As the protection and control of post-WWII Pax Americana falls, we will all realize how much of our peace and prosperity had previously relied upon Pax Americana.
Just to be clear, "Western Europe/Social Democracy" now faces a two-front battle.
On one side, we have X/Twitter far-right state media from the USA, and on the other, we have Telegram far-right from Moscow. Our youngest are effed, while watching the CCP's TikTok, and we choose to do nothing about it.
Our Russian brothers and sisters want to be part of EU instead of the Kremlin, fight me.
What is super fucked up is that while Russian education is top-notch, see Google.com founders, meanwhile, Russia is so fucked up that they cannot take advantage of any of this.
You're seeing the result of something that's been decades in the making. You can see a simple table of dollar reserves here. [1] They've been consistently falling year over year for the past 27 years. And it's not like 1999 was anything particular. Rather the uptake leading up to 1999 as a peak was a result of shenanigans that happened in 1971 [2]. That's when the USD became completely unbacked by anything, enabling the government to start going arbitrarily far into debt. That had short to mid-term positive impacts and long-term catastrophic ones, as is the typical strategy in modern times.
People always exaggerate the impact of geopolitical things, because it feels like the biggest thing ever, especially when you're relatively young. But in reality we're always onto nonsense after nonsense. Countries have the wisdom and view to appreciate this, and so respond to geopolitical stuff (in action, not rhetoric) far more gradually than people do. They're certainly not going to just dump all their dollar reserves because of a single misguided war or even misguided president, or they'd have been gone long ago.
I hear you, the world is always ending. But, I am well past mid-life, I am a huge beneficiary of Pax Americana, and 47 feels like something truly different. Maybe it's just the end of a long pattern, but it is still the end. US-led NATO is dead, and the stability of the USA is dead, therefore the dollar's dominance is weakening.
Don't take my word for it. Listen to Mark Carney at Davos.
I think there is a realization that (1) US' checks and balances do not work, (2) Trump is not a "mistake" of voters and can repeat again.
This is the main reason that things are different. Most presidents were reasonable in their hegemony, and Trump's naked aggression makes everyone to hedge against US.
Bush invaded Iraq on completely and maliciously fabricated evidence. Literally - all of it was made up. He sought EU approval to invade, was rejected, and then invaded anyhow, starting a decades long war leaving the region in complete chaos severely undermining US (to say nothing of global) security. Other presidents happily carried on and even magnified his war in some ways.
And as you go back you can see that our more contemporary actions are just echoes of the past anyhow. Vietnam was also started on a complete and malicious lie. [1] That lie then led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, practically bankrupted the country (playing a major role in the events of 1971), left the country more divided than ever, and concluded with us running away from Vietnam with our tail tucked.
We didn't start the fire. It just always feels so different in the present because you don't know how things are going to turn out, so there's always the possibility that this time it might be something extraordinary as opposed to just this perpetual and never-ending self-crippling.
I think that people also see that government in all its ministries is becoming less competent, because of deliberate actions, firings, and flight of competent people. Uninspiring, uninterested, loyalists as leaders of each department doesn't exactly help.
And the competence of departments is crucial for the well functioning of the country, services high and low. (Diplomacy, war, and education to electricity and roads).
In my view it's both that the State Department, for example, is less competent than before, and that the administration is less likely to listen to the experts and Department officers than before.
How can you reconcile the rest of your comment with:
> That had short to mid-term positive impacts and long-term catastrophic ones, as is the typical strategy in modern times.
Is the catastrophe still coming from the 70s to now? 50 years later? This is the most repeated quip that makes no sense. Same with companies, everyone just repeats "omg they only care about short term" and then years after years the company trots on.
But I guess it's easy to say since the defense is "oh just wait". As if the online commenter is able to see N+1 moves more than whoever they comment about, but that person just simply cannot. Like come on.
The site [1] I already linked has a number of excellent graphs of the endless major inflection points driven by the shift in 1971. Most started in the years prior to 1971 since 1971 was, itself, also a longer term consequence of years of previous mistakes.
Many of those issues started out fairly small and had a rather small impact relative to the initial benefits of 'financial liberty', but those benefits faded fairly rapidly, while the consequences not only remain, but continue to grow. It turns out that free money is rather expensive.
If you look at the achievements and progress that was being made in the 60s in the US in practically every domain, and then you showed them what 60 years in the future awaited for them, the most common response, outside of digital gizmos, would probably be 'what went wrong?'
It’s not a self decapitation exactly. I think Trump, his family, his corporate donors, and other friends are all willing to sacrifice everyone else - including the lead America had - to make themselves rich and powerful. Every single decision to spend - defense, ICE contracts, AI, approvals of anticompetitive acquisitions, changes to regulations, etc - is making that circle richer at our expense.
They don’t care if American supremacy is lost or if the dollar crashes or if the national debt becomes a crisis. As long as they have their wealth. The public is being decapitated, not them.
