Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America (1995)
openculture.com
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It really is crazy to see the way the US is going. I remember reading every time in history an emerging superpower was replacing a declining power, the declining power got antsy and shot first, leading to them getting whooped by the emerging superpower, cementing them as a superpower. I wonder if that will happen with the US.
Some kinds of babies are good and other babies are bad (in their view). They only want "good" babies.
Trump's unconstitutional executive order targeting birthright citizenship tells you all you need to know about who they think the bad ones are.
And though many have tried, no country has figured out how to meaningfully drive up birth rates with pro-natalist policies.
There's only one proven way to get more babies and sustain economic growth when native birthrates decline: MORE IMMIGRATION.
If immigration to the US continues apace, we surpass China's total population within decades and continue strong economic growth comfortably. If TrumpElon really manage to kill the golden goose, welp... it's been real.
First, I'm saying Musk's apparent interest in birth rates is best understood as a component of the neo-fascist, authoritarian project in which he's embedded himself, the likes of which we've seen many times throughout history, and is the kind of thing that often culminates in large scale atrocity.
Second, I'm saying for anyone who is truly interested in driving population growth, the last thing one would do is inhibit immigration. Instead, you'd open the floodgates.
No one. And everyone.
That's the point. There will be no on 'policing' things (even imperfectly), and so anyone who wants to do a power grab will make an attempt.
"Those in positions of power do what their power permits, while the weak have no choice but to accept it." — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 5.89
There will be no one 'policing' things (even imperfectly)
Although, that's a specific part of the "world policing" role that I can see China stepping into.
They certainly have the manpower and the shipbuilding capacity, and they certainly have the incentive to protect international shipping so they can sell their goods everywhere.
I don't think China (yet) wants any part of the other bits of world policing, like deploying armies and/or funding proxy wars on the other side of the world.
IDK, I could see China funding a proxy war in Ukraine, any time soon.
Just not in a good way, so to speak.
I don't think they want the US as an enemy. It's not good business for them.
I have a 100% unsupported belief that 100% of the public messaging from all sides regarding Taiwan is complete BS. I think that behind closed doors, all parties (except maybe Taiwan themselves) are working out a deal so that Taiwan winds up back in China's hands in the next 10-15 years without a war and everybody gets to save some face. I think that the CHIPS act, TSMC foundries on US soil, etc are all part of this process. It is the most mutually beneficial situation for the US and China: they get Taiwan; we get non-traumatic continuity for our chip supplies, everybody gets to save face, etc. (I'm not endorsing it or decrying it or even touching the morality or lack thereof)
I think that you're probably correct, but that goal will be in tension with the corollary "... And Russia next door is buying lots of raw materials and miliary hardware, even at an above-market price".
China is thinking long term and building capabilities:
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
i'm not saying it's good or bad, but i think this is a thing that most people don't seem to be recognizing/acknowledging.
> I think that the CHIPS act, TSMC foundries on US soil, etc are all part of this process.
very likely
And, well put this way: the management in China seems to be more grown-up and stable, which is better for long-term prospects.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crr54x00857o
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/20/chinese-econ...
https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-deflation/
https://www.aei.org/economics/chinas-economy-is-in-deep-trou...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/03/xi-china-economic-decli...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/business/chinas-gdp-q2.ht...
"growing slowly" != "declining"
> https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crr54x00857o
"China's economy expanded in the third quarter at the slowest pace since early last year, as the country struggles to boost flagging growth."
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/20/chinese-econ...
"It has been a grim month for the Chinese economy: A slew of recent data has revealed the world’s second-largest economy is slowing faster than expected, causing analysts to predict it will miss its relatively modest 5 percent growth target this year."
> https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-deflation/
*Chart showing growth in all but one quarter since the start of 2019, and good growth in all but one of the growing quarters*
> https://www.aei.org/economics/chinas-economy-is-in-deep-trou...
"This week’s disappointing Chinese GDP (gross domestic product) numbers showed that Chinese economic growth has slowed to 4.75 percent from the very rapid annual economic growth rate of seven to eight percent during the 2010s"
> https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/03/xi-china-economic-decli...
