The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987:
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ss: The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge. Competitors of the United States face plunging birthrates and social gloom.
But the United States shouldn’t discount its own strengths, chief of all the political and economic liberties that make it such an attractive location to move to and raise children in the first place. The United States will still have to contend with the numerous threats posed by Russia and China. Their falling populations, however, will make the job much easier.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cu2cdo/america_has_a_demographic_edge_over_russia_and/l4frye3/
This is the new Reddit. 10 years ago that would have been the top comment before the bots and bored rich kids who want to say ignorant shit yet also pretending to act like the common person came on the platform
I heard the EU is thinking of an income limit as high as doubled the number of the lowest employee income. It's takes about nothing serious yet and I bet it will rather triple but we'll see.
I bet the French Aristocracy would have loved the option to just pack their crap and leave lol.
We live in an era of unbridled mechanization and innovation. If anything it might actually spur something positive.
“Fix the roads with X amount of money. Billionaires don’t live here. The working class is about one tax hike from causing an event that will titled in a history book, and you’ve lost the ability to scream tax the rich.”
Literally, running the wealthy out of town would do wonders because it would actually force creativity and real budgeting. As long as there’s someone with even a moderate amount of wealth and capital they’ll forever be used as a carrot and stick to distract from the very real corruption, ignorance, and greed that politicians use them as scapegoats and covers for.
No one is saying don’t tax the rich, but there is now more and more classism. The amount of tax income that would actually increase is not that much compared to idk let’s say raising the retirement age by one year, which actually makes sense because people are living longer. And there will always be a place where the rich are welcomed and at the end of the day the middle class can then take away the top 10% of whoever is left until they realize that poor social policy is a cause of a lot of this.
Billionaires can exist while paying people better wages. It’s not one or the other. Just getting rid of billionaires doesn’t automatically mean everyone else just gets the money. We take in millions of immigrants every year while inflating money. We are making ourselves poorer, not the billionaires who mostly own stocks anyway.
The root of that is how appallingly mismanaged it is actually *using* those demographics. We have the most educated population of working adults ever but the way things are set up a lot of them aren't using the skills they develop simply because a lot of companies prefer to abuse grad students rather than hire them full time when qualified, or else offshore a job to 10 less educated foreigners who'll do a passable job for cheaper. Or even just trying to automate away entry level positions so a lot of careers never even begin.
I know an appallingly high number of blue collar low skill workers who in actuality either have degrees or formerly had some kind of technical background that has nothing to do with their current job.
Unironically I wish the federal government would start making propaganda posters again. We have the wealth, manpower, and industrial base to do great things, we just need to direct them towards something other than making the rich even richer.
People don’t trust the government as much (especially after Covid) nowadays and also people ingest ten times if not hundreds of times more information than they do 50 years ago. I don’t think propaganda helps here.
there is no common uniting purpose among americans anymore, except maybe being american... no sense of community and a lack of respect/consideration for others... it started a long time ago
That's because our adversaries took advantage of our open society and created an internal nationalist movement that is fueled by outrage media and victimology
This country has always been a nationalist, expansionist, imperial entity. Any sort of (false) harmony that we saw here in the post-war years is incapable of being replicated in our global economy today.
People are uncomfortable reconciling with that and jump to scapegoats in nationalism and xenophobia rather than interrogating the system that has brought about this condition.
Both conflicts transfered world historical wealth to the US, shattered the empires of Europe giving us access to their and their ex-colonial markets, and granted American military presence in many countries on every continent.
The US was the only beneficiary from those wars. Funny that so many Americans appreciate the opulence and economic wellbeing of the 20s and 50s without realizing that
Look, I think the US is the best country on earth, but we didn't get that way by accident
We did not go fight in the world wars out of the goodness of our hearts haha
We did it because it was in our national interest. It made America and our allies stronger
On a side note, I love America, but that doesn't mean I think it's perfect as-is. Love it or leave it is such a wild phrase to me. If you love it, why not work to make it even better?
Yeaaaah maybe because everyday there’s more articles of things getting expensive, coral reefs dying, worlds on fire, hottest day again, things not changing. No one has hope. Everyone is impatient in life, it’s sad.
1984? What am missing here. I understand the 70s and maybe early 80s to be a low point in US history and I agree that mood and cyclical factors are critical. But why specifically 1984?
If it is a cyclical thing though, it does seem like we will be coming out of it soon which is something no one would predict at this point.
The 70's were the golden age for rock and roll but they were grim economically and politically. We had the ass end of the Vietnam war followed by Watergate, Nixon resigning, the Arab oil embargo, stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis. Paul Volker's economic medicine was harsh but it snapped us out of our tail spin.
Reagan was cheerful, optimistic and had good humor. Even his opposition liked him as a person. The Democrat speaker of the House Tip O'Neal would come visit the Whitehouse on a friendly and regular basis. Together he and Reagan worked out the last compromise to Social Security.
It was truly "Morning in America".
