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I don't know how with a straight face you can say it's not just China after Russia's performance and the performance of other recent adversaries. I concur with the other takes that Iran was no victory for the US but have been careful to point out that as far as losses goes it wasn't a military loss. Russia can't even militarily push around its own region anymore. There is precisely one other pole candidate and it's China. And it's not like a unipolar world is the standard that we've fallen from, the soviets fell in the late 80s and early 90s. multi-polarity was the the norm for all but like 20 years.
Where exactly did it go? Mostly it bought us a free trade status quo in which we and many other nations became rich. The military adventurism wasn't exactly that successful nor provided much treasure.
Again, this has much more to do with a rise in China. And you know who we were worried about racing in technology? Japan. Which you don't hear much about now.
PPP as used for subjective spending power is a reasonable choice but it has a lot to do with local labor costs and you're basically double measuring the catch up we care about when you adjust for it. The US produces about as much as a percentage of the world total output, which is what we're kind of interested in when discussing a decline between nations, which by the way as I said from the beginning I don't really think is what people are feeling, I really don't think the American populist feeling of decline hinges on whether a Chinese person can buy more rice than their gdp per capita might naively predict. I don't think people have a sixth sense for that sort of thing.
This is just a kind of impossible measure. The status quo is of course going to catch strays for everything that goes wrong. They deflect most of the terrible ideas of populists which range from disastrous stuff like going back on a gold standard to implementing rent control. Much of our housing crisis I think can be laid at the feet of populists, it's largely the movement to give local control veto powers that has made it impossible to build where building is most necessary. But just naturally on the national level the stability forces built into our system of government have mostly held. Where they've failed recently has been disastrous blm lead defunding of the police which has resulted in thousands of excess murders and all the shenanigans Trump has gotten up to. Populists tried to dissolve our democracy on January 6th. It's awkward to bring up because I really don't want to get into the weeds with the populists on this board about whether actually our democracy was already dissolved by the democrats cheating, but it did happen, people did storm congress with the intent of overthrowing an election based on populist conspiracy theories. That's the kind of thing we can expect from an ascendant populist movement, the left version will be very bad as well.
I agree and that's why I resisted doing it for several posts, but you pushed for it. What else can I say? The statistical evidence that they're wrong is ignored and it's demanded that I explain where the energy of the movement comes from. If it's psychological in origin how can I avoid psychoanalysis? I might agree with them about some problem, housing is indeed to expensive, but there is an abundance, non-populist, style argument for why that is and then there is what the populists believe which is either some incoherent beliefs about landlord greed that doesn't extend to undercutting other landlords or it's that actually there are 600 million illegal immigrants bidding up the cost of housing. Both are untrue and no amount of evidence will satisfy them.
I don't know about this gloss! The printing press favored pamphlets. Rhetoric was as important as it is today on social media. Where it's all going I don't know. The major change with the social media age is that gate keepers and distribution is now gone, the memetic evolution chamber is now global and fast where previous iterations had locality. Both for memetic and political reasons the local election has been obliterated, after all the local government runs the national elections and if you're in the trump camp you think you need to be able to call on them to do recounts and if your in the democrat camp you're terrified that a future trump surrogate will call a local republican trifecta and demand they "find the votes" to name him the winner.
I think the globalization of everything will be the ultimate legacy of social media. Whatever meme is fittest will dominate and meme alignment is no more advanced than AI alignment.
Doomers have predicted 55 of the last 1 great depression. They're a rock with the text "doom is imminent" painted on them. Certainly there are things worth worrying about. I myself consider AI safety to be a critical concern. But I don't push it with conspiracy theories and unfounded accusations that people who disagree with me as demonic pedophiles.
I don't know if I'd qualify him like this. Vance is a cynical actor. He's willing to go along with and push populist rhetoric if it'll help his political ambitions. But he's a politician, as far as I'm concerned he's a sociopath. He'll tap into populism for power but he's not really swept up in it. He knows Trump didn't win in 2020 and only mouths the words because those the mouth noises that get him what he wants. A smart cynical operator can indeed engage in nuance, when it serves him. When I speak of populists his willingness to do the bidding of populists is certain relevant but I don't know if I'd count his ability to engage in depth is really the same as populist's ability to engage in depth.