"China’s economy is performing dreadfully. The post-pandemic bounce was far smaller and briefer than the Chinese government had anticipated. Despite recording a respectable, if diminished, official growth rate of 5.2 percent in 2023, the reality may have been much slower, with some analysts estimating growth was no more than 1-2 percent."
> https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/business/chinas-gdp-q2.ht...
"China’s economy grew 0.7 percent in the second quarter over the previous three months, below the expectations of most economists. When projected out for the entire year, the economy grew at an annual rate of about 2.8 percent — a little less than half the rate in the first three months of this year."
The USA, by comparison, was 2.5% in 2023.
If China is "in decline" from these numbers, so is the USA.
There doesn't have to be a replacement. Just like nobody replaced the USSR after the Cold War ended leaving the US as the worlds lone super power.
A world can exist with no super powers and with multiple conventional powers.
https://www.thenerdreich.com/trumps-weird-freedom-cities-and...
Wonder how long they'd last if Greenland, Panama and Gaza are up for grabs by non-network states though.
Some of us who are optimistic believe that the uniqueness of the U.S. lies in its favorable environment for innovation (e.g. YC), so we hope to invent our way out of problems. We grew up on hopeful sci-fi and will stick to it until our bitter end.
American optimism and hope did not derive itself from "hopeful sci-fi" or tech. The sci-fi and tech came in its superpower phase, post-WWII. American optimism preceded that by decades if not centuries, because its population believed--despite everything--that as country it always strove to act in a morally just manner both domestically and internationally. What's more is that this mythology, cause that's what it was, happened to be accepted by much of world as well. That accomplishment in persuasion exceeds any accomplishment in short-term innovation when the goal is to maintain a long-lasting empire.
There was a time when many thought Nazi Germany was the most innovative and advanced entity in the world. Yet, even at the time, no one who believed that would care to immigrate to Nazi Germany for that reason. The same would be true if China became the most technologically advanced country in the world.
It is the man-child delusion of the broligarchy to claim that American optimism is (was) rooted in technological advancement.
"Everything not saved will be lost." -- Nintendo
This is not a technical problem; it's a societal/social one.
Without mandatory reeducation I don't think it's a solvable problem.
https://ballotpedia.org/Joe_Biden%27s_executive_orders_and_a...
Sure, with the peaceful transfer being recently violated for the first, but probably not the last time. The literacy rate in the US continues to decline, and the US keep losing respect on the world stage which is only going to get much worse over the next 4 years.
> Some of us who are optimistic believe that the uniqueness of the U.S. lies in its favorable environment for innovation (e.g. YC),
The US doesn't have an especially favorable environment for innovation than other first world countries, arguably it has less given the lack of regulation.
> favorable environment for innovation
I may be wrong, but all indications are that this is a sort of "past glory".
I've not personally visited Shenzhen, but every online account (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toizHWGD-rE) shows that they are making everything there -- the "Designed in California, Made in China" is a tenuous situation, and not guaranteed to last.
Like how DeepSeek was a wake-up moment, there are several more waiting to happen.
Again, this is my very much "secondhand" perspective, but I think the GP's assertion is on borrowed time.
The government can continue even if the US stops being a democracy, citizens lose their basic rights (like they did Jim Crows era), or have a civil war without continuity of government breaking.
The US can smoothly slide into Hungary, then Singapore (parliamentary republics only in the name), or more crash into South American Banana Rebublic with some key blues states working, while large parts of the country are effectively lawless or authoritarian.
the uniqueness of the U.S. lies in its favorable environment for innovation
The Trump administration is doing serious damage to that ability on several fronts.
> Thucydides Trap, is a term popularized by American political scientist Graham T. Allison to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon
> Allison led a study at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs which found that, among a sample of 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivaling a ruling power, 12 ended in war.[3] That study, however, has come under considerable criticism, and scholarly opinion on the value of the Thucydides Trap concept—particularly as it relates to a potential military conflict between the United States and China—remains divided.
