's market. Which market we're in is an be interesting discussion, and it predicates any prediction of the future.

A country's demand is linked to its supply. After all, it has to pay for the goods it demands with something.

That's a very loose link in a world where fiat currency and reserve currency exist for printing money.

But not negligible. The USD wouldn't be where it is without the US economy.

Not only has no one said that, it doesn't even make sense in the first place.

> Technology in China is still by and large imported / copied.

When I visited China, I felt like I was in the future. We have fallen behind, and we literarily have shipped the "Arsenal of Democracy" to China. Their airports are bigger and better, the high speed rail was amazing, and the subway system was simple to navigate.

China has innovated in important ways - they have beat us to 5G, and they have weapons systems that could take out our best aircraft carriers and satellites.

Who gives a damn if their infrastructure is new and modern? Was that technology developed in China? It's possible, but I doubt it.

And what kind of visit was this where you were inspecting their weapon systems, and ascertained that they could take out the best of what the American military has, based on some knowledge of military technology you magically have?

> and ascertained that they could take out the best of what the American military has, based on some knowledge of military technology you magically have?

Thats called reading. https://www.rand.org/blog/2019/10/how-the-united-states-coul...

https://www.amazon.com/Destined-War-America-Escape-Thucydide...

Technology still works even if it's copied. Don't confusing "copying" with "only copying". Modern US tech is in large part created by Chinese emigrants and their children. Do you think every technologist emigrated?

Infrastructure is a sign of a healthy economy and capability to build a war machine.

>Western (US / EU) demand is what drives China's growth.

China's exports are not as much of an influence on it's GDP as you would think. The difference between China and the US is less than 10% of GDP.

China's middle class has grown very wealthy which has undoubtedly reduced China's reliance on exports and stabilized its economy against outside interference.

China is doing most things right according to endogenous growth theory. Exports help it grow faster but are not the most essential part of the equation. China's export is only ~20% of its 2018 GDP. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/china/exports/

"Endogenous growth theory holds that investment in human capital, innovation, and knowledge are significant contributors to economic growth."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_growth_theory

> Technology in China is still by and large imported / copied.

For many important technologies, it is either on par, a bit behind, or sometimes a bit ahead (5G, quantum communications) of the west. A few key areas where China still lacks are semiconductors, aviation, and global reaches of internet platforms. These are important but account for far less than half of its GDP.

China's numbers of patents and scientific publications have reached world's no.1 in recent years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_In...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

One can argue about the quality of those, but one should not assume that China is substantially behind the west as was the case even a couple decades ago.

China's number of STEM graduates, many of whom are sources of the progress above, is the highest in the world: 4.7m in 2016. The only country that comes close is India.

https://www.statista.com/chart/7913/the-countries-with-the-m...

> ...while Western demand (mostly US, really) and its technology are not.

US population: ~330 million; EU, ~450 million => Total: 780 million. China's population: ~1400 million. Domestic demand is clearly not China's disadvantage.

> US population: ~330 million; EU, ~450 million => Total: 780 million. China's population: ~1400 million. Domestic demand is clearly not China's disadvantage.

Population size doesn't paint a full picture. China's GDP per capita is still less than a third of the US. A lot of those 1.4 billion have absolutely appalling living standards.

That is why I mentioned they still have a significant room for further development. (Many people's quality of life in major cities, from all reports I have seen, is no worse than that of the west's middle class, except for pollution.)

If a country is economically well-governed and still developing, the quality of life for most everyone will improve over time.

Most people who have studied or traveled to one of the Asian tigers before and after its rapid phase of development can see how different 2-3 decades can make.

A 5% annual compound growth results in 3.4 times the previous GDP within 25 years.

2020 projection of GDP per capita (PPP) of China is ~$21000 according to the IMF. It's a middle-income country. If they continue to adopt and invent technologies extensively, there is no reason they cannot grow further.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

Quality of life is not a zero-sum game. In fact, when a country is richer, their trading partners are often better off too.

