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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember the threat of the Japanese economy during the 1980s. Joe six-packs smashing Japanese electronics in front of the Whitehouse. Calls of "Americas glory days are over" were heard over and over. And yet here we are today.

The current way I interpret news articles that proclaim huge shifts in the world is this: if the article takes any short-term trend and applies it over a future time period I immediately discount it.

I'm waiting for the next new article "American teenagers grew an average of 10 inches in 3 years, if this trend continues, American will be an average of 13 ft tall in 2050!!!"

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Yeah, I remember too. Detroit was having a tough time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_%26_Me

Middle class jobs were leaving America and Reagan pushed the national debt over $1 trillion dollars. And college tuitions were skyrocketing. Tufts students were complaining about an $8,000 a year tuition.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1980/2/25/students-at-tuft...

...Fortunately, everything has turned out swell.

http://admissions.tufts.edu/tuition-and-aid/tuition-and-fees...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_bankruptcy

http://useconomy.about.com/od/usdebtanddeficit/a/National-De...

Yeah - I went to a rust-belt high school in the 80's, and remember all the excessive pessimism. On my return visit this spring, I got to see how the story unfolded.

Burned out buildings. Unpaved streets. City reverting to wildland.

Things truly fell apart. The center could not hold.

>Calls of "Americas glory days are over" were heard over and over. And yet here we are today.

Yes, here we are today.

With the economy in a bad shape, jobs that wont be coming back, a huge public debt, a crushed middle class, fewer prospects for the younger generations. And Japan, who faced a similar shakedown, still going strong, but replaced by China as a main US competitor. A country, who, unlike Japan, is not under supervision, but a superpower on its own.

I guess people were expecting something like complete ruins or some post-apocalyptic landscape to consider decline a real thing? It's not like somebody comes in and in a couple of decades steals peoples houses and things. It's that slowly, their status and prospects is declining over what it used to be. It's not something you can watch happening in real time, like a fire burning down a house. It's more like watching paint dry. It's slow, but it does dry.

Japan's per-capita GDP did surpass that of the USA for a while and it is plausible (mathematically speaking) for it to do so again:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan+gdp+%2F+japan+po...

Per-capita GDP does not matter in the power contest. There are countries that have GDP/capita twice the size of US's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nom...

Luxembourg does not count, has never counted and will never count. Therefore this evidence is inadmissible. I thank you !

To some extent, we always have to extrapolate from the short-term into the long term, but the point is to remember that we are doing so, and to reduce our confidence accordingly.

Still, I love XKCD's take on it:

https://xkcd.com/605/

How do you interpret articles which proclaim that other articles proclaiming huge shifts are overblown?

Because that's what this article is doing.

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