Aye. It's illogical to call to "Make America Great *Again*" while also claiming there's no decline. Logic isn't how politics works, so that doesn't stop it.
The logic is undiminished potential hobbled by weak leaders, sinister cabals, and their enablers.
But seriously, even last time, with 2016's MAGA slogans including "drain the swamp", there's a gap between "great but we could be better if not for them" and the implicit absent greatness of the initials forming MAGA.
The USA may be happy to cast psychic damage on itself, I wish to only learn what I must to defend myself from the nonsense that spills outside your borders. :)
> It's illogical to call to "Make America Great *Again*"
So if we want to be "great" again we gotta do something entirely different. The problem seems more similar to that of big companies and monopolies. A monopoly isn't an inherently bad thing, it is just that they frequently abuse their positions as it is easier to extract wealth by using your weight than it is to innovate. Even though a monopoly is in a far better position to innovate than they had been at any other point in time! (You can take on far riskier problems, ones that have high likelihood of failure but that the success would similarly be enormous. That failure kills many startups but is nothing to big company. Google can run X at billions in losses and Zuckerberg can throw money as fast as he can at the Metaverse without real risk of the companies failing). The problem is that in general systems optimize towards their "lowest energy state", which is __not__ innovation (directly. It does include absorbing innovators). It is laziness. In optimization, it is that you stop exploring and rely entirely on exploiting your established knowledge. You're stuck in a local optima if you do this. The problem is that we tend to rest upon our laurels.
Is this not the same thing? American can't repeat the magic of that time period any more than Google can repeat the magic that happened in the early 2000's. Just a few days ago I was arguing that we should be taking higher risks and throwing more money into the sciences[0]. The pushback is about ensuring that the money made its way to productive projects and not conmen. But neither have we stopped conmen nor have we significantly improved in predicting what constitutes the most groundbreaking research. So America relies upon its status to extract money from the system we've created over innovation. We were forced to innovate before, and now we don't. In our fear of losing our status we take fewer risks, but by doing so, we ironically end up taking even greater risks. It is the problem of delayed reward systems and recognizing the difference between long term investments and short term. So I think China's rise can cause America to re-establish it's dominance, but it depends at our reaction. Competition is good because it forces one to not be lazy, but recognizing this cause allows us to approach competition differently and even recognize the results can be obtained without it. Do we rely upon our status to main status or do we recognize that we've become fat and need to "hit the gym." I'm not confident this administration understands the difference nor am I confident that the interest is in that goal. So I worry we will just repeat the process, getting too caught up in the moment that we lose sight of what actually matters. Losing sight of the actual reasons that "made us great" in the first place, being unable to differentiate the real factors. Might as well be a cargo cult.
Optima at 1/e of an opportunity's lifetime, IIRC? May be over specific to the "secretary problem".
In the cultural revolution China sent all it's educated out to the fields or worse. Now:
>China awarded 1.38 million engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2020. The comparable American number is 197,000 https://asiatimes.com/2022/07/a-tale-of-two-talents/
That's China advance, not a US decline.
I'd argue that the focus should be on creating prosperous communities, of mutual benefit to their individual members. But maybe that's just a "pathway" to individual prosperity.
But people don’t exist for the benefit of communities.
Let them deliberate without us watching over their shoulders (because it's mostly just the powerful who do) and we might get back to writing laws that solve problems.
Check the work at https://congressionalresearch.org/ for a lot of evidence on this topic.
The Citizens United ruling had essentially noting to do with "money in politics" and was just a bog standard first amendment ruling against a federal agency attempting to read the power to regulate political speech into a statute that had been passed a mere eight years earlier.
Contrary to the misinformation spread through the media, the court did not rule that "money is speech", but ruled almost exactly the opposite: it was the FEC that was attempting to argue that "speech is money" -- that using resources to speak in a way that might persuade voters was equivalent to donating those resources directly to a candidate -- and therefore they had the right to restrict the publication of "electioneering communications". The court ruled that no, speech is not money, and is protected by the first amendment under all circumstances.
