How is everything not collapsing in the US?

On the contrary, a second Great Depression might be good for the US. I mean we came out of the last one stronger than ever. No reason we can't do the same with this one.
A dramatic upending of the international order doesn't typically benefit the country that was on top before the convulsion. The first 45 years of the 20th Century ended Europe's dominion on Africa and Asia. If there's an analogy to be drawn between the first half of the 20th Century and the first half of the 21st, we would probably be cast in the role of the UK and China would be playing the role of the US. (And that could be a best-case scenario, because the US and the UK switched positions without beating the [snot] out of each other. It's one of the examples that Graham Allison cited of the superpower and the rising power managing to avoid a war ("Thucydides' Trap"). The worse scenario - and I think the more common one, historically - is that we're the UK and China is Germany, and some other country or bloc is the US; India, maybe, or some kind of EU-esque East Asian economic union made up of the countries currently jostling with China - South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam. Either way, the presiding superpower falls a rung or two down the ladder and is replaced at the top by a rising power, if not the one that challenged them directly, then another that avoids too much damage and sprints past both of them during the chaos.)
 
A dramatic upending of the international order doesn't typically benefit the country that was on top before the convulsion. The first 45 years of the 20th Century ended Europe's dominion on Africa and Asia. If there's an analogy to be drawn between the first half of the 20th Century and the first half of the 21st, we would probably be cast in the role of the UK and China would be playing the role of the US. (And that could be a best-case scenario, because the US and the UK switched positions without beating the [snot] out of each other. It's one of the examples that Graham Allison cited of the superpower and the rising power managing to avoid a war ("Thucydides' Trap"). The worse scenario - and I think the more common one, historically - is that we're the UK and China is Germany, and some other country or bloc is the US; India, maybe, or some kind of EU-esque East Asian economic union made up of the countries currently jostling with China - South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam. Either way, the presiding superpower falls a rung or two down the ladder and is replaced at the top by a rising power, if not the one that challenged them directly, then another that avoids too much damage and sprints past both of them during the chaos.)

I've seen it argued before that the US was already the top power in the world prior to the Great Depression and World War 2, it's just that no one, not even the US itself, realized it. So if you subscribe to that argument, then the US as the top power in the world went through the Great Depression and came out of it even more ahead of the rest of the world than it was prior.
 
I've seen it argued before that the US was already the top power in the world prior to the Great Depression and World War 2, it's just that no one, not even the US itself, realized it. So if you subscribe to that argument, then the US as the top power in the world went through the Great Depression and came out of it even more ahead of the rest of the world than it was prior.
If you're looking just at the inter-war period, then maybe. The US Navy was pretty strong, the Europeans were shook, and the Japanese hadn't flexed yet. In the game of Imperialism, we'd claimed control of the Americas and the Europeans held sway over Africa. I don't think the US was a bigger power than the British Commonwealth, though. iirc, the Commonwealth of the 1910s-1940s had staggeringly huge population numbers, because they still controlled India. I'd be curious to see what the volume and value of trade out of Asia was, and where it was mainly going. At some point, the British missed the memo about aircraft carriers supplanting battleships, and that was when they lost the game.

I'm not sure that separating the three cataclysmic events of the first half of the 20th Century is the way to go, though. To my eye, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II are a trilogy that you have read together. If I were trying to draw an analogy between today's events and the upheaval of the first half of the 20th Century, we haven't even reached WWI yet. The current period could be more like 1895-1914, where the regional power starts to reach out and challenge the global powers. Teddy Roosevelt got up in the UK's face over Venezuela in 1895, and the British backed off. But they backed off because they were also dealing with Russia and Germany, they didn't want to fight three upstarts simultaneously (although there was one RN Admiral who said they could do it), and Russia and Germany were right on their front porch. If the Royal Navy had been able to turn their full attention to the Caribbean, the US Navy would have put up a good fight before it sank. (In 2020, substitute the US Navy for the Royal Navy and the US Navy for the Chinese Navy. If China got into a fight with us right now, we'd win, and they know that, so they're not doing that. Instead, they're throwing elbows on their smaller, regional competitors in SE Asia, the same way we bullied our neighbors in the Americas in the 19th Century.) Then, in 1898, we threw down with Spain, took the Philippines and Bob's Your Uncle, we were a global power and up in Japan's face.

