The same guy who predicted collapse of USSR, is predicting the collapse of U.S.
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
He seems to think that the United States is exactly like the USSR in 1990, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Just look at his map. Its hilarious.
The USSR was a conglomeration of formerly separate countries who were culturally distinct, constantly bickered and fought. This was was mostly because the USSR wasn't around long enough for people to forget what independence for their country was like.
So yes, at the first sign of weakness of the central government each previously independent country eagerly broke away. They even had their old government systems to dredge up and fall back on when they wanted.
The 50 states, on the other hand, have never been separate countries (with one or two minor exceptions).
The Texans, while they might complain about the Californians, do not consider themselves a different ethnicity.
And the map's ideas of what countries will control what parts? Is he kidding me?
How can China possibly control the west coast? Its insane. The language and cultural barrier is insurmountable. And Mexico controlling Texas and the south east? Are you kidding me?
This shows a complete ignorance of the cultural issues of the region.
Our biggest mistake is that we both project our own experiences on the other. This article is a great example of this, as lionheart points out. In the other direction, we were wrong in thinking that the most likely alternative in 1991 to Soviet communism was US-style democracy.
While this guy's ideas are laughable, I understand how they could spread. I can imagine a similar book being written in the US about the Muslim world - playing on our fears, outlining some crazy scenario for the Middle East with no real basis in reality, and completely misunderstanding the differences between Iran and Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, etc.
In the end I decided that you mean: People call out the bullshit on HN.
A very important thing to note is that he believes the U.S is gone as the sole superpower. What he really means by collapse is about the same fate that endured the British Empire.
Even assuming the US doesn't have anything called a "collapse", it's obvious to anybody with eyes that there are a number of countries that will inevitably grow to superpower status over time. This is normal, and arguably good, since the alternative ("everybody stays poor") is probably bad. Singulatarians would argue that tech is moving such that people, or at least small collections of people (on the order of tens of people), may become "superpowers" by modern standards.
Even the most optimistic predictions of continued US success don't have it coming at the expense of other success, and the economic phenomenon that less developed countries have much more low-hanging fruit, allowing them to grow to modern standards much faster than the leaders, will not stop anytime soon.
Seems to me the question of whether the US will "collapse" is distinct from the question of whether it will be the "sole superpower" across any timespan past 10 or 20 years. (Slightly later edit: And the collapse of the US won't make China a superpower, it will mean there simply isn't one for a while. Superpower is ill-defined, but it definitely has something to do with being able to project force around the world, and China can't do that yet, except with nukes, and if that makes a superpower, than they are already there, along with numerous others.)
While Soviets often had a patriotic admiration of their country, it was often framed in the sense of the USSR being better than someone else, rather than on its own merits. Also, people were more locally pariotic: Russians were more Russian and Ukrainians more Ukrainian than Soviet.
Do Americans strongly identify themselves by their home state? In my experience (as an outsider) they do in a somewhat relaxed manner, but nowhere near the extremes of their pride and hope in the United States of America as a country. The strong inter-state migration also appears to support this.
China holds quite a few dollars and is wary of the USA's plans on trying to spend its way out of this recession in case their value slumps. There's an argument that all these rescue plans are just prolonging the inevitable, just as the boom was stretched by Greenspan's actions making it a huge bust to mirror the huge boom. What's needed is a hard crash in asset prices, houses, stocks, commodities, etc., until buyers are convinced that a hard bottom has been found. Then they'll be interested in buying again. And companies going to the wall in that time is a good thing; it culls the weak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
There's still worried talk of deflation. I think they're over concerned. There's some things I must buy, even if they're a bit cheaper tomorrow, e.g. food, and if my TV breaks, I'll replace it. By over-compensating for fear of deflation, we're facing high double-digit inflation in a year or so.
Reminds me of that old matra: For deflation, hold cash. For inflation, hold gold. For hyper-inflation, hold guns.
This map is a real trip. South Carolina splitting from Georgia? Mexico owning New Mexico but not Arizona? If he's going to prop up ridiculous fantasies, at least he could try harder.
What pains the the Russians to no end is that the very idea of the nation state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America. Only their backward, so-called "democracy" and a handful of nations in east Asia take it very seriously anymore, while the concept is used to pit regions against one another in Africa (see the US interference in Ethiopia and Somalia for a good case study). Make no mistake, "India vs. Pakistan" and "Iran vs. the Middle East" are culture wars with borders providing the necessary tension.
I'd love for that to be so, but it sounds like wish-fulfillment, to me. Care to provide links to more about that?
I can't provide links (books are of greater help when synthesizing theories for me) to prove this, but I do recommend reading up on the aforementioned trading blocs, as well as this excellent book: http://www.amazon.com/End-Nation-State-Regional-Economies/dp...
Thanks for the pointers!
Where are the ents going?
I can see an economic collapse and the fall of the USA as the most dominant super-power, but I don't see the country fracturing along the lines given in this article. One does not necessarily lead to the other.
Good point. CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT. The article was published to start interesting conversations like the one in this thread.
(That said, some of his comments make it seem that maybe that is why he made the map.)
On a somewhat related note, if we folded the federal government and signed a free-trade and migration pact between the 50 states, would we miss anything?
I don't know that that's necessarily the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War
I know because I grew up there and still talk to old friends.
Wake up, Cold War ended decades ago and we live in a global economy now. No matter what you see in movies you don't know anything about this country. You need to live here for at least, I would say, 3 years to understand it.
The article is silly.
Now I'm predicting that the Empire State Building will collapse. I must be right, I've done it before.
Even if he is the guy who predicted the USSR's collapse, that's meaningless now.
Also, Mexico is nowhere near powerful enough to control/influence that much of the US, so that part is clearly wrong.
The other parts are at least theoretically possible but still pretty unlikely.
I also like how he tries to deliver this theory as completely devoid of anti-American sentiment.
I don't think I need any reason to support my claim. Anyone who read the article will know why.
Nations have fallen to civil wars and dissolution before. I'm a little skeptic to just think that we're vulnerable to that, but at the same time, we're not invincible either. It would be silly to think that nothing bad could happen to the US.
Right now, it's just speculation based on classified information that may or may not be true.
As a nation, the U.S. is more uniform than it is then so any such theory would have to explain how this is to our detriment, how an increase in similarity can actually provoke serious infighting, because the psychology research shows that people who are more similar tend to get along together in the long run. More than that, we just elected a uniter, who seems to pick good advisors no less.
So in all, I really want to see this classified information, because we've been through pretty bad times before (that's pretty good evidence, yes?) and this country didn't break up then.
I agree that the article is more 'fun' than 'news', but is the WSJ implying in the sentence above that USA has nothing to see with the mentioned issues?
I was going to say that this is obviously rubbish and if the professor is spouting it then it reflects very badly on his hypothesis. But then I thought about what I would say if some journalist asked an insightful question like 'this is all rubbish and can't possibly be true, right?'
The most charitable way of looking at it is: maybe he was trying to remind people how wide the bounds of possibility are and that ruling out the prediction without examining his methods would be premature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/business/worldbusiness/30g...
"That Russia’s largest state-run energy company needs a bailout so soon after oil hit record highs last summer is a telling postscript to a turbulent period. Once the emblem of the pride and the menace of a resurgent Russia, Gazprom has become a symbol of this oil state’s rapid economic decline."
How credible is his source?