True. In that sense the voters have self decapitated. I can’t understand how the Trump administration still has support from 40% of the country (per polls). I could understand voting for him due to some issue a voter has strong feelings about. But now we have seen it all play out and it’s a disaster leading to national ruin. And there is no talk of impeachment, trials, and accountability for everyone in his circle. So I guess that 40% DOES choose to self decapitate.
Media that is never critical towards one side is what started all of this. A politician's kryptonite is when their voters find out that they lied or were hypocrites. That is a universal truth.
Single party media outlets like News Corp, Sinclair, Euronews, and so many others have broken that system entirely.
My test to see if someone is a shill/moron is to simply ask them to say one obvious bad thing about "their side." If they cannot, it becomes clear that they are not worth listening to.
> and all the conservative news tells them what to believe
And most traditional news is conservative now.
The idea that the mainstream media was ever leftest was always wrong, but these days its absolutely laughable and yet a lot of people still parrot this like it is the truth.
The US lead over the EU in per capita productivity has massively grown over the last 20 years. There's no indication of waning American power.
America has produced 70 times more stock market wealth if you look only at companies created within the last 50 years than the EU. And this is not all paper wealth. If you look at technological sophistication, whether that's frontier AI models, leading-edge pharmaceutical drugs, total amount of compute, or the space industry, the U.S. has grown its lead over the EU over the last 50 years.
It's because the EU has largely fixated itself on reducing wealth inequality by punishing those who succeed. It's safety-maximalist approach to private industrial action has also hamstringed industry — see Germany closing all 17 of its nuclear power plants. The US doesn't really need to do much except not sabotage itself to maintain its lead. Like in all nations, laissez-faire (French for "leave it alone") allows the private sector to do the rest.
As just an average US citizen living in a not so prosperous area, this rings pretty hollow to my mind and most of Europe sure looks like it is winning over 95% of the people that live around me. We already know the stock market is divorced from reality, IP rights are a short-term benefit, and I fail to see how having more compute or starlink satellites are suppose to carry the US into future economic prosperity.
Now im not saying everything is bad, but it sure feels like a lot of the US economy is a Lamborgini shell stuck on the body of a Ford Focus and we think we are winning because most people haven't noticed yet and the profit margins are higher than ever. Europe sure ain't perfect, they got plenty of problems, but their problems are more like worrying about percentage points in the future, while in the US the worry is whether our economy is going to provide for people at all not in the top 25% long-term. And an angry and unsatisfied mass of lower class people is a recipe for upheaval with everyone on top relying on that not happening.
I'm not so sure people in Europe are better off. There are a lot of very poor regions in Europe compared to how people tend to imagine Europe. In fact, most European countries, if they were U.S. states, would rank among the poorer U.S. states.
Now, looking only at the statistics, there are certainly some things European countries are doing better than the U.S. But based on my research so far, which admittedly isn't enough for a full understanding, my tentative conclusion is that almost all of those things don't seem related to economic policy. They seem more related to things like urban planning, for example more pedestrian- and bike-friendly cities.
In terms of work and wages, U.S. wages are substantially higher than wages in most European countries. And I'm not just talking about longer hours. I mean the compensation per hour is significantly higher.
Averages tell us the general availability of wealth. To give you some perspective, most European countries are poorer than the poorest U.S. state, which is Mississippi. There just aren't as many high-paying jobs. And these figures encompass everything, including what the government spends on health care and welfare programs and education. So Europeans as a whole get much less per capita from both government and private sector. When it comes to purchasing power parity, which takes into account cost-of-living differences, the gap isn't as big as above, but it's still pretty significant.
> It's because the EU has largely fixated itself on reducing wealth inequality by punishing those who succeed.
It's actually because America pivoted[1] from manufacturing to higher-margin services (financial, tech[2]), and generations of American Diplomats had negotiated trade deals that ensure American services are never shut-out or hobbled in most countries. American companies won't look so special,or be nearly as profitable, once they lose their default status that allow them to siphon money from all over the globe -including Europe
2. Silicon valley caught lightning in a bottle. Other American locales repeatedly tried and failed to replicate it - so it rules out American legislative attitudes as the vital ingredient.
If you're familiar with American capital markets and global venture capital, you'd know that it had almost nothing to do with these trade deals. They had a marginal impact. The amount of capital available to startups and established companies at all stages of their development was the main difference. And the difference between the US and EU in that regard came mostly from the US simply not sabotaging itself the way the EU did with extremely high taxes on the top income earners, as part of an agenda to reduce wealth inequality.
The fact that the tech industry concentrated in Silicon Valley is simply due to network effects. Regardless of which locale became the Schelling point for U.S.-based technology companies, that locale would have succeeded, because of the national economic policy it operated inside of.
> ...that locale would have succeeded, because of the national economic policy it operated inside of.
The US policy is about to become a lot more robust and a lot less laissez-faire. Over the decades, the public image of tech CEOs has switched from benign, awkward but genius dorks, to out-of-control bond villains.
There's a tech backlash happening in the US, if you've been paying attention, and legislators follow the voter zeitgeist.