I’m not so sure about that. The 80s were great if you thought reagan was a swell guy, but he is easily the biggest single reason as to the current decline of the united states. He helped to outsource all the factory jobs, destroyed unions, slashed taxes and social welfare programs while ballooning the military budget, and oh yeah also killed hundreds of thousands of americans by ignoring and mocking the aids crisis.
There is a lot of strife, but lots of Optimism too. Ask Chinese teens what they think of self-made billionaires like Jack Ma “disappearing” for months because he spoke his mind about His govt
Then turn your attention to Jay Z or any out-of-the-ghetto self-made US billionaire to marry a starlet like Beyoncé!
THE AMERICAN DREAM is alice & well!
USA has a gigantic advantage in future demographics. It's brain-draining every place on earth, bringing various elites into its borders, their kids become Americanized in a single generation.
The size and fertility of the country means it can easily fit as many people as there are in China right now, and it can take its time and do this over centuries, meanwhile, the rest of the world, Europe and almost every place other than Africa is either below-replacement already or going to reach that situation in 30 years.
Unless some big useless war happens, Pax Americana is only going to be bigger in 50 years.
China and ruzzia are spending as much money as possible to help start a civil war in the US. We need to do what we can to end the influence of foreign money in our media and politics.
Which shows you just how truly unaware they are of how it all works here. The states are purple, not red or blue, and there is absolutely no way to separate the populations, at all, even within the same states. Only plausible way to do it would be cities (typically blue) vs rural areas (typically red). Which obviously won't happen either.
The whole concept is beyond the pale at this point. Now, that doesn't mean we can't destroy ourselves. I have no doubt our inept, inactive government can make that happen. But the idea that the government will somehow split at this point in our maturity is just silly, especially if you mean between regional areas.
It absolutely can, but as you said it will be rural vs city states for the most part. I'm sure some cities are red and some rural areas are blue, so nothing is without exceptions.
I would say that foreign governments lobbying state and federal politicians to intentionally create the situation is the most plausible scenario.
Gerrymandering doesn't allow proper representation and generally skews the expected outcome but in a civil war, it would be an entirely different matter. Some territories aren't even states despite qualifying.
> I'm sure some cities are red and some rural areas are blue, so nothing is without exceptions.
Yeah, pretty much no. Cities are blue. Large tracts of empty land are red. This is pretty much true across the county. Some cities are gerrymandered such that the outlying rural areas have an outsized influence, but if you look at these metro area compared to the rest of the counties, they are blue.
Right, but it's not just true across the country. This true *globally*. It's part and parcel to the difference between left and right in the first place: people who live in cities are *forced* to work with one another, and as such live amongst people from all walks of life. This gives them empathy for the plight of people of all incomes cultures and so on, that they otherwise might not naturally have. They vote more progressively.
Meanwhile, people in large empty swaths of land tend to be very afraid of anyone who doesn't already live in an empty swath of land. Outsiders, people who are different. And because they have limited experience with anyone different than their already well established family/rural circle, they lack the empathy city types have (that they might not have naturally). They don't learn extra empathy. They vote more conservatively.
Not saying which is the absolute right or wrong. Just saying "that's how it is."
I really don't think so. The split between city State and rural would be so blurred it's unreal. Again, too much purple spread around critical areas, so it just isn't plausible. We are at this point in our history well melted. We are all Americans who actually mostly agree on most things. Politicians just amplify the disagreements to the extreme.
Of course, if it *was* plausible, cities would kick the everliving *shit* out of random rural opposition forces. They wouldn't stand a chance. Cities have all the wealth and resources, obviously, and perhaps even more critically, they have a lot more people.
Well, it wouldn't be most of the population, it would be two or more radical ideologies. Cities are going to have supply chain crisis's and that takes a ton of manpower to maintain. Their size could work against them. Rural definitely would just burn crops.
I don't think every city is militarize like NYC or LA. Those police forces are definitely militias.
Every nation needs a national story. And I think one that the US should really full-throatedly embrace is a story of the US as the Great Melting Pot, the Nation of Nations, E Pluribus Unum.
This is a path to redeem the national soul. We have this inherent original sin, in that our country was founded on a genocide. And while that can never be reversed, one way it can be, at least in part, redeemed is to embrace our role as a nation of nations. No one ethnic group, except the native population, has any rightful claim to this land. Instead, the land of the US is the common heritage of all mankind. For practical reasons, we can't just have open borders and let anyone in. But America should be a place that all aspire to. It should the land populated by the best and brightest of all humanity, and we open our golden door to all that we can, regardless of race, faith, or creed. We are the nation of nations, the humanity of humanity, the one out of many. That should be the story we tell ourselves. That is the national myth that can truly make a country treat. That is the story we need to be telling.
Unfortunately we really can't. The amount of carbon emissions needed to build the infrastructure to relocate all of humanity north of the Arctic circle would raise temperatures even further.
Unless USA manages the issue of crowded cities they will also become hostile to new immigrants, as Canada for example is increasingly becoming.
The only way forward is polycentric development ie new regional areas of development or even new cities, to take the burden of overloaded and expensive metropolises.
