Can you think of any long-lived ( > 100 years), empire-scale civilisations that have collapsed despite a firm belief they were non-collapsible and/or essential to all surrounding nation states?
Without consulting wikipedia, I can only think of about 17 off the top of my head.
This is a salient point, I don't know how other countries handled it but American schools as an institution were absolutely wrecked by covid, a significant portion of the youths just straight up stopped attending school, and I'm in a bubble but most parents I know are homeschooling at least part time now, when they wouldn't think of doing so just 5 years ago
Does not bode well for the future of informed populi
* The US economy nearly requires a degree for economic success
* US demographics cliff results in a heavy short fall of student enrollments
* US Federal government deeply cuts funding for universities
* US higher education offers remote learning to attract students and reduce costs, much of which deeply lowers the standard of education
* LLMs are deeply integrated into social products including snapchat and twitter
* LLMs are capable of completing a significant amount of curriculum
* The US Department of Education is removed, including teams responsible for tracking academic success on a national and state level
Words like collapse are I think not the right word. But the long term institutional harm of this sequence of events may hit the country very hard. Bringing back factory jobs ain't gonna fix it, if tariffs are even capable of doing that.
The majority of the country never needed college to obtain the success that they have had. I do concede that it is a positive economic indicator though.
Right now Gen Z is coming into adulthood, they are one of the smallest generations. After that is Gen Alpha the kids of millenials, University funding might change to reflect that.
I'm autistic and a significant percentage of my schooling was ignored by me because it held none of my interest. I practically made it a point to intentionally ignore certain information because I didn't see myself having any use for it in the future because I just didn't care about those things.
As it turns out, the part of me that cared about those things just had a stunted development and was behind. Certain subjects like language and history have an emotional and cultural significance that cannot be appreciated through only math. I highly doubt anyone could have explained this to me because I had thought that I was the sole decider of everything ever in my brain. I honestly probably still do think that way.
Its the damn phones and tablets. This abundance of cheap software has really messed up kids attention spans. Computers are a distraction in class and need to be delegated to special times. How do you keep tech out of kids hands out of class?
Anecdote: I grew up on N64 and an era where software was a lot more difficult to come by. As a kid, I'd look forward to buying a floppy disk packaged in a plastic bag held up on a cork board at my local computer shop.
When I got a game on the N64, I would be laser focused on completing it.
I recently purchased a N64 for my niece and nephew who are 8 and 10 respectively. When I was 10 I got Ocarina of time at the beginning of the school year and spent an entire year laser focused on solving every puzzle and completing the game.
Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (and being kids to freakin PHD academics) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
They must try "every new app", see every new thing on Netflix/Hulu/whatever. Maybe i'm just exhibiting old man syndrome but it really shocked me. I clearly remember being that kid yesterday and doing my best to beat the game. I guess the fact that the N64 only ever had about ~380 games in its entire lifespan made a difference. Each title was a special event. Today there is just so much software for the kids to play with.
> Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (...) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
Have you considered that they might just not find games interesting? Even if they like playing some games, they might not enjoy the game the particular game that captivated you for so long.
Even in your own generation, there were many kids who would have got bored of sitting in front of any computer game for 10 minutes. There's absolutely no reason to extrapolate your experience with your nephews out to an entire generation.
Yeah you are probably right about that but they play a lot of mobile games so my assumption was that they like it at least somewhat? Maybe they are just bored. The PHD father is also a musician on the side so he got them into guitars and drums at an early age but they are wishy washy on that as well. I don't have kids so there is probably something obvious im missing and im probably overthinking it too much. Like I said, im probably suffering from old man syndrome.
I wanted to provide some more missing context since you brought this up and maybe this can spur some interesting discussion. I have been finding that they prefer simpler games like Mike Tysons punch out which really surprised me since I consider the mechanics of that game pretty basic. I got them Super smash brothers, Zelda, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, super mario 64 and most recently Starfox 64 which they don't even want to take the time to go through the training properly, they get frustrated when they can't move the ship properly and have to press the C buttons to speed up or slow down. They love the easy wins and spectacle of super smash brothers though which is the game they play the most as in every other day. It kinda worries me because it would be one thing if they were striving to excel at smash, that would be cool but they aren't even doing that, just messing around until someone wins. Maybe you are right?
If it helps, I'm older than you and grew up on 8-bits and then progressed to the Amiga. I played games, but even as a kid, my real interest was always programming - I'd usually rather be coding something than playing a game (for me, that is far more mentally stimulating).
I do have very fond memories of certain 8-bit games, but apart from Elite and the Freescape games like Driller and Total Eclipse, they're mostly platformers. I liked some of the classics on the Amiga, e.g. Dynablasters, Monkey Island, etc, but again I far preferred platformers.