If
history is going to repeat, or at least rhyme, we'll see China bust a move somewhere outside their current area of influence. Africa would be my guess. If I read about Chinese and Indian frigates screwing with each other off the coast of Somalia next year, I will frown out of concern. Or maybe China will decide that somebody needs to step in and resolve the Yemeni civil war in 2023, and they'll send in 7,500 marines as "peacekeepers", supported by their first aircraft carrier to enforce a "no-fly zone" or some [stuff]. I'm sure China would love to get in on the melting Arctic sea ice action, if they could, but I don't see an obvious way for them to do that. Maybe they'll try to buy Greenland or something. :lol:

There is one puzzle-piece that muddles an attempt to draw an analogy, and it has no historical precedent I can think of: Nuclear weapons. Pretty soon, everybody who wants them is going to have them.
 
One of the big differences between now and 1900 is I think simply the population growth since 1900 of the US compared to the traditional empires.
the UK and France simply did hardly grow (around 70%)... and the US became more than 4 times as big.

In 1900 the populations:
Without colonies etc:
US: 77 Mio
Germany: 56 Mio
Japan 44 Mio
UK: 40 Mio
France: 39 Mio
Russia 87 Mio
China: 400 Mio

UK empire: 384 Mio
French Empire: 79 Mio
Russian empire (excl Finland and Poland): 120 Mio



Population 2019:
US: 328 Mio
Japan: 127 Mio
Germany: 83 Mio
UK: 67 Mio
France (in Europe): 65 Mio
China: 1,400 Mio
 
On the contrary, a second Great Depression might be good for the US. I mean we came out of the last one stronger than ever. No reason we can't do the same with this one.
It took a world war to get us out of the depression. Is that what you are advocating?
 
There is one puzzle-piece that muddles an attempt to draw an analogy, and it has no historical precedent I can think of: Nuclear weapons. Pretty soon, everybody who wants them is going to have them.

Countries eager to produce their own vaccins against for example Covid...
They also do build up the techs and capacities to produce new virusses !

So yes... proliferation of NBC weapons is a real issue
And cyber wars come on top.
NK active their to gain knowledge...but not the only one
And how do you handle eroding cyber war disruptions on your economies ?
My guess would be that both building up defences and suffering minor level continuous attacks will be economical much more expensive than the cost to attack.

And how to parry ?
When some minor nation state, being a vassal of a geopolitical opponent, can be proven as origin of the attacks... does that mean firing nukes on the geopolitical opponent ?
 
US wont collapse but things are definitely going to get worse before they get better.

Healthcare tied to jobs in Depression level unemployment is just plain stupid. The eviction crisis could be very ugly if nothing is done. The BLM protestors will be joined by economic protesters soon. There are already anti eviction protests starting.

The $600 was keeping things afloat. The us economy is 70% consumer spending. The top 10% of income earners were responsible for nearly half of that 70% prior to Covid-19. They're also the ones who typically can work from home and isolate themselves regardless of shutdown status. A lot of them are staying home Mask of the Red Death style reducing their spending. The people that were collecting money that allowed them to spend outside their normal means were making up for that. Now without another stimulus package we'll see the real economy.
 
iirc gdp dropped by like 33%, grand depression #s. How come people are still getting lattes and pizzas and watching Netflix and not dying?
Two reasons not everyone is dying, I think. Firstly, most people have an intuitive grasp of where that 33% drop is coming from. It's not because of rolling unemployment, it's because people have stopped doing stuff that's normally counted in GDP. So, we stopped going to the amusement park and we're okay with it. GDP went down, but it didn't go down cuz we're broke. The other half is MASSIVE government stimulus masking that drop in productivity. People are laid off, but don't feel broke, so we just eat more pizza and have more Netflix. And the people working for essential services are still accepting the fact they deserve about the same pay that they were getting before. Not sure how long it's sustainable.
 
I think we're rapidly restructuring our economy with Covid and will come out stronger for it. We will onshore a few more strategic industries, but the big gains will come from how many people are entering industries of culture. Cameras almost doubled in price, audio interfaces (connecting computers to studio speakers and mics) are sold out everywhere, people are diving into learning skills they have been putting off. A lot of people are trying to learn to code or do other brainy "remote-work" jobs. Covid could wreck us, but as long as we keep pooling national resources back on ourselves to weather the storm, and as long as we quarantine during the storm, we're going to come out years ahead.
 