Population can be a burden. As the US has learned, economic systems can't grow forever; maintaining the US standard of living is a significant strain both geopolitically and environmentally. It will be much harder to provide a similar standard of living for 1.4 billion people.

I suspect that China will hit similar limits soon, if they haven't already. We do see signs of environmental and geopolitical strain there.

It depends on the direction of growth.

Antibiotics by itself improves the quality of life a great deal and does not take much resources to produce.

If a country moves toward an innovation-driven economy, its growth can be less constrained by physical resources.

Appalling living standards sucks for those people, but that doesn't make China less of a world power.

Note, Japan's ascension to the largest economy in the world was also "guaranteed" near the end of the Cold War. We can all see plainly how such claims have played out.

You have to admit that the possibility of a global hegemony is more likely today than ever in modern history. An unlikely event, however, is still unlikely, no matter the rate at which it increases in likelihood. Our prerogative now is to carefully monitor this increasing rate, lest it somehow escape our attention while becoming unavoidable.

Interestingly, Japan ended up going down a low-growth path in part due to demographics--lots of old people, not many immigrants. China's former one child policy and a preference for boys set the stage for stagnation in 10-20 years. China just has 10x the population of Japan.

https://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/china-...

Wasn't quite a lot of what you say about China true about the USA in the 19th century? Not saying the cases are the same and I am skeptical of grand historical theses, but I don't think you can glibly dismiss China either.

Personally I see China replacing a superpower, but the superpower being replaced is Russia. Russia is by nearly every metric declining and much faster than the USA.

The question is whether the USA will remain the dominant superpower or whether China will be a serious challenger by mid century. To really challenge the USA China would have to export more than just goods and services but also ideas and culture. I see a little bit of ideas being exported but very little cultural export happening.

Russia is objectively no longer a superpower but a shell of its past self.

US after Cold War and before 2008 will be remembered as a very special country by history. China or the post great recession US can only imagine that power and influence, they can't match it.

That was kinda my point. We had a brief period of a unipolar world with the US as the sole superpower. I don't think that's stable or likely to persist, and it looks like China is already filling the empty niche.

I think the 21st century will have China and the US as the two superpowers and the rivalry will be mostly economic and technological rather than military (via build up and proxy wars) and propagandistic.

I don't think it was the Great Recession that cut America down to size. I think it was the Iraq war. We "won" but it was a classic Pyrrhic victory that cost us both a ton of capital (I wonder if it caused the Great Recession) and our reputation on the world stage. We basically burned our Cold War victory on that. Bush II was the worst president of the last 100 years, in my opinion worse than Nixon and worse than Trump has been so far in terms of actual damage done. I don't think there would be a President Trump either were it not for that damage.

Russia's debt is minuscule in comparison to the other two.

But that doesn’t really matter. It’s like if you have a net worth of $50 and an income of $100, but your buddies have an income of $100,000 and a debt of $70,000

Kind of. But which one would you bet on in a startup position?

The latter. Wealth is a verb, not a noun. It's measured in flow, not money in the bank. Idle wealth is not wealth.

Yeah, but so is Russia’s GDP. For reference, Canada has a higher GDP.

It's roughly the same but per capita, definitely worse.

IMO, Russia will bide her time. They have a lot of intelligent, entrepreneurial people. Just need the government to loosen up a bit.

Or perhaps, most of the economy doesn't need GDP.

As a whole Russia’s entrepreneurs are leaving because they know if you get big enough, the corruption will come into play.

Their government needs to do more than just loosen up.

From all that I've read, corruption is why Africa has been so poor and missed out on much of the development of the 20th century. Why bother investing in anything when it will just be stolen by the local strong man?

