The Collapsing Leviathan

USA's power stems from having coasts on both oceans, which gives the USA unique naval advantages, according to a book:

> The United States Navy controls all of the oceans of the world. Whether it’s a junk in the South China Sea, a dhow off the African coast, a tanker in the Persian Gulf, or a cabin cruiser in the Caribbean, every ship in the world moves under the eyes of American satellites in space and its movement is guaranteed—or denied—at will by the U.S. Navy. The combined naval force of the rest of the world doesn’t come close to equaling that of the U.S. Navy.

> Having achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world’s oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies, and this could be done by making certain that no one was motivated to build navies—or had the resources to do so. One strategy, “the carrot,” is to make sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy. The other strategy, “the stick,” is to tie down potential enemies in land-based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies.

-- Friedman, George. The Next 100 Years (p. 45). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Basically he says that the USA can spend recklessly, be astoundingly inefficient, etc and still remain in power due to this.

I agree with a lot of this post, but I'm skeptical of characterizing the SAT as "one of the most fearsome weapons against entrenched wealth and power ever devised."

The SAT was originally created by a eugenicist "to uphold a racial caste system. He advanced this theory of standardized testing as a means of upholding racial purity in his book A Study of American Intelligence. The tests, he wrote, would prove the racial superiority of white Americans and prevent 'the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population'—chiefly, the 'infiltration of white blood into the Negro.'" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History

> The last side door for smart noncomformist kids is now being slammed shut.

How does a standardized test benefit nonconformists? I strongly disagree with eliminating the SAT, but always viewed success at it as requiring one to conform to a certain template. You need to shift your thinking patterns and your style to match what test writers want.

Wouldn't nonconformists have some of the more interesting extracurriculars and essays, things which have increased in value?

I agree with the part about smart kids being disadvantaged by the SAT going away, but nonconformists and smart people are not the same thing.

The stock market didnt really crater.

But more importantly, the author has nothing to say about academia itself. The whole 'went to the moon and promised flying cars' has cratered too. Simple things like epidemiology don't work. World seems resigned to watch humanity pay the toll of herd immunity and call that an achievement.

Covid-19 has perhaps been a test of organisation, more than anything else.

Unfortunately the US (from what I observed during my short time there a few years ago), though really amazing in many ways, did rather seem (in my European eyes) to be somewhat floundering in that regard.

> the US’s “holistic” college admissions system, with its baffling-to-foreigners emphasis on “character,” “leadership,” “well-roundedness,” etc. rather than test scores, originated in a successful push a century ago by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to keep Jewish enrollments down. Today the system fulfills precisely the same function, except against Asian-Americans rather than Jews.)

"Fulfills" implies it is effective, but enrollment statistics show this to be utterly false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130080

> do you not understand what your system will actually do to society’s underdogs? Or do you understand perfectly well, and approve?

I'm cynical by nature, but I'd rely on Hanlon's razor here.

Reminds me of a great movie called Idiocracy :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKyoSS3bwjA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHCVyllnck

I have been trying to think of a systematic way of testing whether and the extent of which the US is in collapse. It can be hard to separate the histrionics of the current media environment from facts on the ground. I’d be curious what model or factors people would consider relevant to such an analysis.

- influence on the world stage?

- GDP

- wealth inequality

- quality of life

??

So how do all the countries that don't have the SAT manage not to collapse?

One of the amazing things about the coronavirus pandemic is watching what all the right-thinking, non-MAGA folks are expected to blame Trump for swivel 180 degrees in an instant. Not so long ago, the idea that it mattered whether the US made things anymore was a Trumpian delusion, a cynical and counter-productive attempt to exploit people's nostalgia that fundamentally didn't understand how the modern world worked. Now that it turns out that actually being able to make things matters and is what decides if you can supply your populace and doctors with protection, suddenly it's Trump's fault for supposedly destroying American industry in just three years. Similarly, his China travel ban has gone from pointless and xenophobic to not strict enough without anyone blinking an eyelid.

The elite schools have always been a caste system, we just convinced ourselves after WW2 that the entire country belonged in a global upper caste. The notion seems just as absurd today as it did in the 1800s.

I attended public high school in rural upstate NY in the 90s and scored a 35 on the ACT when I was 16, without preparing at all. With some amount of studying I had a 1440 on the SAT that same year (1998 or 99) and didn't bother taking it again. I've always scored well on these tests, but it never translated into much acclaim or academic success. I smoked weed at lunchtime every single day my junior and senior years of high school, which was the kind of achievement that gets celebrated in those parts. For a while there we all dropped acid on the weekends too, the winters upstate are brutal. Unlike most of my friends, I went to college where I slacked my way through a 2nd rung liberal arts school with a 3.7 in subject (mathematics), graduating in 2005. By 2010 I was in a hurry to leave the miserable customer service/QA engineer role I had worked for 3 years at Surveymonkey.com, so I took the GRE. After about a week of half-assed prep in the evening I scored a 790 math 670 verbal 6.0 writing, enough to get me a scholarship for my Masters. Turns out going to school to escape your shitty job isn't the best decision, but I didn't have a lot of other options. Surveymonkey is worth what, a couple billion today? Well they didn't treat me very well back in 2007. In today's climate of online outrage I probably could have parlayed that mistreatment into something, I am a protected species afterall (gay).

