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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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To what extent were early Westphalian mercantilist nation-states their own corporations, competing over raw materials and attempting to organize vertically-integrated supply chains?
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Not much. Global trade was a fraction of what it is today. Most economics was domestic economics, and global trade was mostly in luxury goods until industrialization kicked in. The biggest competition was over land and people (slaves).