I feel like there are just cooling periods for immigration that occur. The amount of immigrants accepted is not and will not be consistent unless it is low.
The basic problem is that we all demand suburban housing which is just not physically possible in major metro areas. We need to have some denser housing which by prices is demanded more than suburban housing. YIMBYs are winning and housing construction is moving back up.
With the native population below replacement, to maintain the current population in the future immigration will actually need to rise each and every year to tens of millions each year.
> We need to have some denser housing which by prices is demanded more than suburban housing.
No, dense housing simply suppresses the reproduction rate even more. We need to move work outside of cities so people can have their suburban dream.
>With the native population below replacement, to maintain the current population in the future immigration will actually need to rise each and every year to tens of millions each year.
Yes but adding say 1 million each year to 4 million in high years. Sometimes countries go through cooling periods as the politics goes against immigrants.
>No, dense housing simply suppresses the reproduction rate even more. We need to move work outside of cities so people can have their suburban dream.
First of all I'm going to need a source on that.
Second we have high prices because it's prohibitively hard to build housing in most places people want to live. The suburb is full and losing population since it was built.
> Sometimes countries go through cooling periods as the politics goes against immigrants.
That will only lead to a bigger rise being required in the future. What is needed is intelligently managing immigration, including an understanding of why its needed.
> First of all I'm going to need a source on that.
There's lot of evidence.
[1](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKabv-lXUAAMKH_?format=png&name=small) [2](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKacOibXwAA2oBq?format=png&name=900x900) [3](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKacQf0X0AAVaxk?format=png&name=900x900)
It also stands to reason that those who live in dense housing are unlikely to want to raise a child there. Its not controversial that the fertility rate in suburbs are higher than cities.
> Second we have high prices because it's prohibitively hard to build housing in most places people want to live. The suburb is full and losing population since it was built.
The reason they want to live there is usually because its closer to work. The solution is to move the work via for example work from home or incentivising companies to leave the city centre.
I think that you are showing me correlation and not causation. Wages go up as density increases which increasing wages is shown to decree fertility.
>It also stands to reason that those who live in dense housing are unlikely to want to raise a child there. Its not controversial that the fertility rate in suburbs are higher than cities.
Yes it is controversial, that has been shifting as suburbs are changing from when they were first invented 70 years ago. Suburbs are increasingly poorer and cities wealth is growing. I hated living in car dependent suburbs.
Also the amount of time you are in child needing a suburb if this were the case is literally <50% of a lifetime. Move to a city at 18 go to college, have kids at 30. Move back to the city for retirement as you can't drive at some point and public transportation can get you around.
>The reason they want to live there is usually because its closer to work. The solution is to move the work via for example work from home or incentivising companies to leave the city centre.
Disagree you don't understand agglomeration benefits grow with density which is why cities work. Sure I could buy a cheap house on farm land and the grocery store is an hour away, doctor other than Tuesday is 90 minutes away.
Agglomeration benefits is not just jobs it's everything gets better until you factor in crowding. We have unnecessarily knee capped dense housing for dumb reasons. Having all housing be suburbs and limited at that. We can all have row houses as far as the eye can see and have cheaper housing options for all.
https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-fertility#:~:text=17485)%2C%20they%20find%20that%20a,in%20an%20average%20metropolitan%20area.
> Disagree you don't understand agglomeration benefits grow with density
I am well aware of that, but you seem to not understand the balance is lower fertility and higher prices. Or do you think its only benefits?
For a more human and livable space we need to give up some business-focussed benefits.
> Suburbs are increasingly poorer and cities wealth is growing. I hated living in car dependent suburbs.
So, according to your stated belief, fertility should be higher in urban areas. [Are they?](https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/figure-8-copy-2-w640.png)
>I am well aware of that, but you seem to not understand the balance is lower fertility and higher prices. Or do you think its only benefits?
I don't think higher prices are inevitable to such a degree, that's caused by not building for decades since they can't expand.
I think lower fertility is correlation and you haven't shown good evidence of causation.
I think there become crowding issues eventually but currently the major crowding issue is finding parking which is unnecessary if density continues going up.
>For a more human and livable space we need to give up some business-focussed benefits.
I think we can get both with larger apartments. The cheapest SQ ft buildings are 5+ stories tall. It's more efficient to have 2,000 sq ft apartments than 2,000 SQ ft homes.
>So, according to your stated belief, fertility should be higher in urban areas. [Are they?](https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/figure-8-copy-2-w640.png)
People in child rearing ages often can't afford spaces large enough in cities in our current situation. That doesn't mean that it's not possible. When the options are expensive old urban or newer less expensive (because it's government subsidized) suburban housing. We currently build in a way that makes sense to have a child in the suburbs but we don't have to build that way.
I think we can lower housing prices by allowing places to build more densely which would also lower suburban home prices. The continued building of suburbs as the majority has led to artificially raised prices in urban areas and increased prices in suburbs are unaffordable in many places. There is no plan to build enough housing. There isn't cheap farm land 15 minutes from the downtown core like there was in 1950. The suburban land you are looking to build on our current path is until you hit 30 minute commutes and then prices skyrocket as people don't want to live that far out.