From my perspective, the problem with this whole system is that smart kids are not challenged enough. Everything is too easy in public school, and bad habits are never corrected. There's also no role-models to show smart kids that they might go somewhere in life. Upstate New York is in a permanent state of decline, there's nothing these kids can look forward to and they have no money to go anywhere else. Depression and doubt, difficult home lives, access to all manner of drugs, child abuse etc. The best results from my high school came from a few Indian immigrant families who sent their daughters off to Harvard and the like. We still got those girls to drink and smoke weed with us though :).

There was another local (ie, white) kid in high school who was really smart and smoked lots of weed and got into trouble the same way I did. A real math talent. We took a double period of AP physics together right after lunch, so we were both high as hell in the back of the classroom. We both scored 5's on the test at the end of the year, too. He is a seasonal worker now, puts up tents for country fairs and the like during the summer.

The alcoholism in upstate New York is something people out in polite society would not believe. Lots of DUIs in my old friend group. These guys are conscious when they blow a .4 (or higher) on the breathalyzer. One ex-marine friend is a fire jumper (seasonal as well) and went to the hospital with a .6! He was joking with the doctor while they were pumping his stomach, a real character. No small number of these kids are dead.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, ain't nothing new under the sun.

> University of California will now permanently end the use of SAT and ACT in undergraduate admissions. This is widely expected, probably correctly, to trigger a chain reaction, whereby one US university after the next will abandon standardized tests

You're really missing the point of this action. Since the College Admissions scandal, it has become clear that people with deep pockets can game the SATs and ACTs by paying people with inside knowledge. The UofC doesn't want to eliminate standardized testing, they declared they want a replacement. They are changing this because it is unfairly skewed toward people who can pay up.

Trump and the corruption and anticompetitiveness that he represents is a long line of Conservatism that up-ticked during Reagan's era. Yes, that is certainly a threat to America, and something to worry about.

Conservatives want it all, and they want it concentrated in the fewest hands possible. They are the scorpion on the back of the frog which is Capitalism. Capitalism is free-enterprise, the opportunity for people to create wealth by creating things that benefit society. Conservatives want to twist the rules, to cheat the system, so that you don't have the opportunity, so that the rules heavily favor the people who already have it. Why? Because Conservatives stand for no-change, keep the wealth in the hands of people who were born into it. And concentrate it into their hands even more.

Conservatism is the opposite of what created the USA and made it special, it is the opposite of what made the USA an economic powerhouse. Conservatism is the default that most countries are governed by, since the beginning of time, across all geographies. Conservatism is the reason why innovation and brilliant creativism is sidelined. Because incumbent power brokers don't need it, they don't need change, they don't need improvements. They just need all the gains to continue going to a very few, and all they need for that is the maintenance of exploitation. Occasionally throughout history Conservatism has been broken by special laws the created fairness. In Ancient Greece it was the Solonian Constitution. In Ancient Rome it was The Law Of Twelve Tables. In 1707 Britain it was Parliament which broke Royal Monopolies and led to the Industrial Revolution. At the founding of the USA it was the Constitution. In all these cases, these laws of fairness drove massive levels of economic growth, of creative destruction and innovation, that changed the world.

The Conservatives want to destroy that, because they want it all for themselves, no matter what the consequences. The Roman Emperors destroyed their equitable laws, and that lead to the decline of Rome. Now massive corporations, their heads, and their political stooges/lackeys want to destroy equitable economic laws, they want to destroy antitrust legislation that prevents them from controlling it all forever. The momentum that big companies are building to destroy competition and fairness in this country is an existential threat to what makes the USA special. Citizens United. Unfettered mergers and acquisitions. Widespread corporate surveillance using data snooping. All these are of great concern.

His first point is valid. His second doesn't make sense to me.

The wealthy are already very good at gaming the SAT/ACT system via tutoring. Teaching to a test always improves test scores. Any metric will be gamed if an incentive to game it exists. No exceptions.

Meanwhile he ignores the real elephant in the room, namely that the elite university system as a whole is a major source of inequality in our society. Even if Harvard, MIT, and Stanford do everything in their power to make admissions as fair as possible or even to bias them toward underdogs, it doesn't matter much. All the top ten universities combined can't educate more than a tiny percentage of Americans. That means this tiny percentage of Americans get an outsized advantage that the vast majority of Americans will never experience.