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.
GDP is a completely outdated metric that didn't say anything about civilization decline when it was valid and still doesn't say anything about civilization decline now that's it's next to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
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.
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.
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.
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.