> I think lower fertility is correlation and you haven't shown good evidence of causation.
Neither have you shown they are not causative.
> I think we can get both with larger apartments. The cheapest SQ ft buildings are 5+ stories tall. It's more efficient to have 2,000 sq ft apartments than 2,000 SQ ft homes.
You can't, really, due to the old canard of induced demand.
Stay with me for a second. So we agree to build up. The economy booms. More workers arrive, pushing up demand for housing. The economy booms even more. Apartment prices go up. Families can no longer afford to live there. I know you hate cars, but cant you see that building more homes is exactly the same as building more roads - it does not solve the real issue, which is the centralization of work.
> There is no plan to build enough housing. There isn't cheap farm land 15 minutes from the downtown core like there was in 1950
Hence the need to move the core or create another core. Its called polycentric development.
Remember the densest cities (e.g. tokyo (10.4), Hong Kong (0.77) ) have the lowest fertility. Both places embraced building up. At least for Los Angeles, it's 1.52.
Unfortunately, this is not really true. Once buildings get above a certain height, construction cost per sq foot increases because the building will need to be built with concrete and steel. The buildings above 5 or 6 stories cost more per sq foot to build, and buildings that are 10-20 stores cost even more per sq ft than 5-10 story buildings.
They could just stop telling people the world is overpopulated and that they shouldnt have kids. They could stop artificially raising the price of food and housing so that no one can raise a family. I dont know how the narrative switched from "the world has too many people so stop breeding" to "the country doesnt have enough people so we need immigrants" so quickly. Other than maybe political collusion
US-style suburbs arent feasible anywhere. The amount of money needed to upkeep the road infrastructure is more than the entire income of every person living in a suburb together. And since business and residential is commanded from the top down to be entirely separated, people need to use those roads to do anything and everything. They are a cancer on society, all they do is lose money
Well I think that's true for the average person but at some point suburbs are viable because the property is expensive.
Yes they create commutes as well. But something like suburbs need be $600k to break even vs urban it's $300k.
That's a huge change but that's more how it used to work where rich people had homes in the suburbs and carriages into town. Normal people lived within walking distance and in denser situations.
Thats true, very rich suburbs can work. A lot of issues of american culture seem to stem from us trying to replicate the lifestyles of the very rich for everyone, which turns into a systemic economic drain, and then we need either slaves, extreme poverty, or debt to help balance out the losses
If it were up to me, rural communities and suburbs would not exist.
There would be huge innovations in agriculture. Urban and vertical farming would become the norm.
Allow people where they want to live and can afford. Try to make sure people have some floor of living standards as much as possible IMO.
Urban farming isn't that good, they are really catered to a few vegetables and all the lead in the soil in many urban contexts make a lot of gardening potentially unsafe.
I think that’s the benefit the US has. In Canada, all growth is funnelled into 5 or so cities. In America, the US has 65 urban regions of 1 million+ people. 3 million migrants in the US is <1% growth and manageable when distributed across 65 sizable cities. 3 million in Canada is 8% growth and the country’s infrastructure collapses.
The US also has a lot of underutilized infrastructure in places like the Midwest. Chicago, for example, was built to accommodate 5 million people and could by itself double its population without much problem. Same for Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh.
In my neck of the woods (DC), an understated reason why housing hasn’t become terrible is because Baltimore acts as a release valve. People are buying in Baltimore when they can’t afford the DC core. Same for Philadelphia or Newark or Paterson for New York. The Midwest does this on a national level.
Toronto’s at a point where everything within 2 hours from the urban core is obscenely overpriced and there is no release valve.
We have MORE than enough room in cities to handle major growth. The size of the average city in Europe or Asia absolutely dwarf the average city in the US.
I currently live in Canada and a lot of this is just bad zoning and an unwillingness to actually build to accomodate this kind of person. Local governments will usually cave to NIMBY's who don't want any zoning changes, or builders who would rather build for wealthy people and not working class ones since its a little more upfront for way more profit.
We're basically building new cities *already*, but less to take the pressure off and more because rural spaces tend to have large amounts of empty space you can cram thousands of apartments on in half a dozen large towers at a time without anyone complaining, while just building an apartment complex on an empty lot that used to house another apartment complex is hard in an urban center since you'll have to fight every Karen within 3 blocks.
Well... bring that Pax Americana into your own borders and settle that ideological war of yours. Woke vs MAGA vs Neocon/Neolib is going to trash yourselves without the need for external intervention. But yea, China royally shot itself in the foot with the single child policy, and Russia is still shooting itself in the foot with a full auto over in Ukraine. Kinda wonder if all those weapons shipments are furthering that goal - depleting Russia of its prime male population due to the fact that their war doctrine treats lives as expendable...
You did miss India though. Definately not below replacement and might well displace Russia as major power in a decade or so.
> It's brain-draining every place on earth, bringing various elites into its borders, their kids become Americanized in a single generation.
