If one removed the country names and just looked at where investment (focus, planning, and money) was, we would see two greatly different pictures.
One country is disincentivizing or even blocking renewable energy production, rolling back climate protection measures, trying to revitalize the coal industry, slashing investment in scientific research of all kinds, demonizing higher education, and spending vast and rapidly increasing amounts of public funds to create direct, physical conflicts.
Another country is increasing their renewable energy generation capabilities dramatically each year, encouraging EV adoption, investing very heavily in scientific research, and also investing in military (although without initiating direct physical conflicts).
One of these two countries is riding on momentum, but the drag from waste and mismanagement of resources is increasingly slowing it. The other country is building momentum while reducing drag.
The difference in these approaches will be obvious in a decade, and in two decades one of the two countries will be just another chapter in a book about the rise and fall of empires.
While I agree with your overall point, I'm reminded of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" here. The US is a huge economy with a massive military infrastructure. I don't think it's fading to fallen empire status that quickly.
1910 The UK is the biggest, most powerful empire the world has ever seen.
1950 The UK is not that or anything like it.
Today. Does anyone really care much about what the UK says or does on the world stage? Ordinary British are better off now than 1910 and it isn't close.
So what you say is obviously true as long you define "quickly."
Plus the Japanese beating the British so badly all over Southeast Asia. This gave a lot of momentum to independence in Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and eventually India.
Hopefully. With that said, when a country makes too many poor decisions, independently or relative to other countries, it'll eventually bite them in the butt.
It’s going to be a multi-polar world. The US will continue to be among the top powers for decades to come. We’re simply exiting an unusual period where China isn’t leading/among the leading pack of countries.
The rate of US relative decline will be set by our policy decisions and cohesion. As we are apparently electing malicious narcissists with dementia to our highest office, a more precipitous decline seems reasonable
I think what you will see is what happens in the body when it becomes starved - it will start eating itself.
We have already begun to see this. The middle class is no longer expanding, nor is the poor (by meaningful terms). Worse, the poorest class - largely made up from immigrants - legal or otherwise - are being driven away.
Life in the US has been relatively comfortable for a few generations now. So current healthy (age-speaking, not fitness) generations have no idea how to revolt. Ironically, we may see change come from the southerners with guns who eventually decided they had been deceived by the people they voted for. After all, both sides cowered on Jan 6. Just imagine if "representing your constituents" was a do or die scenario. The US is mostly far from that scenario if a supreme leader is not directing the masses.
Unfortunately, as with many other fallen empires, I think it will take a LONG time for things to recover. The idealistic principles which the US claimed to be founded upon are largely not present now - the freedom from oppression, the freedom of/from religion, and the concept of fair representation.
> As we are apparently electing malicious narcissists with dementia to our highest office, a more precipitous decline seems reasonable
To be fair, the current political dysfunction can probably largely be reduced by switching the electoral system from 'first past the post' + electoral college to something like ranked choice or proportional representation.
> In political science, Duverger's law holds that in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, as in, for example, the United States and United Kingdom, only two powerful political parties tend to control power.
> By contrast, in countries with proportional representation or two-round elections, such as France, Sweden, New Zealand or Spain, there is no two-party duopoly on power. There are usually more than two significant political parties.
and that way the presidential election does reflect "either the will of the Democratic Party elite or the will of the Republican Party elite" (ie, the extremes of the two main parties), but something closer to the will of the people.
I may be misinterpreting your comment, so forgive me if I am.
When Trump began the trade wars (tariffs), it caused many countries to reconsider their alliances and operations. What you can see is a great shift away from the USD in many areas. This is not temporary, or at least not short-term.
Once trade alliances are formed between parties that exclude the US, those groups seek financial paths which are more stable and unrelated to the volatile path they previously took.
As for the EU, they have an insane task: trying to provide fairly equal voice to a large number of stakeholders. EU was a very idealistic concept, and I'm surprised it made it this far. But they should not be discounted. They may be slower to react to situations by virtue of their necessary processes, but they will eventually get it.
Europe is wisely waking up and starting to loosen its military dependence on the US. Hopefully they are/will do the same when it comes to medical research since the US has been taken over by anti-vaxxers.
I’m saying this as a non European. I’m an American who is making plans to split my time between the US and Costa Rica (here now) and maybe Panama and would love to see them become close to Europe politically.
> Hopefully they are/will do the same when it comes to medical research since the US has been taken over by anti-vaxxers.
Aren't European companies already very competitive in drug development and Medical devices? Philips practically owns the ultrasound markets globally -- Novo Nordisk, GSK, Bayer, Merck, seem competitive too.
US has fossil energy and its actually on the front lines in innovation including green energy, so it will probably be fine. IMHO the main risk would be whatever hapen to the Japanese mobile phone industry happening to US. That is, US will probably end up developing lots of very cool US specific tech that people will talk about how impressive it is but no one will be interested in actually buying it because everyone else will have moved on.