Look at China's GDP over the last 2 decades. It has grown exponentially. At this rate they'll surpass the US this decade or next. You cant just move manufacturing elsewhere. China have perfected low cost mass manufacturing. It's not just beacuse labour is cheaper. That used to be the case but now they are innovating at a huge scale.

economics lectures i attended a decade ago indicated that china has already surpassed the US in gdp, but to give us face and to not decelerate their growth, china manipulates their numbers and monetary policy to keep up appearances that the US is still larger.

china has 4x our population and growing like a weed. it’s naive to think they haven’t/won’t/can’t eclipse the US economy. it’s another reason we should overhaul immigration policy to attract the world’s best minds while we still have the prestige to do so.

In publicly announced numbers, China has larger GDP by purchasing power parity. (I'm not sure if that's equivalent to your currency manipulation interpretation.)

yes, ppp gdp was largely on par a decade ago too. apparently that's not as worrying to american politicians and policymakers as nominal gdp, as it's nominal gdp being manipulated for appearances (besides monetary policy, the government apparently has enough tentacles into industry and regional accounting to do so).

>> You cant just move manufacturing elsewhere

That's exactly what China and the United States are trying to do: To Africa.

All you said might be true 5 years ago. But many no longer holds.

China is no longer an export dependent economy, and moving manufacturing away from it, is hard.

The belief that manufacturing is about labor is simply false.

Dalio is pretty smart to smell the trend, maybe just because he is less idealogical driven but data-driven.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have about china's economy today is that they aren't nearly as dependent on exports as people think. On an absolute number net exports look big, but as % of GDP, countries like Germany or SK nearly log like more dependent.

The much more critical thing for China is domestic consumption, which is where they focus the most and struggle the most. And a big thing there that has made other developed countries mad is that China's net imports haven't nearly kept up with their consumption growth. China has been meeting consumption domestically, which changes their mix, and makes everyone else understandably frustrated.

> The West can move manufacturing back home (or anywhere else with cheap labor) and China's economic prowess will be severely undermined.

The US technically can, but then how many Americans would be able to buy the $2999 iPhone (for example) to keep Apple's current valuation?

It will move to places like India and Vietnam and other countries that are more open and transparent but also Cheap.

It was accelerating before the pandemic.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3045141/c...

Not to mention the lead times on factory construction being two orders of magnitude longer in the United States.

Steve Jobs told Obama manufacturing is never coming home, but it only partly had to do with cost. Impossibility of scaling like China was the major blocker.

I'm not sure that the West can move manufacturing back home, but I can see manufacturing moving to the next poorest country, in perpetuity. China's standard of living is increasing, and it will eventually be as economical to outsource work to China as it is to outsource labor to Japan or South Korea.

Instead, I can see the world gradually shifting manufacturing to the next cheapest labor pool until there is none left, and then the ensuing equilibrium would have diversified supply chains, with any concentration largely being a function of 1) access to natural resources, and 2) access to expertise.

> but its cheap labor is easily replaceable

If it's that easy, it should have happened by now.

> If it's that easy, it should have happened by now.

Why? It's not convenient. I'm just saying it could be done if necessary.

It isn't convenient because China also offers infrastructure, a rich supply-chain of similarly off-shored labor / parts and it's "the devil you know" vs. e.g. Vietnam

The West can move manufacturing back home (or anywhere else with cheap labor

No it can't. An empire is the complexity*robustness of its supply chains, and supply chains are much less modular on the ground than they appear to be from the air.

Nuclear weapons don't actually have that much of an impact. They don't do anything socially or economically. They don't prevent all conventional warfare either. If one country annexes territory from another and the target responds with a threat to nuke the aggressor, the aggressor can just call their bluff. Mutual destruction over a flesh wound isn't credible. The only things nukes do is ensure that actors can't be forced off the stage with military conquest. Barring that, the rest of the military-economic-social game plays on as it did before the nuclear age.

The question is how these trends will evolve in the future. The trends in education for example, China has a huge population, it’s hypothetical but do you think US engineering and innovation keep up if it’s then vastly outnumbered in 20 years?

>still by and large imported / copied.

The import of intellectual property could take decades or lifetimes to truly play out. If a country could take everything we know, without the debt, it would be a stellar starting point, but wouldnt instantly make them us.