Correct. There seems to be a pretty broad tendency across societies to fixate on reducing wealth inequality. I don't think the U.S. is going to escape it. Taxing the rich is the most popular thing in the world. There's nothing the common man prefers more.
Even if US companies only had the US market, they'd be massive — Google gets ~50% of its revenue from the US alone, Amazon over 60% from North America, and most other Big Tech is in that same range. The US market by itself is plenty huge. And the EU provides 20-30% of US Big Tech revenue. Even losing all of that (very unlikely even under protectionist policies), US tech companies would be doing well, with 70-80% of their current revenue.
Sure, full-blown protectionism everywhere would make the world including the US poorer (less specialization, less division of labor), but it would also harm EU exports, as the US is the EU's biggest importer, and moreover it wouldn't change the factors behind the growing US-EU gap. US-EU trade policies with each other are basically the same. The difference is internal, and mostly comes down to the US just not sabotaging the private sector as much.
Weakening your own domain to get powerful sounds clearly contradictory, yet there are so many examples of elites doing exactly that despite the fact that doing so must've required foresight and planning elaborate enough to not blind them from the consequences.
> Weakening your own domain to get powerful sounds clearly contradictory
No because it's relative. If people around you get weak then you get more powerful automatically. If you get more powerful and people around you also get more powerful then you are in the same situation.
So if power is what you want you destroy others at the same time as building your power. What trump is doing is logical. He isn't living in china or russia. he doesn't care if they get stronger. he cares if people around get weaker relative to him and cronies who are in on it. and that works
Even most dictatorships don't "have a dictator". They have a "great leader" that coincidentally gets voted in again and again, for whom constitutions are amended, and who happens to have his own "revolutionary" irregular militias, not-so-secret police grabbing people on the streets in plainclothes (or worse), a subservient parliament rubber-stamping decrees, etc etc.
Even without some of that, the "unitary executive" theory, as implemented by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, is effectively a temporary dictatorship in all but name.
> all the oligarchs in the US got rich when the economy was doing well.
You can make bank when things go bad. Look up the European currency crisis of the 90s, when folks like Soros amassed their billions. Or the few who got 2008 right.
Whoever is betting with incredible timing on Trump's unexpected policy shifts, every other week, is definitely not getting poorer. And when the economy tanks, assets get cheap - which is great if you have accumulated cash.
basically make decisions that make no sense but benefit you financially. Sample. you run a printing business. you dont own it just run it. you sell your main printer and assign a performance bonus to your self. next month your business is closed because you dont have equipment to print, but you also have your bonus in pocket.
As an analogy, you can pump the yield of your crop fields by 50% if you are willing to deplete the soil and cash in on 100 years of careful building of the topsoil layer. The person doing it wins out in the short term 10 years, but society loses out long-term when they gotta spend another 100 years of much lower yields to build the top soil back up to healthy levels. Meanwhile the 10 year guy already made his money and sold off whats dregs are left to seek the next snatch and grab operation.
Not really. It has more to do with gold is now worth almost 3x what it was 2 years ago.
And before you get too excited, this "news" from the World Gold Council. A consortium of gold mining corporations. Clearly it's a pump article "have you bought gold yet? everyone else is! why not you!?!?"
Not really. It has more to do with gold is now worth almost 3x what it was 2 years ago.
It's not like we've suddenly found new and exciting uses for gold though. The reason the price has gone up is because the demand for it has gone up, and the reason why demand has gone up is because people want an alternative to U.S bonds. A bunch of pump articles wouldn't be enough to lead to a 3x price increase.
> the reason why demand has gone up is because people want an alternative to U.S bonds
That makes no sense since the amount held in US bonds is not that different.
The only change is that the gold that people held has gone up in value.
It's not different than holding Google and Apple stock, and when Apple stock goes up people say "oh, it's because people don't want Google stock". That's not true at all.
I often wonder if tech billionaire psychosis might lead to a "Great Filter" event for our species. They have entirely unchecked power, lack of empathy, and gleeful ignorance of everything our species has done that their success rests upon.
They haven't even read the scifi that positions AI as an obvious resource trap. Sure, let's devote all our resources to birthing an AI. Do we think if its smarter than us we can contain it? Do we think it will help us by default? Have we not thought through the basics of what we're attempting?
I believe that that Fermi Paradox is not a paradox at all. It's just a poor set of assumptions. Life is likely extremely rare, and intelligent life is likely astronomically rare.
Technological interstellar traveling life does not appear to exist anywhere in our Local Group.
The Local Group is only 10M light-years across. A single technological species that had arisen on any of the trillions of planets, traveling at 10% the speed of light, would only need a 100M years to colonize the entire Local Group!
We are alone, or at least the first. This is a good thing if you look at how we treat "lower" species on our own planet.
That's an enormous span of time. There's no reason to believe even a technologically advanced civilization would survive for that long. Let alone maintain the impetus for constant colonization. We gave up going to the moon in less than 10 years.
Buckle tf up.
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