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Comment by Freedom2 | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason why you believe the US isn't that country?

Rightists are scared of energy sources beyond coal and oil; leftists are scared of information technology that could replace human workers; homeowners are scared to make any physical changes to their neighborhoods and cities because it would "change the neighborhood character"; legislators are scared/incapable of making any fundamental changes to governance because it would be difficult, and can't agree on anything; the president and the average American are scared of anyone and any ideas that don't come from within the country's borders; and for anyone who isn't scared, the cost of enacting change will be a realization that everyone who has skills have either retired or abandoned their trades to become software engineers optimizing ad revenue; and that the young are no longer interested in taking on these challenges because they're doomscrolling TikTok all day; and if they proceed, they will be mired in lawsuits for decades by naysayers; and the financial costs will be 10x the true value paid anywhere else in the world.

All of this. Everyone in the US is basically afraid of something.

Innovator’s dilemma at social scale.

I wonder if two things are massive factors in this:

a) The US is already prosperous. When you have much too lose, your mental trade-offs between gaining something and losing what you have become different.

b) US politics has been dominated by the massive post-war generation. It seems like we drastically stopped building when the boomers had bought their first homes.

Both of these also work for other Western countries that also stopped building.

I think a major cause is how dependent the United States is on the courts to decide the law. China is a technocracy with strong central state control so they can sidestep that; Japan, on the other hand, has a strong bureaucracy that given a set of rules and processes, can execute them efficiently. On the other hand anything you do in the USA starts off in a gray zone and really is decided once you’ve gone to court, limiting risk taking to only those who are well capitalized and have a lot of time to burn.

This is definitely true. I'd also add community input to that.

However, while these are all issues, I think the root cause is a deeper cultural issue. I don't think Western, European countries have the same legal issues but they too stopped building.

Everything is stuck in gridlock in attempt to prevent change, but of course that's futile. There will still be change, it'll just be rust and dryrot and all that ensues. Many would rather see it all crumble than allow progress and risk loss of power and station.

Travel.

There are two United States. A prosperous nation and a struggling nation. See both.

I’m from a now depressed rural town. When I periodically drive home it gets a little more ramshackle every year. My town had 20 operating dairy farms, now 0. Three industrial facilities, now one, which is now fully automated and employs security guards and guys to load trucks.

The best jobs are police, teachers and logistics people at a nearby distribution center.

I pay my entry engineers in real terms 15% less than I made 30 years ago. Housing is about 30% higher in real terms. Our benefit overhead grows 2x inflation.

Then travel abroad.

The result of monomaniacal focus on GDP and DJIA as the sole indicators of economic success…

But the good news is that Musk reached $500 billion net worth, the Gini index be damned. /s

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