However, that was just for that period of time - when I went to uni, I got interested in "real computers" and especially distributed computing, and I missed out on a whole generation of games. Even now, I've still never played any of the Zelda games even though the top-down 2D games would have interested me when I was younger. Even more surprising to me is back in the late 90s, I thought I'd buy Myst on the PC because it seemed like I'd enjoy it because I liked Monkey Island on the Amiga. I never managed to play it for more than about half an hour, it just wasn't interesting to me at that point of time.
Ironically, professionally I'm actually a games developer even though I still don't play a lot of games any more. I'm in that industry because I love programming and experimenting with rendering techniques, and working in that discipline always keeps me on the cutting edge of the current technology. But modern games? Mostly meh, IMHO.
I still do play some modern games, but mostly if they're story based or appeal to my retro side. Things like the Drake and Last of Us series on PS3 that have a great story, or VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy which tap into the retro feelings even though they're much newer. But it's more about an original mechanic for me now - so things like Portal, and I even remember sinking over 80 hours into PixelJunk Eden (a really obscure PS3 game that barely anyone has heard of) which was maybe 10% of my total playtime on all the PS3 games I owned.
Anyway, I agree there might be a problem with your niece and nephew if they are just mindlessly doomscrolling and doing nothing else with their lives. But as long as they also have some hobbies they enjoy, it doesn't really matter if they intersect with yours. Maybe ask your grandparents what games they spent their childhoods playing and see if that's something you'd have wanted to do as a child... I'd guess it probably isn't, or else you wouldn't have spent all your times playing these games.
Aha, I had briefly considered whether that was your intent when you made your original claim, but had mistakenly assumed earnestness:
> The entire world has too much riding on the US not collapsing.
Because, obviously, there's no such thing as a self-assessed 'too important' as some kind of safety net when a nation state is being actively sabotaged from within and without.
The lazy argument is that China will take over everything, that they think in 100 year increments. However they have terrible demographics, have serious risks like food security, and have mucked up their economy through their real estate collapse.
We all know of the US's issues and there is no other country that is really challenging these two....so how about everyone fails and we are all poor and destitute together?
I think it’s in the 0-2% over the next 100 years range. I think there are situations where the US collapses but the world doesn’t so that’s why it’s lower.
If the world collapse happens, it’ll be a result of pandemic, meteor, solar storm, nuclear war, or something like that and not some country “taking over everything.”
HK and Xinjiang are already part of china. Tibet and Taiwan have historical ties. China has no expansionist ambitions, they just want what they perceive as theirs.
And like, idk if you know this, but the world bank and the IMF are the ones offering the predatory loans. Countries choose to work with China instead exactly because the terms of their loans are better than the western alternatives.
The US government has many military bases and troops stationed in other countries. It can project violence across the planet. Any entity with that power has strong ability to dictate what others do, and induce dependency.
https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/us-sending-more-troops-...
Safety of maritime shipping. The US Navy was created because ship captains kept getting ransomed by Moroccan pirates, since America gained independence their ships were no longer protected by the British Navy and became fair game.
I know it's a controversial doctrine, but power projection does have a hand in keeping the peace.
Global security (lots of countries exist because of the US), Tech industry (ie: Operating system), Food/Energy and some manufacturing. I think only the first two are critical for the rest of the world. The rest can be substituted.
5 over 100 feels high to me but not order-of-magnitude off. I'm at maybe a 2 myself. I agree that's an entirely unreasonable amount of risk for everyone to just be waving off though.
On average, governments last 250 years — which means we have a 0.4% chance per year. Using that figure, 100 years has a 33% chance of collapse — as our background.
Or roughly 4% per decade.
People wave off that risk because there’s not a lot that can be done: we don’t know how to make perfect governments and we’ve never discovered a good way to, eg, eliminate the ratcheting tax burdens that destabilize society.
Yeah, part of my argument is that that 250 year number is heavily skewed by past civilizations where life was much worse and so people were much more apt to just tear everything apart. I don't think it holds for countries at current First World standards of living. As we improve living standards further the number of years regimes will last for will stretch out even more.
I'm not too crazy about this as an anarchist, mind you, I think there are better stable equilibria we could get to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I guess.
I think 5 in 100 is totally reasonable to wave off.
I’m not giving it a second thought personally.
If it happens it will be so bad that I’ll almost certainly die as a result (due to chronic illness) so I should just keep on living as-is and not worry about it.
An, to be precise I really meant everyone, like including national banks and giant corporations and stuff. Ordinary folk like you and me can almost certainly ignore it, it's just weird I rarely hear people talk about how to price this kind of thing in for very long term assets.
the "very long term" property of assets has very little present value with any reasonable discount rate, and fewer experienced people to actually care about it.
That is true and a big part of the reason why the world let the US get away with lots of stuff. But I think if the nature of the economical relation changes too much (ie: the US demand more juice to flow back to it), I can see how these countries might seriously consider (and maybe go for it) to break from the system. Will be a very wild ride.
But the US is efficiently disentangling itself from the entire rest of the world as we speak; so that argument may not hold anymore in the near future.
I think it’s a 5% chance over the next 100 years.