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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

While interesting, I have a feeling that your prediction may be subject to recency and availability bias. If I picture myself looking from within the US, your scenario sure resonates. But looking from outside, I'm not convinced it does. From the other side of the planet, it looks like the US is having a moment but the other governments aren't sitting idle and letting entropy increase.

I'm also not sure that 50 years from now, the Capital Riot will be recorded as being a majorly significant event in US history. It'll probably be mentioned in history books but I'm doubtful it'll be referred to as a pivot point in US history.

Migration crisis: I feel there's been larger migration events in the past. Doubtful the climate crisis will actually be creating a massive scale migration crisis.

I do think climate change will change the dynamic in various areas.

I otherwise also agree on the paradigm shift in military technology.

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In Bangladesh alone 150 million people are projected to be displaced by rising sea levels by 2050. Many South American countries are suffering from spiking rates of kidney failure as the climate warms, which is already a factor in the US border crisis as an increasing proportion of migrants suffer from kidney disease.

Dikes are cheap 12th century technology.

I think there will be displacement, but over many years/decades as opposed to a single large event. That's why I'm not strongly confident in a migration crisis. I don't say this with confidence, but it doesn't seem likely to be as bad as say, a World War forcing 150M refugees overnight.

I think there will be a few levels of displacement and migration waves from climate change.

Things like sea level rise, rising temperatures, and more frequent blizzards or cold snaps act over decades. That'll be a gradual shift in migration patterns, not a crisis.

But a lot of the second-order effects operate on much smaller timescales. Hurricanes can cause large dislocation on the timescale of a week: look at Rita & Katrina in 2005, which cut the population of New Orleans in half and gridlocked all the freeways out of Houston for days. Wildfires also can trigger large migrations within a matter of weeks. We've been lucky that most of the West Coast wildfires have been in relatively unpopulated areas, but if one were ever to jump highway 280 in the Bay Area or get into the Pasadena/Glendale/Burbank area by LA, we could have a mass evacuation crisis. Crop failures too: that's what's driving a lot of the Middle East migration. If it happened in the U.S. or China millions of people would starve.

There's also violence caused by resource constraints. We see that in Central America now, in the Middle East, and increasingly in the middle of U.S. cities.

I've been predicting something like this since about 2005, long before recent events. It just it felt like it was far off in the future, not something happening right now.

The other major factor is a demographic crisis: worldwide, we have a large bulge in the number of people who are just about hitting 30 in 2020. Historically, when a lot of people reach reproductive years and there aren't the resources needed to support all of them having families, violence and social instability tends to result. This has been predictable since all these kids were born in the 90s, but obviously I'd hoped it'd go differently and technology would find some way to alleviate resource limits. Now we're here and seeing all the discontent from peoples' lives not turning out quite how they envisioned as kids.

Ah, so you read what you want to hear into current events and seek confirmation bias. Your whole world-view comes off as a bit prepper / Great Replacement-crank.

It's the nature of negative black swan events that there's always a reason to believe they won't happen right up until they do. If you hold these beliefs over a long-period of time, based on long-term societal trends, "your whole world-view comes off as a bit prepper / Great Replacement-crank". If recent events bear you out, it's Availability / Recency bias. If the events actually come true, then we won't be discussing it on an Internet message board, we'll either be dead or spending our effort trying to survive, in a perverse form of Survivorship Bias.

Nevertheless, we know from history that these events do occur, and they occur much more frequently than those of us alive now believe (again a form of survivorship bias - folks that don't live in a time of peace tend not to survive). The 250-year stability of the United States - and the 75-year Pax Americana after WW2 - is a historical anomaly. The article gives a bunch of reasons why the 2020s will be different, financially, from the 1980-2020 period, and I gave a bunch of reasons why it'll be different sociopolitically. You can choose to believe them or not, but I (and Dalio) at least explained the dynamics that lead me to believe them.

Recent generations in the US are pretty meek and well-mannered, and not exactly dripping with confidence.

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