> copied

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5XQxRrQvw&start=46&end=62

Highly recommend listening to this full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrxYhv2O3wU. It's long but worth it, and it touches on many of the points he brings up in the article. In fact, the interview occurred just a week after this article was published.

I'm currently reading Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World by Peter Zeihan. [1]

The book discusses the upcoming world order from a geopolitical perspective and gives original insight into potential developments. For example, I wasn't aware the US Navy has been securing the maritime shipping lanes, thus boosting global trade; and if that stops, well, you can imagine the implications.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Disunited-Nations-Scramble-Power-Ungo...

The USN is way overkill for dealing with pirates. It's sized to deal with other national navies. The USN promises not to blockade foreign nations (most of the time) and fights those that would not purely out of altruism, but because if they can convince would be competitors that they don't need to build a navy then the USN doesn't need to get into expensive naval arms races.

Zeihan and George Friedman are really good. After getting perspective from reading them, prepared to be annoyed by geopolitical commentary on HN.

Generic dissing of other commenters just adds noise to HN. If you know more than others, why not share some of what you know so we all can learn?

(Edit: I originally wrote "one of the worst ways to add noise". That was overkill; it gets worse.)

I beg to differ. The comment was perfectly reasonable in my view. I also learned about someone new, namely George Friedman.

You're talking about a different part of the comment.

It is a qualitative analysis done by an enthusiastic amateur (me). You may disagree, and it is perhaps noise. Who knows!

I'm not sure either that I understand this or that my point was clear.

The part of your comment that added information was fine. It would have been better to add even more information, for example if you had macroexpanded "really good" into what specifically is good.

Generic dissing of other commenters is one of the most common tropes that appears here. Repetition, and especially repetition of indignation, are the things that most lower the quality of the site, and therefore most to be avoided.

if you look at cargo ship over time. we are building bigger and bigger cargo ship while everyone's blue water navy have been diminishing. it will be interesting if U.S. exit the global stage and stop patrolling the ocean.

are we going back to colonialism era where everyone build up a navy to escort goods or we are at the point that we can trade goods peacefully without a strong Navy escort.

Everything Ray Dalio writes he presents like the prophet come down from high to give us the Sacred Truths.

Dalio is a successful trader and is beyond wealthy. He’s a smart guy who has a true interest in history. But he is just one opinion of many and he is absolutely not saying things that are uniquely known to him.

I read the whole thing and it’s like, “Powerful countries decline! Declining power leads to social strife!” No shit dude.

It's not just that Dalio is a "successful trader." He runs the world's largest hedge fund and their expertise is in predicting global macroeconomic trends. His experience is directly relevant.

I’m just not impressed by what he writes about in regards to “universal principles of world history”. His credentials don’t make me assume everything he writes is true and what he writes is long winded and obvious.

Glad it's not just me. I'm halfway through reading the linked post, and it seems like he hasn't yet gotten to the point.

It's the introductory chapter of a book.

He would be the first to tell you to do your own research. Not sure why you attribute prophecy to Ray's writings; he has repeatedly said to consider all information.

I'd read his books on debt cycles. It's novel thinking. Not necessarily correct, but fairly well-researched and presents data in a different view. Nowhere does he say to take the advice as gospel.

It's a short, introductory LinkedIn article. If you want more depth, start with his recent book on debt cycles. I'm guessing his next book will have more as well.

You know successful hedge funds profit more from insider trading than from any kind of analytical wizardry, right?

Lol. Dalio is too big to bother with insider trading. With $160bill under management, that leaves like what, ~50 companies he can't just buy outright in the entire world?

Please stop watching Billions and thinking it represents anything close to reality.

Billions is absolutely based on reality. Steve Cohen / SAC Capital.

He can't buy all the companies. That's only 1% of just the NYSE market cap.

What is the max size of asset that can profit 4%/yr alpha from insider trading?

I think he means any of the companies, not all at once. And I'll note again that stock picking is not what their fund does anyway.

As if hedge funds only trade stocks. As if LIBOR was the only thing ever fixed.