I can say it with a straight face because I pay attention to this stuff. In the 1990s Russia was struggling to maintain territorial cohesion. In 2002 they failed to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrence. They didn't field an active radar-guided air-to-air missile until 2015. (For reference the US had those since the 1970s). Now they sling them at Ukrainians all day long. You think Russia looks weak because it can only slice off small parts of the largest European military power, backed by the largest military power and the world's two largest economies; in the 1990s it couldn't even hold Grozney.
Sure.
Well, because Russia was toothless, the US slashed military spending dramatically, shuttering the US defense industrial base, consolidating the remaining portions into a few primes, and leading to the procurement of cheaper, less capable systems. Then it spent two decades of time, blood, money and attention fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, repeatedly cannibalizing big ticket procurement programs intended to replace Cold War era military technology. Why do you think we still use Cold War kit?
Right. I won't be very surprised if the same thing happens to China. But a big difference between China and Japan is that China is actually very militarily powerful, and if they suffer economic decline it may make them less stable and more hostile. The Japanese military was never a rival to ours, and they were our ally in the 1980s, despite the concerns about their economic growth.
I'm happy to agree that might not be what is causing the "malaise vibes" from the bottom up, but I think that populist thought-leaders are very well aware of China. Some of them receive security briefings on it.
It's their job for things not to go wrong, though. I agree with your point about the status quo catching strays but presumably the point of elections is to vote people who mismanage things out, right? And I while I think it's fair to question whether or not certain decision were foreseeably bad, some of them certainly were - to go back to my 9/11 example, for instance, we know it was foreseeably bad to ignore because people at the time were warning about the dangers of ignoring it - just as how people were pointing out that actually defending the police is a foreseeably bad idea.
I think that if the people who had goofed up stuff had fallen on their sword (figuratively) then populism wouldn't have nearly the purchase it does today, but generally speaking they were not punished and they were sometimes rewarded. For instance, I'm not saying that we should have passed an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law to crucify Wall Street financiers after the 2008 financial crisis, but I am saying that the banks that received US bailout money should have of their own volition not given out billions in bonuses.
I mean, is it that cut and dry? There are a lot of people think that the Democrats cheated and won in 1960, but I'm not really sure that (if true) means our democracy is dissolved. I guess that's a tangent but an interesting one.
If I came up with a statistically solid domestic decline theory, would you buy it? I can whip up a very statistically solid if somewhat undercooked decline narrative, as an example: the cost of college education has risen, and college enrollment has grown to tilt disproportionately female. Despite the fact that women prefer for men to make more money than they do, young women now out-earn men or at least reach parity in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. This effect is particularly pronounced with young, unmarried women. This leads to tension between the sexes, widespread dissatisfaction, and lower marriage rates. Lower marriage rates in turn make housing less affordable. But because it's not politically correct to discuss, people instead blame their economic dissatisfaction on things like "the evil elites." Thus it can be true that there can be a cultural or even localized economic decline without it necessarily showing up in broader statistics.
Rhetoric is not necessarily irrational, but I think that writing well forces a reader to exercise different skills than a charismatic orator. You can't read your audience, which makes a big difference.
I agree with this.
I am very interested in seeing how this turns out. I am curious if the legacy of AI will be rolling this back.
I think that you and I are probably worried about a lot of the same things. Where we differ is probably that I think that the gatekeepers made genuinely bad decisions in the Cold War and especially in the post-Cold War era. This makes me more sympathetic to populists looking forward even if I have important differences with them. Whereas the populists now make you, looking backwards, more sympathetic to the gatekeepers than (imho) they deserve. I don't really think your distrust of populists is ill-founded. But I don't think you should let that carry over into overlooking the mistakes of the gatekeepers.
Sure, that seems mostly good. (Conspiracies are real, but they often don't take the shape that conspiracies theorists think that they do.)
I realize that calling someone a cynical actor, sociopath, and politician is less inflammatory than calling them a demonic pedophile but is this a bit?
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