Item — HN Reader

The decline of the USA empire is clearer, day by day.

I'm starting to watch videos from today's China and comparing with 30 years ago its like night and day, sons have a much better life than their parents. The typical evolution from parents that worked on the fields to sons working with computers or selling things on Douyin. You see new cars, new buildings, from the outside you feel like this country is "going up".

Compare this to the USA now and 30 years ago. The disillusionment, the social strife, electing a president like Trump that makes George W. Bush seem like a good pick, people than can leaving the country for greener pastures... Sons have worse opportunities than their parents.

If you just compare the gradient of China and USA you will see it clear.

1 comments

As someone who grew up in the US, we went through the same cycles in the 1970s and 1980s and it's about that time period where it comes through again. I remember the fear that we were losing and the Soviet Union was outcompeting us. Reagan (the President that just shutdown mental institutions and put the people in them to live on the streets) told us constantly in much scarier words than we talk about China we were losing to the Soviets. My parents were in constant fear for their jobs. Interest rates made home buying unaffordable. Everything was rundown because there was a boom in the 50/60s and that stuff was getting tired and run down. There were huge crack epidemics and city downtowns looked bombed out.

China will start going through it as all that new infrastructure starts needing to be replaced and/or maintenance costs go up, 'new' cool cities just become regular old cities, peoples bodies break down and populace gets tired.

I am so glad that China is doing good though. I'm excited for more people's lives to improve!

What’s especially frightening about this comparison is that post-Glasnost figures clearly show the U.S. was never even close to being surpassed by the U.S.S.R. economically or militarily. We don’t need to speculate about production gaps between the U.S. and China today - they have been out in the open for years, and all the political class here does about it is counter, “But the stock market is up!”

My greater point was that Reagan was able to steer the US out of fear, and fear disconnected from reality. If the US responds to where we are and cycles in general out of fear I don't think the outcome will be good.

I want a strong America, but I think our problem is real problems of our own making by the political class and our capital class, not by China.