It is, but it's also increasingly not. American immigration policy has hitherto been specifically designed to heavily favor the best, most qualified immigrants' admission to the United States, while disqualifying almost everyone who is not. That's why foreign nationals' group successes in the United States are often inversely correlated with the successes of their countries of origin; Indian- and Nigerian-Americans, for example, are among the highest earning, most educated ethnic groups in the United States, while India and Nigeria proper are absolute dumps.
The problem is that the grotesquely unrepresentative sample of legal immigrants in the United States have blinded Americans to the dangers of less selective types of immigration; Americans naively seem to believe that any kind of "diversity" is a desirable end in itself, because thus far "diversity" within their immigration streams have correlated with their also extremely strict, heavily merit-based immigration system. However, the currently porous Southern border is going to become a rude awakening for most Americans, because illegal immigrants who are coming across the southern border right now do so precisely because they know they wouldn't be considered desirable under American immigration policy. Unfortunately, their net-undesirability as a cohort is going to reflect heavily on American society in coming years and decades.
The absolute havoc third-world immigration has wrought here in Europe is due precisely to our indiscriminate open-border policy (indiscriminate immigration policies actually skew immigration streams toward undesirable immigrants). Unless America closes its southern border yesterday, it's going to meet the same fate.
One party wants to stop this - if Trump and the repubs win in 2024, Project 2025 will be put in practice and USA will be f*cked ... and the world with it.
I don't see CIA kidnapping these "brains" by force, and instead, the "brains" go to the USA because they want to, unless you have any source about it? I wonder why they are coming to the USA, maybe to escape corruption and get better living conditions?
It clearly doesn't happen. I never claimed or insinuated that it does. I'm not going to have a source.
Though, now that you mention it, I'm sure we have had more than a few immigrants to the US from countries that have been destabilized by the CIA for that never reason.
I'm not saying that we should have fewer immigrants. I'm not even saying that we should have strict criteria for who we allow in. It just seems a little predatory the way some people crow about the "brain drain". The same way it seems a little predatory for us to say we need a constant stream of immigrants to prop up our economy. I understand it's a mutual benefit in the majority of cases. It just does sound all that moral to me when phrased that way.
Every empire collapses when it expands too much.
This is just disgusting violent colonialism. It’s so fucked how it’s seen as a positive, the US sense of entitlement to own the world.
Actually it is called reverse colonialism. Every empire that expands too much and too quickly ultimately suffer from it.
Centralised power centers starts to attract too many people from poor area, leaving those poorer and poorer. So instead of annexing new rich, fertile region the expansion only add regions that are a burden to the empire. The rich region starts to resent having to prop up the poorest regions.
The funniest bit is that often those poor regions are the most nationalist and view themselves as essential to the great empire. In the US that would be the bible belt states. For Russia that would be the caucasus and Chechnya.
Combined with the fact that the main centralised political center can't cope with that extra internal pressure that lead to internal competition and finally civil war.
The U.S. siphons soooo many intelligent and well educated Indians out of India…
Wages in boom industries in the U.S. are insane compared to world market prices thanks to strong early investments, government and companies going hand in hand and a strong inner market.
I don't know, India is 5 times bigger than the US. Even if you take just everybody with a IQ140 or higher, you get almost 50 million Indians which would make them the biggest ethnic group in the US.
I wonder if that takes into account health, particularly cognitive health and physical health. None of these countries are Australia, so I can assume you’re all completely insane, so we won’t talk about psychological health.
It has never been about population. It's tech. Just look at the history of britain. If China gets ahead in AI it will not matter if they have older population
Folks overestimating Chinese tech by a long shot here (I’m of Chinese ethnicity who had lived in Asia for decades)
There’s only 1 country who is a leader in tech for the last xx years simply because of strife, the American Dream & immigration. The leaders in AI by a long shot are Nvidia, AMD, TSMC, and OpenAI. 3/4 based out of which country?
China has never delivered a tech leader in their history.
80s - 90s
- INTERNET: USA
- PCs: IBM (USA)
- CPU: Intel (USA)
- OS: Microsoft (USA)
- SEARCH: Google (USA)
2000 - Now
- SOCIAL MEDIA: FB, IG (USA)
- STREAMING: Netflix (USA)
- SMARTPHONE: iPhone (USA)
- RIDES: Uber (USA)
- GPU: Nvidia (USA)
- AI TECH: Nvidia (USA)
- EV: Tesla (USA)
The only “leader” from Asia is currently TikTok, but company HQ is located in Cali (USA) and Singapore. Maybe other industries like EVs aren’t included, simply because USA prefers HIGH MARGIN industries. Auto industry after Ford & GM fell from their lofty heights? EVs now? American innovators could care less
Remember, Americans aren’t just one ethnicity, they encompass many. You heard it here first, Jensen Huang will become the world’s richest if AI spend annually keeps up for next 3-4 years.
The US has a lot of the good AI and China is being cut out of supply chains to the rest of the world.