Could you provide a source on this?

I agree that no one insight in this essay is especially surprising. But I think the right way to think about this is Paul Graham's framework http://www.paulgraham.com/sun.html. Paul points out that if you are talking about very general topics, even a small delta of novelty is useful.

I think that describes Ray's work here well. He is talking about a very general topic (the narrative arc of history). It's hard to say anything completely new about a topic like that, but something that is only slightly new is still valuable.

I agree. Find me ONE, just ONE commentator, sage, whatever you want to call them - find me one whose grand predictions actually came true.

Sure, there are instances of people being right, but I'm talking about "sage" characters that are going around doing interviews and such.

I agree, but I find his methodology a lot more refreshing than other similar opinion pieces, who barely tries to look at data or give context to their claims (history).

Chapter 2 doesn't seem to be available there yet, but Dalio did post it on his linkedin page:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/money-credit-debt-ray-dalio

Worth mentioning Pure Alpha was down 20% in Q1. Someone else observed Ray Dalio has been too busy building his brand as a financial sage (cough cough) and either not keeping his eyes on the road or he just got lucky in 2008.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-03/bridgewat...

Dalio admits in this that he didn't see the pandemic coming.

...or he didn't plan for the pandemic and got wiped out like most everyone else? It doesn't have to be Ray's fault for not being prescient.

Unless the US losses a major war either economical or physical they are hard to upend because of globalization. Everything is very dependent on the US dollar and switching it will take a lot of persuading. Like losing a world war type persuading.

I think that the “de-dollarization” can happen gradually, with the dollar slowly becoming a smaller portion of a bucket of currencies used for international transactions. Even countries that want to get out from under the dollar tax probably want this to be a slow transition.

That said, I have no idea what the next few years will look like economically. Probably income inequality will greatly expand and I wouldn’t be surprised if new national alliances occur.

With covid-19, the U.S. Congress is really hammering the Cosmic Credit Card.

The deficit and the debt seem to be Really Big Numbers, existing in a scope outside of economic reality.

One has the impression that this is not an economic perpetual motion machine.

Maybe covid-19 could sink the USD and usher in a new economic phase.

But seems unlikely, and there further seems zero political will to do anything more sane fiscally.

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“The slow one now will later be fast / for the times they are a Changin’” -Bob Dylan

Loved reading “Principles” by Dalio. Great read.

I find it apparent that the U.S. is declining while China is in a prime position to reach new heights. The U.S. greatest competitive advantage has been culture which is quickly being copied by the new middle class in China.

The U.S. has allowed the wealth gap to grow to levels that are pretty scary. The U.S. has continued to elect inept and crony politicians who wish to look backward instead of bring the nation forward.

> The U.S. has allowed the wealth gap to grow to levels that are pretty scary.

China has scary levels of wealth gap too. I think it is probably has more.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/04/06/income-inequali...

> The U.S. has continued to elect inept and crony politicians who wish to look backward instead of bring the nation forward

China is perceived to much more corrupt than the US. It is not even a competition. This index is not perfect but this is the closest we have to measuring corruption uniformly across different systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

If the US is declining and China is ascending, why do we so many Chinese PhDs students (many of them my friends and hate going back) who want to stay back in the US with many years of wait time?

https://www.boundless.com/blog/visa-bulletin/

Let us please stick to facts and data.

(All the falsifiable statements in this parent comment are false but for some reason it is on top.)

It’s amazing that someone who has a deep nuanced view of American politics and critiques the minutia of American current events from the inside, then blindly believes vague propaganda from China (“China united and strong! Great and competent leader!”). Super common perspective from upper-middle class Americans who argue on HN and Reddit.

If you don’t live in China, don’t speak Chinese, didn’t grow up in China, have no Chinese family, then you simply have to idea what the fuck is really going on there.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You have a good point here, and this way of making it just makes everything worse.

We've had to ask you this kind of thing many times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781294

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22543721

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343386

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19010638

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17822100

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20805021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667959

... and that's just for starters. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on? I appreciate the good comments you make here and don't want to ban you, and at the same time, there is a problem.

