Ask HN: Are you worried about the state of the “West”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you worried about the state of the “West”?

3 pointsrecvonline12 comments

I wonder how people feel about their western countries (EU, US, Canada etc) vs. India/China - what seems to be the rising powers.

Are we on the decline? Demographics seem to speak for the China/India/South Africa alliance versus US/EU.

Are you thinking in terms of that or how do you asses the future of your country for you and your family?

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I try not to tie my well-being to my country. Partially this is defensive due to living in the USA, but it also is pragmatic. What is a country, anyway? Some countries of today did not exist 100 years ago. Some countries from 50 years ago do not exist today. Countries merge and split and come and go in various ways if you look at a long enough period of history. The people who live within them have ups and down in their societies, periods of well-being and periods of pain. Even aside from all that, being too tied to your country is one of the things that I see that causes hate and mistrust of other countries. We're all people, we all share many needs despite different cultures.

So I try to think bigger than my country. And smaller - I take care of my life at my home. I make sure my family has stability, and try to have safety nets in place if things get really bad with supply chain disruptions, etc.

I'm not sure China is benefitting from anything demographic-wise. Seems like they're already peaked in terms of working age people and it's a decline from here. At least in the U.S. there's still plenty of immigration which continues to bolster population numbers whereas China, Japan, S. Korea can't (or don't want to) depend on that.

https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/07/12/the-end-of-chi...

One could also view immigration as China, India, and Latin America expanding into the US.

It depends on what you mean by decline. In 1900 Britain was a lot more powerful on the international stage then it is today. I'd much rather live in Britain now though because even though it has "declined" living standards are a lot better in 2022 then 1900. I have concerns for the future of the U.S when it comes to politics and polarization. I don't think a future where the average living standards have increased in the U.S but we no longer are as dominant as we currently are in international relations and economics is a bad thing. It isn't our right to be a superpower and the largest economy in the world. I worry that other people in America don't share my view and if we "decline" it will be messy.

This was posted the other day: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2022/comm/popu...

Democracies are sleep-walking their way into extinction. We keep pretending that autocratic/dictatorial regimes are going to "play fair." They do not. We keep pretending that if we trade with them, they'll want to become democracies. They do not. We keep pretending that if we write agreements with them, they will respect those agreements. They do not.

The Chinese and Russian governments are absolutely committed to destroying democracy, and they are by and large succeeding. They have bought out our politicians, poisoned our social media, and stolen our technology. And we, the democracies, have done sweet fuck-all to prevent them from destroying us.

Good luck to the latest generation: I believe you will be ruled by a dictator by the time I'm dead.

On the topic of demographics, a map showing where the next 1000 babies, on average, will be born: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vwixz5/100...

This is a big topic but as far as Demographics go, China is by far the worst placed big nation due to their one child policy and inability to support more than one child due to modern costs. If that were the only factor or even a major factor, would be massively negative for China's future vis-à-vis rest of the world.

I don’t see India forming a bloc with China.

I can only imagine a society to be stable if it manages to maintain trust. Not only trust in the government, whatever form it may have; but trust in other people that are also part of this very society.

In my humble opinion, trust can only be formed via communication.

No. Societies have problems but I don't get what the "versus" means when you put it like "west vs India/China", or how those countries are relevant to the majority of the problems that people in western societies have.

Yes, we are declining, not civilizationally, but in terms of global power. This is due in part to technology (energy, communications, infrastructure), but in large part is down to the "victory" of globalist capitalism in the '90s, which has helped to spread technologies and skills around the world in a way which evens out historical imbalances in information. So, life is mostly getting better, but the US is unlikely to be the world's bully in 100 years, the lingua franca may change, and eurocentrism will be challenged. My only concern in the matter is hoping that governments stay sane enough to avoid nuclear war long enough for humanity to become whole peacefully.

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