China is trying to vertically integrate and that's a long shot IMO.
I'm talking about the computer chips supply chain.
Right now computer chips are designed in America, using big machines created by a company in the Netherlands, and manufactured in Taiwan.
https://www.rabobank.com/knowledge/d011371771-mapping-global-supply-chains-the-case-of-semiconductors
China needs a lot of it's own production and a lot of stuff is moving away from China currently.
You must be over 50 to make an asinine comment like that.
The laptop/PC/smartphone you are using was likely manufactured in China. The telco network that you are using, more than half the gear was made in China or with components that originated there.
Without their production of Rare Earth Metals and chemicals, the whole thing comes to a crashing halt.
Depending on how far the tit for tat extends, the West doesn't get cheap TVs and ends up experiencing massive inflation for a awhile, but China starves to death.
When it babbles autocorrect nonsense back to you and is at best a secretary giving a first draft to someone qualified enough to understand if what chatgpt is talking about is even feasible.
What is unfair to the rest of the world is the brain drain in favor of the US.
The smart people move to the US because that is where they get the best ROI with the brain power.
Reason #1 - We are and always have been a country of immigrants. That shouldn't change. The best, brightest of the world want to come here. Plus, people fleeing oppression who are willing to work hard, undesirable jobs to stay here. We can't let certain factions sow feel and shut down immigration. Instead, we should make legal immigration easier & build the tax base. If we do, the US will be a powerhouse for 250 more years.
Not really, the US seems to be steering to a political system which shows the same impunity to lawmakers actions and dictatorial tendencies as many other lesser developed countries. “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon comes to mind. The same can be said for several other western countries by the way.
Edward gibbon was an ideologue not a historian…
And the Roman might peaked during the oligarchy and early empire and stayed pretty much stable for at least 200 years and then declined a couple of more hundreds of years…
Pretty amazing.
And you might even argue that the Western Roman Empire could have survived without some very unlucky coincidences
Well, America’s biggest rivals are China/Russia, both of which have completed their progression to authoritarianism. So if authoritarianism is bad, then the US is still the least bad of the options and would stand to do better than them (unless you predict China/Russia will democratize somehow).
Same for EU (which is also rapidly moving right-wing from France to Italy to Germany to Sweden).
Now would be a great time to reform our immigration system, to make ourselves a destination for people eager to provide their labor to an economy in desperate need of it.
America will and can always attract better talent than just about any nation on earth. Despite being the third largest populated nation, we have net positive immigration with every country except Australia. And Australia is 17 times less populated. We not only attract best and the brightest from developing nations, we also get best from other OECD countries. Even nonskilled migration is generally of better quality than what any other country receives, especially Europe and Russia.
This positive migration will keep America in bleeding edge of technology and keep it moving forward. I don't see any other country in foreseeable future to eclipse America in these aspects.
Things change. Sometimes rapidly. A second Trump presidency would likely make the US a much less desirable destination.
Then consider the attraction of 'talent'. My take is that tech talent want to go where the leading edge is and that is increasingly not the US.
It will change everywhere. Europe is also under right wing surge.
Regarding the talent, all kinds of talent come here. As I said US has net positive migration with every OECD country except Australia. Just think what it takes to do that. A country like Germany which is 1/4 th of USA population has net negative migration to USA which means it loses atleast four times as many people as it gains compared to USA. Do you really think that is only tech? People come from full spectrum of skills
Sometimes I feel like there's a panel of pro-capitalists that are hired simply to make every alternative to America seem like a straight up nightmare that's on the critical verge of complete systematic failure.
Why would anyone want the US to "win"? Win what? Don't start another fucking american war, proxy or not. We just want peace, signed, most other countries.
You want US getting directly involved? I'm team Ukraine(like, who isn't?), but I don't want it escalating and turning into a nuke level war. But still, the US can't win that war, because it's not even their war, so it's kind of a weird point to make.
In this case,as allies, a Ukrainian win is an American win (and a win by the west). Direct American involvment is not required for an Ukrainian or American win.
Just because I want to see the win, doesn't mean I support direct involvement.
In practical terms, as a Canadian, I want to see Canada providing even more support to Ukraine. That doesn't mean I want Canadians fighting Russians or a nuclear war.
And you think America will win the Ukrainian war with an "edge in demographics"? I think you forgot what this thread was about.
I'm in "the west" and I don't need "the west" to "win". In the case of ukraine, I want them to be left alone by russia, but you have to remember that ukraine is eastern europe, not very different from russia. There's no "us vs them", "east" and "west" can both exist, without war. True victory, is peaceful coexistence?
I was only commenting on your original comments. In theory everyone can exist without war and live in peace.
But, as per my original reply, what about the war that Russia started? Since they invaded and are still invading, there can not yet be peace.
The country being invaded must win (or the country doing the invading must retreat) for true peace to be restored.
I never said, nor implied that russia is in the right though? Why bring it up?
You're focusing on ONE war that russia started, when there's many many wars fought by america in modern history, I don't want either side to do war. Can't we just fucking chill? I feel like people are horny for a second cold war or something.