Was the problem the class component? I thought it was relevant because there is a monoculture on HN and Reddit, and most of the readers likely identified with that.

Only insofar as it's part of a putdown package. Really it's the combination of pejorative language (especially when personal), outright insults ("blindly believes vague propaganda"), putdowns ("super common perspective from [etc.]"), aggressive argumentativeness (your last sentence). The whole deal.

I'd be careful about perceptions like "there is a monoculture on HN and Reddit". Trying to pin down anything concrete about that is really slippery. Such perceptions are notoriously in the eye of the beholder, meaning we tend to create them without realizing it's we who are creating them, and it leads us to do battle with our own demons. Large statistical clouds like HN (let alone Reddit) furnish tons of material to craft demons with, far more than we need. That makes the pictures extremely convincing—with enough degrees of freedom you can fit any curve to any picture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980339

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098687

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Seconding this opinion.

China may need no help from US to jeopardise its ascendancy.

So far, China's progress came at a greatest expense of its political establishment.

For long, people have expected that at some point the people in power will decide that they need to put a leash on the country that gets too far ahead of its political leadership, and prevent it from getting "too successful" for them to manage.

They way Xi's administration not simply acting on that, but like tripling and quadrupling down on it in the last few years is the biggest proof that they have passed that point.

Yeah, this is a pretty common affliction among well-to-do Americans, and I just do not understand it. Remember when Sam Altman said it's easier to discuss controversial ideas in Beijing than San Francisco?

That is just plain scary. Reminds of this old Soviet joke.

Q: Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR, just like in the USA?

A: Yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan”, and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan",and you will not be punished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

> The U.S. greatest competitive advantage has been culture

I'd argue it's being the global reserve currency not culture.

According to the article,being global reserve currency is a the result, not cause, of having competitive advantages

What does declining mean in this context? Getting worse? More rudderless? Not improving as quickly? Overvalued? The US could be improving and be overvalued at the same time.

There is still a lot of innovation coming out of the US despite it maybe being a bit inefficient.

Declining as in the machine that is the U.S. is broken and there is no apparent fix in sight. This generation won’t experience famine or regress into a developing nation but we will experience a decoupling of some of the preconceived notions of what being an American is.

I believe if we make some changes we can push the U.S. back to being the beacon of freedom that it has the potential to be. We have a lot of brilliant minds here.

I have a controversial hypothesis about what creates freedom in nations: it's the self sacrifice of people willing to make others free. In the US it was the independence and civil wars. Then the lazy descendants carelessly waste this freedom until none left, and the nation folds into an authoritarian black hole or enough people start the new cycle by sacrificing themselves. In some sense, creating freedom is like donating all your money to a neighbor and they dying on streets.

Agree (sadly) about the decline of US. But for new hegemony look elsewhere other than China. China is a dictatorship and they inevitably fail or reform, and right now China is not heading towards reform. Also, have you seen wealth gap in China?

Lost me in the first paragraph. Examining a history of money supply and debt that predates Bretton-Woods is simply not relevant. Everything I read could have been lifted from a comment thread in /r/Libertarian 10 years ago. The last financial crisis was the ultimate test for fiat currency. One that was pointed at as the moment that debt-driven currency would crash and burn by a lot of gold bugs.

Instead, a deluge of loose money came and went. Banks recovered. Markets recovered. Jobs recovered. Everything recovered. Even if the face of continued fiscal profligacy. There is absolutely no logical conclusion that can be drawn except for fiat currency being one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century.

debasement happens all the time https://money.visualcapitalist.com/currency-and-the-collapse...

OK, but what's your point? The US dollar doesn't seem to be debasing too badly since 2008, despite all the new money created.

That's utterly preposterous. It's the exact same gibberish that Ron Paul used to try to convince us the Fed action was going to cause massive inflation. He said it for years. Then we struggled to crack 2% with gigatons of helicopter money.

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