I think this discounts the nature of the threat. American science has been systematically gutted and will be rebuilding for a generation even after it stops, and we’re seeing a lot of effort to put anti-competitive measures in place: from blocking deployment of green energy and removal of EV chargers to forcing fossil fuel infrastructure choices which lock in fossil fuel-based industrial processes for a decade. Japan’s phones were both very unusual, not repeated much elsewhere (due to language support) and they had a world-class electronics industry backing that, whereas ours was moved to China to save on labor costs.
We’re not developing cool tech if we don’t have the industrial capacity to make it or a domestic market. We’ll just get poorer and further behind.
I'd say it's a closer race and the end is not a foregone conclusion yet. That one country currently exhibiting some very troubling tendencies also has more robust self-healing mechanisms in the form of democracy. It has gone off course in the past too but then found its way back. That said, those self-healing mechanisms are under attack as well so there is at least some suspense in the long term outcome
I'd love to share your optimism and trust in that country-that-shall-not-be-named's self-healing mechanisms, but its system is already centuries old and based on a sort of "gentleman's agreement" that each of the powers in the state will respect the others. To make things worse, since WW2, the executive has amassed more and more power which a sufficiently unscrupulous president can use to start an authoritarian takeover. Currently, the only hope I see is that enough people are fond enough of their democracy (even if only because that's what they grew up with) to stand up for it when push comes to shove...
A major problem facing that nation is that not many people are particularly interested in maintaining a democracy. They just want to see the “other team” lose.
This is not how the adult world works, and we are all in organizations to know how difficult it is to spin up teams, and get them to a degree of excellence.
America with project 2025 has basically been burning libraries of experience, and it’s not going to come back without decades of slow, painful work to rebuild it.
Since this concept is only visible to people who think and have seen organizational decay, it is going to have a minor impact on the zeitgeist.
Instead voters are going to wonder every year why things aren’t better, not be interested in the boring institution building, and will vote whatever sounds good.
Underpinning all of this, the fundamental flaw that is laying all democracies low, is the challenge of managing our information economies.
We’ve developed ways to pollute and control our speech that don’t involve government control. We have information and media ecosystems that shape discourse by embracing abundance. Our legacy social defenses are “more speech = more good”, and so we have no new ideas how to deal with this new feature of modern life.
The other factor is the increasing concentration of wealth, resulting in those elites being the only voters that count, since they end up consolidating power. The top few households matter more to the economy than everyone beneath them.
These are the two big challenges that we have to address philosophically and practically for the advantages of democracy to kick in again.
> One of these two countries is riding on momentum, but the drag from waste and mismanagement of resources is increasingly slowing it. The other country is building momentum while reducing drag.
Let's not stop at the two biggest economies: the US and China. Let's add the EU to the mix. The EU saw, inflation adjusted in USD, hardly any growth since the 2008 financial crisis to now. While both the US and China's GDPs grew like crazy.
I agree that China atm is doing something very right but if you believe the US not on a good path, you should look at the EU. The EU has nothing but one company left in the top 50 of the biggest worldwide companies by market cap. Not that long ago the UK was the world's first superpower and France just before that.
And now my EU is headed on a path leading to third-worldness.
I think this reasoning does not work for you because the word "woke" does not mean anything bad for you.
Let's use a different derogatory word to illustrate this same point. Imagine if using renewables was associated with being "communist" or "terrorist" or "a child molester". Remember how Bitcoin is often perceived, "it's used by criminals to buy drugs and pay for hitmen, so we should not endorse it, even if it might have some good uses".
This is how about half of the country _perceives_ "woke".
I'm not saying it's a correct behavior, but that's how many people perceive it. So working on its brand and marketing is probably a good idea to disconnect the concept of renewables from the word "woke".
Renewable energy and EVs are technologies. They aren't woke, communist, or any of the other silly adjectives being applied. Conservatives are against these technologies strictly because liberals are for it. Only the dumbest people in charge.
> If one removed the country names and just looked at where investment (focus, planning, and money) was, we would see two greatly different pictures.
> ...
> The difference in these approaches will be obvious in a decade, and in two decades one of the two countries will be just another chapter in a book about the rise and fall of empires.
The interesting question is: why. I'd say the US ultimately will be judged to be another victim of the "shock doctrine" (in its case, the China Shock). In other words (at least in a democracy): letting the economists and libertarians run wild with the economy will create a backlash that will ultimately weaken it.
The supposedly smart people in charge needed to pay less attention to their pet theories, and way more attention to the common people. They didn't, and this is the result.
"Energy doesn't appear immaculately from the heavens."
It actually does. There is a big fusion reactor up there that gives us a lot of direct energy, if you don't live near the poles it is enough for everything.
One country is disincentivizing or even blocking renewable energy production, rolling back climate protection measures, trying to revitalize the coal industry, slashing investment in scientific research of all kinds, demonizing higher education, and spending vast and rapidly increasing amounts of public funds to create direct, physical conflicts.
Another country is increasing their renewable energy generation capabilities dramatically each year, encouraging EV adoption, investing very heavily in scientific research, and also investing in military (although without initiating direct physical conflicts).
One of these two countries is riding on momentum, but the drag from waste and mismanagement of resources is increasingly slowing it. The other country is building momentum while reducing drag.
The difference in these approaches will be obvious in a decade, and in two decades one of the two countries will be just another chapter in a book about the rise and fall of empires.