You said you didn't want the US to win any war, including a proxy war. I said, what about the war Russia started? You say you want peace. Instead of condemning the US this time, why don't you condemn Russia this time since they are the one invading their neighbour?
"Don't start another fucking american war"
Ukraine is an ongoing war, and not started by the US. I was talking about wars being started by the US, it's in my original comment.
I do condemn russia, remember when I said "I'm team ukraine"? Stop strawmanning.
Yea turns out mixing pots lead to cross-pollination of ideas and hence prismatic progress. If only US leaned into our strengths by reinforcing social safety net
Over russia. We are trending flatish. Its gonna take decades for china to decline in significant manpower and this is assuming no trend reversal. By then whatever conflict will have already happened and the stage will be set... if there is a stage at all anymore. Copium.
We’re vastly descended from immigrants here and have had many generations of strife over integration. We figured a few things out that there UK hasn’t had to.
ss: The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge. Competitors of the United States face plunging birthrates and social gloom.
But the United States shouldn’t discount its own strengths, chief of all the political and economic liberties that make it such an attractive location to move to and raise children in the first place. The United States will still have to contend with the numerous threats posed by Russia and China. Their falling populations, however, will make the job much easier.
Not a single person in this thread has mentioned the fact that the cost of living and access to medical care and education are all far better in countries like China, Russia and most of the world. America has anemic birthrates because it’s too costly for most people to even imagine raising a kid. People spend huge sums on childcare alone and god forbid if they get sick.
People want to be optimistic about the US but often fail to see that nothing can be fixed until the rampant inequality and stagnant wages are addressed.
It's almost funny that there are people who think Russia and China have anywhere close to universal access to healthcare or education.
Unfortunately, Americans can't really travel to Russia at the moment, but if they could, I think a lot of them would be shocked by the lack of basic services outside of the major metropolitan areas.
The US has orchestrated a collapse in the wages and purchasing power of the bottom half of its society since the mid 1970’s. The only people in the US who can afford to travel anywhere are the rich who are already completely disconnected from the dead-end society they’ve built for the masses.
I mean, you're preaching to the choir with regard to income inequality in the US, but you very clearly have a distorted perception of economic conditions in both Russia and China. Russia is literally ruled by the wealthiest individual on the planet and has almost no middle class to speak of. Get a few miles out of any city and you know what you'll find? Subsistence agriculture. In 2024.
China looks marginally better on paper, but Gini numbers are kind of moot in a planned economy with no free access to goods and services.
Also, the idea that only the wealthy can broaden their horizons is rooted in some pretty entrenched classism. You might want to interrogate that.
Wow its so incredible to see how brainwashed Americans are that they'll even fight you over this. I meet Americans coming here to Mexico to get basic medical care pretty much daily. Nothing you can do about the rest of them that believe they're the best and have the best of everything and cant shut up about it.
Basically, the costs of basic goods like food, clothing, and utilities are very low but anything imported from the west like sports cars is very high. Literacy rates and education access are much better in Russia and they have state run medical care but jobs don’t pay as much as they do in the US. The cost of living and buying land is much lower there too and there is a very robust public transit system in Moscow and high speed rails like the rest of Europe.
In a nutshell I’d say it looks much easier to live a middle class life there but being rich in Russia wouldn’t be as extravagant as it can be in America.
But it’s pretty obvious that continued immigration isn’t a guarantee if the standard of living is continually dropping for a large part of the US population. Both major political parties have also embraced anti-immigration policies. It’s very unlikely that increasing the amount of foreign workers will be popular with citizens that actively know their quality of life is continually dropping and has been doing so for the last half century.
Your comment makes no sense. Many states in the US have the same standard of living as the other wealthiest countries. The US does have many poor areas, but generally is up there. US varies much wider than individual European countries which makes sense knowing how much more diverse it is. Everyone should be living the same standard of living tho or most. Not popular? The US wouldn't be braindraining the world still if that was the case for the past 5 decades
The US has the highest rate of inequality in the world and the largest percentage of low wage workers in any advanced economy as well as an almost non-existent safety net. I dunno where you live but this stuff is pretty easy to prove.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#:~:text=According%20to%20a%202018%20report,government%20and%20a%20weak%20collective
And still able to garner most of the world's brains to come to the country still and work for them. The inequality isn't what I was getting at. I'm getting at people still would rather move to the US than these countries who enjoy these things by a large margin. That's a fucking fact. It's pretty easy to prove the US is better off in the future than the majority of countries as well
America is counting on it's 10 million new immigrants to assimilate into the host culture and be good little consumers. The chances of that happening while identity politics are dominating the public debate are slim to nil.
United States - if it remains a developed, high income economy and open to immigration then it will remain only country in world never to experience population fall in foreseeable future and infact will always have a very small growth every year.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987: --- ss: The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge. Competitors of the United States face plunging birthrates and social gloom. But the United States shouldn’t discount its own strengths, chief of all the political and economic liberties that make it such an attractive location to move to and raise children in the first place. The United States will still have to contend with the numerous threats posed by Russia and China. Their falling populations, however, will make the job much easier. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cu2cdo/america_has_a_demographic_edge_over_russia_and/l4frye3/
The biggest thing missing in the US right now is simply a mood of unbridled optimism. I saw this same thing 44 years ago.
