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Over the past couple of years I've visited several countries in Asia. In contrast, it sure looks like the USA is bad at a lot of things, and is slowly decaying, with very little progress to counter the decay. I wish that weren't true, but it plainly is.
In the 1930s we built all kinds of amazing infrastructure. In the 1940s we mobilized in a huge way for WW2. In the 1950s we had big increases in quality of life, like building the infrastructure for consumer air travel. In the 1960s we went to the moon. Then, uhh, crickets.
Sure, "but the Internet". That's fine, but every aspect of the internet designed after the 1970s is crappy. Compared to the previous decades, do we have enough to show for the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s?
It's easy to underestimate how huge an achievement it was to do something like going to the moon. I recommend seeing "Apollo 11" if you have not (but see it on a regular screen, not IMAX). We went from announcing the goal of landing on the moon, to actually doing it, in 8 years.
The first scene of Apollo 11 shows this, the Marion Power Shovel Company Crawler-Transporter, used to haul the Saturn V. It looks like something from Command & Conquer, but it was real. They designed and built two of these in just 4 years, for cheap.pic.twitter.com/OXG5GRXdlW
With technology 50 years more advanced, the City of San Francisco can't even build a train station in 4 years. And the Crawler-Transporter was just one of many sub-projects that were successfully performed to accomplish the moon mission.
We kept using them in maintenance mode, hauling the space shuttles, but never building newer or better ones. When the shuttle program was stopped in 2011, so were these.
I have moved to Singapore 8 years ago and visited all major asian cities in the past 8 years. The idea of ever living in the west again now seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
Yeah, I just got back from Singapore 2 days ago, it was one of the places I was alluding to.
Because of progress? Not sure I quite catched what Singapore has done that's comparable to the moon landing in the past two decades.
If you go there you see the difference. It's even more impressive because most of Singapore was slums in the 1950s, so they went from thorough poverty to richest of nations in 60 years with no natural resources to speak of.
To be fair, both countries have massive wealth inequality and much variance across countries and between cities. Not fair to just compare, say, Shanghai and San Francisco.
I am also thinking of places like Tokyo and Singapore, not just Shanghai. If I were to list the world's top cities, I think 0 of them would be in the USA. It is a problem.
Right, but Asia is doing mostly "catch up growth" which is easier than being at the GDP/capita frontier. I dont thaexpect China to ever innovate much given the political incentive structure (bribes necessary everywhere to do business, etc.)
I just got back from Singapore. They went from terrible poverty to richest-of-nations in 60 years.
Not sure they'll sustain that long term with their political structure. Depends how clean the transition of power will be from current leadership. More optimistic about more democratic nations like S. Korea.
Considering their political structure was autocratic with rule of law with their history of development, we can only pray they don’t catch the democracy AIDS.
You're right about the US is not as great as the last century, but Asian countries have their own problems, the US's still the immigrating destination for Asians.
I don't think that will continue to be true, if the USA keeps backsliding.
Well, the future is difficult to predict. Singapore is kind like a family business of Lee, when things went right, everything is fine, few people know when it goes to the opposite direction.
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