So the ruling put things back the way they were in 1995, before the FEC had ever gotten the idea that they had the power to censor speech.
The Citizens United ruling didn’t just clarify the FEC’s authority, it fundamentally reshaped the landscape of American politics by allowing unlimited corporate and union spending on elections, which critics argue disproportionately amplifies the influence of wealth. While the Court didn’t explicitly equate money with speech, its decision enabled the flow of money into the political system in a way that is effectively treated as free speech under the First Amendment. Far from "restoring the status quo," Citizens United created a system where the wealthy can now spend unlimited amounts of money to sway elections, a shift that has drastically altered democratic representation.
The court did the exact opposite, and repudiated the attempt by the FEC to equate money with speech.
The FEC were effectively arguing that "speech is money" and that their authority to regulate campaign donations allowed them to censor the direct expression of political opinions by organizations that weren't associated with candidates in any way, under the theory that the expenditure of resources in a way that might influence voters' opinions is equivalent to directly donating the monetary value of those resources to whichever candidates might benefit from shifts in opinion.
Prior to the FEC's attempted enforcement of the 2002 BCRA, this wasn't even an issue at question -- the right of individuals and organizations alike to express their own opinions with their own resources was never in doubt.
There was no century old precedent at stake at all. The case, and the ruling, was about the FEC attempting to use a 2002 statute to censor the release of a movie in 2008, invoking a concept ("electioneering communication") that did not exist at all prior to the 21st century.
What I meant was that before this case ....there were a variety of limits and checks regarding money in politics from a variety of sources... and especially regarding corporate donations.... And after the case was ruled this way... money flowed in a way that it hasnt in 100 years prior. Any attempt to deny this is just criminal.
Your facts are just straight-up wrong.
I can, however, see the some of the unintended consequences of regulatory interventions in other countries. For example, Germany's ban on nuclear power made them dependent on Russian oil imports, inadvertently propping up Putin's regime.
This sounds like you are observing much of that, and then dismissing the results as superficial appearances.
Dismissing regulation here would be like dismissing a comparison of a correlation between laws against murder and a low murder rate and a correlation between no laws against murder and a high murder rate.
The reality is there is a hint of truth in everything. We must be careful to assign cause where correlation exists.
Let's use Vermont's gun laws for example. Over the last 40 years, the state's approach to firearms has been quite permissive, with relatively few restrictions, but it still maintains a reputation for having one of the lowest gun violence rates in the country. Vermont is one of the few states in the U.S. where people can carry a concealed weapon without a permit. So is it regulation that prevents the gun violence, as many would lead you to believe, or is it a combination of factors. Factors like social stability, cultural attitudes toward guns, and the state's strong focus on community engagement. Those all contribute to the relative lack of gun violence, rather than simply the laws themselves.
But speaking from experience, when we are deep into ego development years (think teens), I would have absolutely killed someone if it wasn't for murder laws. But today, what holds me back is empathy, and not the law.
That was true for decades, but over the past 15 years, 28 more states have adopted Vermont-style permitless concealed carry laws, so it's now a majority of states that allow this.
But someone has to seed them
Bernie's ideas are very dangerous, because he offers simplistic, pat solutions to risks that are fundamental to politics itself (at the expense of the much more nuanced safeguards we've developed over the ages) while proposing to make the political state far more central to people's immediate lives and livelihoods than it has ever been before.
Getting politics out of civil society is much more important than getting money out of politics.
And "Make America Great Again" is as well, but over 70 million people rallied behind it
If there's any evidence of a decline, it's definitely found in the extent to which people are both (a) looking to federal politics to solve their local and personal problems for them, and (b) supporting incompetent sloganeers as the people they want managing federal politics.
Of course. The vast majority of America needs "sound bites" of info. Wish this wasn't the case. But it's worked for decades.
>Money is just a tool. The resources and incentives that the money is being spent on already exist, and it's being used to further ambitions and goals that were always present. Getting "money out of politics" in a formalistic way will just lead to corrupt ambitions being facilitated via some other means.
