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There's a bunch of literature on this as a turning point... here is a take that the US upstaged hosts UK at the 1851 world's fair. The colt revolver and the McCormick harvester were key breakthroughs.
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If you treat 2014 as peak US, that's 160 years after 1854. So how long might a decline future be? The UK as precedent for rise/fall of world powers: rise from 1600 to 1854 (roughly contemporaneous with East India Company), and fall from 1854 to 1944 (end of WW2).
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Similarity triangle math. If UK took 254 years to rise, and 90 years to fall, the US, which took 160 years to rise should take about 57 years. Rise and fall of empires aren't equally rapid. It's not straight up Lindy effect, but sawtooth Lindy effect. The fall is 2.8x faster.
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So by this math, 2014+57 = 2071. In this UK-rhyming history, and assuming you buy the 2014-peak thesis, by 2071, the US will be down to the level the UK was in 1944 at the end of WW2.
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What can we expect? The UK in decline 1854-1944 is a hugely romanticized and powerful narrative. It was the Victorian+Edwardian era which is still the favorite era of Anglophiles. Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, H. G. Wells, modernist culture, key role in winning 2 world wars
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Whatever the reality of the "new cold war vs. China" or "rise of the rest" or "clash of civilizations" or "climate apocalypse" or whatever, anyone expecting a quick decline narrative is going to be disappointed. Declines are faster than rises, but not THAT rapid.
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If you're (say) 25, betting on an apocalyptic future and doing a bunch of prepping for a Mad Max future, you're going to have a long, painful wait even if you're right. It might be 2060 by the time your future actually arrives. You'll be a 65-year old. You'll have lived life.
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I'm still, on balance, more optimistic than pessimistic about the future of the US. Despite the spectacular bungling of Covid etc. China in 2020 isn't the US in 1854. It isn't a young, hungry nation arriving. It's one of the oldest nations trying to renew civilizational vigor.
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Until a couple of years ago, I still thought the "Chinese alternative" was overstated and overrated, destined to be overhyped and collapse like the Japanese or Soviet examples before it. But Trump+Covid response have convinced me it's a serious alternative of some sort.
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But I don't think the future is one of Cold War or any sort of zero-sum ideological contest among 2 or 4 or 7 ideologies. It's more one of gradual mutual disengagement as the centralizing concern of oil-based economics starts to weaken. Renewables are a decentering force.
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Remember, the rise of the US 1854-1944 was accompanied by the rise of Standard Oil and the dominance of the oil economy by the US. I think we don't appreciate the extent to which unipolar and bilpolar world orders were an artifact of oil competition.
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There is still resource contention over plenty of other things, but the structure of competition is unlikely to be that drastically convergent. More than a change in the competitive order of large political entities (countries, block, Stephensonian clades...) it is a "loosening"
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The US and USSR were in closely entangled competition 1950-74, matching each other's every move. So were the US and Japan 1974-90. But the US-China axis feels different. First, it's more cooperative than competitive. Second it is marked by divergence, not a circling-in.
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The previous ideological conflicts felt like wrestlers circling in a ring looking to grapple. This one feels like a live-and-let-live mutual retreat. You don't have to agree on most things. You share an economy, you share science and technology, you go your own way elsewhere.
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I started with a future-like-the-past analogy between the US and UK rise-and-fall, but the future is mostly not like the past now. The biggest difference is that we now live in a rapidly greying world. A retired world of aging populations.
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A good mental model of world of the next 40 years is: 1. Global divergence of civilizations 2. Energy transition (whether or not you believe in climate change) 3. Aging population 4. Technological progress decoupling from nation-states, and turning into a political commodity
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After 1939 the World's Fair stopped being some sort of national tech olympics and became a kind of boring bureaucrat show (something similar is going to happen to the sports olympics soon...). Tech became a political commodity after 1939, not a way to build national identity.
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I think the starting point was the race to grab Nazi rocket scientists at the close of WW2. Once that chapter closed, it became clear that science and tech had gotten complex and valuable enough that they could not respect national boundaries.
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Complex advances would be the result of developments in a dozen countries, orchestrated by MNCs, and distributed to global markets, with only a little bit of border friction. Open source takes that logic to an extreme. Countries don't compete on tech anymore, corporations do.
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This creates an interesting political puzzle. To the extent nations continue to persist as the primary political units (at least another century imo), what will they be competing on if not technology?
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Modern nation-states date to 1648 (westphalia being the conventional starting point), so for 200 years or so, nations *didn't* compete on tech. They competed on mercantile economics and early-modern warfare. So one scenario is going back to that, which is what Trump wanted.
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I frankly don't think a reactionary turn to neomercantilism is plausible. The world is too dependent on non-zero-sum trade, which is dependent on technological progress, which is now owned by corporate forces, not national.
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Corporations are still nominally governed by nations. The US started a trade-war. The Chinese state interferes in IPOs. But in general, the ability to own corporations is weak because corporations are globally mobile. So if not tech or mercantilism, what then?
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Healthcare is actually a big candidate. Covid revealed public health governance and care delivery as a huge differentiator among nations, regardless of governance systems. With aging populations reliant on a service sector of relatively poor people, this is a big deal.
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There is a popular social darwinist view that pandemics are culls. This was kinda true in 1919 with the Spanish Flu, with the weak and aged succumbing at the margins leaving behind a healthier pool. Even if you buy this ideologically, it is descriptively a poor model for 2020.
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Off the top of my head, around WW2, around 16 young/working people supported 1 aged person in the US. Now it's down to 4:1 or 3:1 or so, and heading that way globally. And most of the 3 workers today are low-skill service workers with hard-to-automate jobs. "Cull" is bad model.
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The population structure of 2020 cannot handle "culls" from pandemics. We are at 7.5B headed to about a 9B peak in a couple of decades, with a very slow service automation trend in a barbell population of poor young people serving weak old people.
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