I think we're rapidly restructuring our economy with Covid and will come out stronger for it. We will onshore a few more strategic industries, but the big gains will come from how many people are entering industries of culture. Cameras almost doubled in price, audio interfaces (connecting computers to studio speakers and mics) are sold out everywhere, people are diving into learning skills they have been putting off. A lot of people are trying to learn to code or do other brainy "remote-work" jobs. Covid could wreck us, but as long as we keep pooling national resources back on ourselves to weather the storm, and as long as we quarantine during the storm, we're going to come out years ahead.


On average a new growth source

Competition between companies.


I think it will also work like an unequaliser for regions and countries.

Regions picking up faster the new situation will mow the grass away from slower regions.
Countries picking up faster the new situation will mow the grass away from slower countries.

Countries facing the issue of choice between developing homegrown or by FDI of companies with the new knowledge.
That FDI ofc at the cost of money extraction from that country to other countries.
The tax on knowledge.
 
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We have now pivoted from lamenting America’s collapse to hoping the rest of the world has to suffer WW3 so USA can rise stronger than ever before and send millions more slave laborers to the gulag!
 
while it can be argued that London and Paris stopped stopping Berlin that they had figured out the US was firmly on the upswing , hence WW ll , it is more obvious that the American leadership was accepted only because of the disaster Europe was facing . The French resisted and they got Dien Bien Phu and a bloodletting in Algeria , the British were more forgiving because it was still an Anglosaxon thing , but they might have been harder and tougher .
 
There certainly is a country that is "#1" in people declaring bankruptcy over medical debt, percentage of its citizens in gaol, numbers of democratically disenfranchised ex-felons or even cases of Covid19, despite being supposedly so well-informed of the dangers, but if I lived in such a country, I certainly wouldn't be loudly proclaiming my nation's supremacy for all to hear.
No country is perfect and all the rich ones are rich due to luck and other factors. Pretty much all european countries have similar problems as those seen in USA. Supremacy have generally come from the military, an area US is far ahead everyone else. I suspect if US wanted to it could destroy something like EU but the era of enforced colonization is pretty much over.
 
Genie is out of the bottle and Pandora lies legs wide. If a major power wants to destroy the world order, they all can. NBC weapons are getting on to be century old tech. They still all work. Colonization tho, that probably works better with a softer touch.
 
Seems harmless enough to take a poke about.
 
What a stupid thread. We'll continue being #1 while the haters keep on hating. Every other country tries to hide their problems because they have a sad inferiority complex. We are the only country on the planet that airs our dirty laundry and puts our own flaws and faults on a microphone for the world to see and judge. Most of you outside the US live in countries with a smaller economy than California, Google, Microsoft or Amazon, who represent a small fraction of the US. Chew on that for a second.

I honestly can't tell what you are saying. I'll be happy to respond if you can be a little more clear with your writing.

You can't deny any of the facts that I posted. Try denying one. Sadly you must resort to ad hominem attacks, because all you have are emotions and ideology and no logic or facts on your side.

Okay then... I would suggest laying of the conspiracy Youtube videos for a while.

Show me the facts that show I am wrong lol. You can't. Certain other countries stopped reporting positive cases that were asymptomatic... I wonder why they think they need to hide the truth?

All of these posts sound like you are 14 years old. I'd expect more nuance from someone in college apparently you are doing a good job from preventing those libs from brainwashing you while you are there!. . .

The state that matters is GDP per capita. . .

https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/

we are 13th.

Also that doesn't mean much since Qatar is first and proves the point that if you have a **** government that GDP is not doing much for the majority of your population. . ./stares over at USA oh look 50 years of pillaging the countryside by the top 10% has lead to vast swaths of the nation unable to afford a 400 dollar emergency.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/

Also our healthcare is crap unless you are loaded. I've seen well off people put under by bad medical bills.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most-americans-file-for-bankruptcy.html#:~:text=A new study from academic,and bills, the research found.

Our infrastructure is 3 trillion in the whole, you literally might fall through a bridge one day.

https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

we are 30 trillion in debt, we have **** to show for it

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnma...dget-deficits-to-30t-and-beyond/#63b0e9565508

Face the facts. You live in a ******** country.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-america-********-country-780888

Moderator Action: Mind the language. This is a family friendly forum. --LM
 
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