You're not wrong. But there is a happy medium. Super PACs/Citizens United....this is what he's targeting. Those are dangerous. They are not in the interest of all American people. They benefit the few.
And we cannot have hypocrites at every level. The insider trading that occurs due to politician privilege is insane. But not Bernie, his actions match his words. He lives by his principles. That cannot be said for many politicians.
>Bernie's ideas are very dangerous, because he offers simplistic, pat solutions to risks that are fundamental to politics itself (at the expense of the much more nuanced safeguards we've developed over the ages)
Is that's how things have played our for the folks in Vermont? I grew up in that area. I've watched his policies shape the landscape for decades. But his policies aren't why he's a great candidate.
While his policies are a big part of his platform, what really resonates with a lot of people is his unwavering commitment to first principles values like fairness, equality, social justice, and democracy. These principles drive his entire political career, and they shape his policy proposals, but they also make him stand out in a political landscape where many politicians change their stance based on what's politically expedient or donor-friendly.
Bernie's character and consistency are arguably just as important as his policies in defining who he is as a politician.
>while proposing to make the political state far more central to people's immediate lives and livelihoods than it has ever been before.
This is a concern of mine as well. It's the ultimate balancing act. Provide just enough support for folks that they still hold agency in their life. As Fred Rogers put it, "There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it."
And this is part of the problem. Citizens United was a bog standard first amendment ruling that has been targeted by an aggressive misinformation campaign by a faction that wants the unprecedented power to censor political discourse, and people are eating up the misinformation.
> While his policies are a big part of his platform, what really resonates with a lot of people is his unwavering commitment to first principles values like fairness, equality, social justice, and democracy.
But again, his "commitment" is in the form of talk. The reality of the policy positions he does advance is to set us up for the exact opposite of all of those things. I don't know whether he's a well-intentioned fool or a deceptive manipulator, but either way, the consequences are the same. He's just a mirror image of Trump, using vague emotional appeals to win power, then horribly misusing that power.
> Provide just enough support for folks that they still hold agency in their life. As Fred Rogers put it, "There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it."
Absolutely correct. And the problem here is that "insisting on someone's doing something" is the fundamental nature of the political state, while "establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it" is the task of a dynamic and pluralistic civil society, in all its forms.
The more we allow the assertion of political power to solve problems that ought rightly be solved by bottom-up activity in civil society, the more we set ourselves up to be the victims of abuse (especially as the well-intentioned people who created the system of political dependence are superseded first by indifferent functionaries, and then by corrupt powermongers).
I hear what you are saying. But again, his policies have had measurable benefits to his constituents in Vermont. With a track record going back decades. I understand you might not have first hand experience with this as I did. But to discredit years of his work saying it's all talk is a little tongue in cheek.
At the end of the day I think we both know it'll always be an attempt to pick the "least evil."
Cheers!
Everyone who disagrees with me is gullible and misinformed.
Pay them each a million bucks a year, for fuck's sake. That's $535 million dollars -- but remember we immediately get a lot of that back in taxes. Fuck, round it up to a billion dollars to include the cost of the agency to watch them. A whole team for each congress-critter. Half of the salaries go into escrow and the escrow money gets paid out after they leave office. And they can't work for 5 years after they leave office -- none of that indirect bribery where "cooperative" congresspeople get cushy jobs at the companies they helped during their tenure on capitol hill.
That's still only like a tenth of a percent of the total US Government budget.
Anybody who thinks that this won't improve the functioning of our government by at least 0.14% is welcome to tell me why.
That’s a recipe for disaster. The Founders came up with a Constitution for a reason. Public debate is not our problem. Any more than freedom of speech is our problem.
I wonder why?
/s
I'll concede, in the US, just as in everyplace else, we have a long list of issues with which we need to deal. However, things like public debate and freedom of speech are not present on that list. I, personally, would go one step further, and caution everyone to carefully consider the possible motives of anyone calling for the elimination of public debate and discourse in government.
Some interesting articles about how previously citizen votes were public and how it led to intimidation, and the push for secret ballots for citizens.
"when the United States is a service and information economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues"
But this time, current time, with technology, it seems different.
Even though you could make same arguments that the printing press had similar effects and criticisms. Hence this is just another cycle of technology change. But really, does seem different in scale this time around.
"It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services and what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed."
'The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.'
"There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-posts...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/17/china-econo...
Can you trust Chinese's numbers when its real estates, foreign investment drop, deflation...etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JYWFUI5kEc
https://apnews.com/article/china-youth-unemployment-slowdown...
It's also a straw man to nitpick the number, as your claim "That leaves the U.S. still standing with economic growth" - was that China was not growing, at all.
What might strike some people as odd is that it took like 50 years for people to start to panic about the future of our economy. And even that is probably inaccurate. I think people did panic in the 70s and 80s, but we have so far to fall and nobody expected it to take so long.
Prophetic, time machine, crystal call.
That's exactly the lenguage of darkness and superstition...
"Matt Novak cautions against falling back into superstitious thinking in our praise of Demon Haunted World. After all, he says, “the ‘accuracy’ of predictions is often a Rorschach test” and “some of Sagan’s concerns” in other parts of the book “sound rather quaint.”"
>February 4, 2025 at 11:07 am
>In the immortal words of Ghandi “When an idiot is elected to power, the people who voted for him is well represented.”
Don’t say that. Nothing says “thoroughly defeated” quite as well as people lacking in self-awareness running around shouting, “The South shall rise again!”.
Let’s just put our heads down and come up with some ideas on how we can better operate in the newly leveling global context.
The schizophrenic doesn't understand that other people are sane!
Suddenly, it makes perfect sense - a schizophrenic (or perhaps a group of them) somehow came up with science. And for them it was a world changing event, as they could disprove their hallucinations one by one. It turned them from something that was barely surviving on the outskirts of society into somewhat functional beings.
But, for the same reason why he was insane in the first place, sooner or later he corrupts his science as well.
However the schizophrenic doesn't uderstand that others are sane.
So, when he was convincing the sailors that scurvy isn't from the lack of fruit, he fought their insane belief, like when he believed a leprechaun stabbed him. When he is convincing you that there are more genders than men and women, he is fighting your insane delusion, like when he disproved that there were fire spitting dragons flying in the sky! He's merely trying to bring you out of darknes, just like he did himself.
The election of Trump (especially Trump 2.0) is a ground-up repudiation of this consensus by ordinary people, who have a completely different life experience to the managerial cosmopolitan class (of whom this website largely represents). Trump, and various other right-wing ascendants throughout the world, are a statement by the common people of the belief that a desire for identity, sovereignty and representation does not disappear the moment a McDonald's appears in their home country.
The (understandable!) lamentations of the academic class towards the current actions of the Trump administration have, to my mind, a deficit of self-reflection and theory of mind towards the people supporting these actions. For decades, the stage of "democracy" has been increasingly garnished with explicitly non-democratic embellishments. NGOs, panels of "experts", bureaucratic oversight, international "obligations" and so on.
This is the exact same situation that motivated the people of Britain to vote for Brexit 9 years ago. Michael Gove, while I have very little time for him as a politician, made a point in a news interview that was condemned for years, but that I think was an accurate capture of working-class sentiment in that time. The soundbite form was "Britain has had enough of experts". And he was exactly right.
For decades, academia has been part of an ongoing anti-democratic, elitist movement to effectively take control away from common people. Health matters are deferred to "listening to the experts", and ordinary people were made to feel as if they didn't deserve a say on if they should be allowed to leave their own homes in 2020-21. NGO-funded academic studies serve to tell normal people that despite their own experiences, mass immigration has been an unambiguous good in their lives, and they have no right to express otherwise. This idea of deference to unelected experts peaked when normal people started being told that it was not within their jurisdiction to define for themselves what the words "man" and "woman" mean -- these two words that are foundational to human civilisation and the language spoken in it were to become the domain of a sect of largely self-appointed modern-day clerics, who expected the public to believe that they were completely rational, objective, and blind to ideology.
This is what the conversation on "anti-intellectualism" very often misses, when being discussed by those in the intellectual classes. While criticising the "uneducated" masses for being so unenlightened, they fail to notice that they also have biases, incentives, and ideological motivations, and it is these that the public are pushing back against, not the noble pursuit of objective knowledge.
When you declare that "studying things" is elitist, that's when you know your argument is cooked.
A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.
When such things are rightly levied in criticisms of academic ideological capture, the discussion reverts to the idea that the entire industry is nothing more than "studying things", as you put it, for knowledge and knowledge alone.
>A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.
You could say the same thing about a private-rank soldier, or a party secretary. The relatively low wages of one particular person is incidental to the main issue of the overall power structure, and who it serves.
“Elite” is traditionally a synonym for rich white men educated at Ivy League universities working comfortable, high-earning jobs. Those people still exist! Trump is one of them, as is George W Bush, and his father before him.
The better definition is simply that the elites of a nation are the ones that hold the most outsized political power, often the kind of intangible power that they are loathe to admit having. Trump is more or less attempting a small-scale revolution in America, being the replacement of one class of elites with another. What the prospective replacement class of elites looks like is harder to say than who they're attempting to replace.
Or maybe it's just a reaction to the "class of technocratic managers" becoming corrupt and dysfunctional, and attempting to control things that were far outside of the role that the "liberal capitalist post-historical consensus" had defined for them.
I've seen this article appear several times in two distinct time periods, one was after Trump was elected the first time, and the second is now.
Why is it popular now? Because people opposed to the present political party want to portray it as a decent into darkness and superstition. It's being used as a tool and it's hyperbole.
Don't fall for the trap, things in the US at least appear to be improving tremendously in just a matter of weeks. Border security is improving, cutting off trafficking and drugs. Middle East peace is advancing. Ukraine might be settled. Significant waste is being cut from government spending etc.
Trump just announced what amounts to a genocide on Palestinians and occupation of Gaza as American territory.
This won't be a lasting peace.
Until it decides to go on a mission of self fulfilled prophecy, trying to undo everything overnight.
the US is 249 years old.
Maybe instead of meddling in international affairs via cover NGOs, let those people work out their own problems like we did in our early republic. We don't have to be captain save-a-hoe for the world.
Average implies that it’s not a hard and fast rule they die at that particular point — as the following sentence implies.
The more important idea isn't the 250 years (I agree), the idea is that it's not unreasonable to model aspects of America as an empire.
My point was that decline and regrowth, or even political transition as with Rome, happen frequently — not just decline followed by collapse (or “death”).
I'd also argue that for most people anxious right now, the idea that America might be in a transitional period of turmoil, but that it'll emerge stronger in 20 years (I made up that number) is of cold comfort.
> I'd also argue that for most people anxious right now, the idea that America might be in a transitional period of turmoil, but that it'll emerge stronger in 20 years (I made up that number) is of cold comfort.
Trump is popular precisely on that platform — that we can do hard work now and reverse the decline in the US.
I think people would be comforted to know that it would only be twenty years — a lot of Millennials in that movement don’t believe they’ll see it, but are nevertheless doing it for their children (or relatives). A not infrequent sentiment is “it’s over for us bros, but do it for the kids!”
But it was also clear that there were many aspects of status quo that were deeply problematic. So I understand the urge at least.
Some argue that all organizations, including governments, eventually become oligarchies. See The Iron Law of Oligarchy (1911)
A civilization declines? If I didn't read history, I'd be shocked.
Isnt America still number 1 in GDP and the only regional hedgemon?
"I predict that America will decline." Someone write an article, I will be correct at some point.
And on the comments about superstition... religion is at an all-time low... So, I suppose that isnt perfectly correct.
If you look at wealth distribution, housing, cost of living, future prospects for young people, actual policies, you get a better picture.
The picture the USA is showing looks like a horror show to me.
Carl Sagan was right and the Right understood him well. Buying up radio stations, media to mold the larger public into a state where you basically have inoculated them against any form of nuance or reason gains you the power to overthrow democracy.
No, GDP has a few ways to measure it, China beats the US on some of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
I think China is also as much of a *regional* hedgemon as the US.
Might argue the EU as well, the Brussels effect etc., but that's less clear. Even after Brexit, the GDP-PPP is very close to the USA, though it is also definitely behind the USA.
But the world changes, and that change leads to political pressure. Even putting aside any possible radical technological shift (AKA "the singularity"), in 50 years from now, the EU may exist as is, or have disintegrated, or may have properly unified into a single polity much as the USA is today — and if the latter, it's likely it will have a single army and engage in hard-power-projection the way the USA does.
Still some value in trying to figure out 'why'. Treat History as a science and ask what are the overall patterns, is there something we can distill out to help guide the future.
US is at the top right 'now'. Wouldn't it be great to prevent the decline that history would say is on the way.
Read some Peter Turchin, he has some good analysis. Patterns in past cycles of growing, then falling, empires.
GDP is a completely outdated metric that didn't say anything about civilization decline when it was valid and still doesn't say anything about civilization decline now that's it's next to useless
Religion's gonna have a come-back once all those Jesuses crawl out from their Mom's basement and start their TikTok Channels for of and by advertisement, sry, I mean people, the people.
Opinion/POV:
America will decline as much as our species will decline, which is not at all, because all we'll do is change which is what America is doing right now.
I always found Tyler Cowen and Paul Graham "yucky", even words like 'obnoxious' felt like giving them too much credit for who they are, which is an opinion I derived from some of their writing and which is how I came to the liminal conclusion that they are exactly that kind of people who want back-doors into teen minds for the sake of an economy that rewards crowd control for the sake of propagating ALL markets, whatever trash-tv ethics they were build on; from punched drugs and cosmetics that destroy the kids' skin so that they have to continue to buy products to alleviate or hide the damage all the way to TV shows and live events that skew their sense of reality and social (and sexual) exploration to the point where "anything goes, just give in, let it happen, let it be, it is what it is" become the foundations of their virtues, much hidden in the subtext of "content" spanning a decade that tries "to warn" while it's actual "substance" works in harmony with the many things that fuck with teen minds and more than enough adolescents and grown ups.
But I recently came to understand that, and I think one of them even phrased it in some way himself, they (et al) are dead serious about 'leading' (to whom it applies) and steering the attention of those who pay attention via bad example and the worst versions of how they can make the economy work. It might be worse but they don't want to ruin or eliminate chances, they just really want to keep it all as open as possible to whomever is capable of doing what must be done to do better.
So whether America will decline or not, and whether our species will, is a matter of people getting the fuck up and going into merciless competition (with representatives, their interest groups, the legislative, executive, judicial branches) using the so obviously better ways that exist to change - not disrupt, evolve, really - the many industries that need to evolve. It's implicit, really, that if people stick to the wrong teachings, then things will break down. Evolution is slow burn, much like that turtle vs that Greek dude and can often seem like its 'plateauing' but in the bodies and brains of the living happens a lot that is subject to the innate mechanisms of an interconnected system. This is why the OODA [0] loop - observe, orient, decide, act - must be actively taught and emphasized and practiced in school, in games, and it should be made one of the key themes for interns in any industry.
It is the old guards fault that the world is what it is, and it will be all our fault if we fail to enable all the youngest generations to properly apply what they observe while they orient themselves in the free and in the professional world. Change isn't hard, but the people demanding and implementing it must be hard, so I believe the whole "it's declining" theme is an implicit challenge that emerged from the simple fact, that the old guard was annoyed to have raised such weak and systems-serving rather than systems-improving offspring, both theirs and that of all the other people.
A lot of what I just wrote is, to me, why some many PhD holders and Ivy league kids appear so disappointing.