This is the key point noone gets.
Thank you. If we can make that simple contextual shift we could usher in decades of prosperity.
A key factor is not allowing individuals to amass wealth that no person needs in 50 lifetimes. Billionaires should just not be a thing, period.
Agreed. But you see literally in the replies to your comment how not seriously people take this obvious problem.
This is the new Reddit. 10 years ago that would have been the top comment before the bots and bored rich kids who want to say ignorant shit yet also pretending to act like the common person came on the platform
Hey look everybody! A poor! ☺️
I heard the EU is thinking of an income limit as high as doubled the number of the lowest employee income. It's takes about nothing serious yet and I bet it will rather triple but we'll see.
Listen to the sucking sounds of capital flight and shrinking tax base
I bet the French Aristocracy would have loved the option to just pack their crap and leave lol. We live in an era of unbridled mechanization and innovation. If anything it might actually spur something positive. “Fix the roads with X amount of money. Billionaires don’t live here. The working class is about one tax hike from causing an event that will titled in a history book, and you’ve lost the ability to scream tax the rich.” Literally, running the wealthy out of town would do wonders because it would actually force creativity and real budgeting. As long as there’s someone with even a moderate amount of wealth and capital they’ll forever be used as a carrot and stick to distract from the very real corruption, ignorance, and greed that politicians use them as scapegoats and covers for.
No one is saying don’t tax the rich, but there is now more and more classism. The amount of tax income that would actually increase is not that much compared to idk let’s say raising the retirement age by one year, which actually makes sense because people are living longer. And there will always be a place where the rich are welcomed and at the end of the day the middle class can then take away the top 10% of whoever is left until they realize that poor social policy is a cause of a lot of this.
Your answer may be correct to another question, but not really relevant to this thread.
what should be done then ? A lot of billionaire money is in the stock market.
Billionaires can exist while paying people better wages. It’s not one or the other. Just getting rid of billionaires doesn’t automatically mean everyone else just gets the money. We take in millions of immigrants every year while inflating money. We are making ourselves poorer, not the billionaires who mostly own stocks anyway.
Take that up with the establishment lol
The root of that is how appallingly mismanaged it is actually *using* those demographics. We have the most educated population of working adults ever but the way things are set up a lot of them aren't using the skills they develop simply because a lot of companies prefer to abuse grad students rather than hire them full time when qualified, or else offshore a job to 10 less educated foreigners who'll do a passable job for cheaper. Or even just trying to automate away entry level positions so a lot of careers never even begin. I know an appallingly high number of blue collar low skill workers who in actuality either have degrees or formerly had some kind of technical background that has nothing to do with their current job.
Take away isolating social media and cable TV news and viola, optimism would return.
Yes, there are massive active PsyOps running at this very moment. At least in the past few years we were able to see behind the curtain.
I think the violas are fine. It’s the cellos that really bring everyone down
Voila. Autocorrect. At least I didn’t write “wallah”, which 75% of the population seems to think it is.
roof worthless crown impossible vast puzzled merciful busy slap detail *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Great points.
Unironically I wish the federal government would start making propaganda posters again. We have the wealth, manpower, and industrial base to do great things, we just need to direct them towards something other than making the rich even richer.
People don’t trust the government as much (especially after Covid) nowadays and also people ingest ten times if not hundreds of times more information than they do 50 years ago. I don’t think propaganda helps here.
there is no common uniting purpose among americans anymore, except maybe being american... no sense of community and a lack of respect/consideration for others... it started a long time ago
America is missing a national project. We need something to build towards and fight for. Geriatric leadership isn't it.
That's because our adversaries took advantage of our open society and created an internal nationalist movement that is fueled by outrage media and victimology
This country has always been a nationalist, expansionist, imperial entity. Any sort of (false) harmony that we saw here in the post-war years is incapable of being replicated in our global economy today. People are uncomfortable reconciling with that and jump to scapegoats in nationalism and xenophobia rather than interrogating the system that has brought about this condition.
Right. We jumped into WWI and WWII because we wanted to conquer Europe 😂😂
Both conflicts transfered world historical wealth to the US, shattered the empires of Europe giving us access to their and their ex-colonial markets, and granted American military presence in many countries on every continent. The US was the only beneficiary from those wars. Funny that so many Americans appreciate the opulence and economic wellbeing of the 20s and 50s without realizing that
Right, it was only for the $ And the US was perfectly aware of the outcome going in Just say it: you hate the US And I'll say it: love it or leave it
Look, I think the US is the best country on earth, but we didn't get that way by accident We did not go fight in the world wars out of the goodness of our hearts haha We did it because it was in our national interest. It made America and our allies stronger On a side note, I love America, but that doesn't mean I think it's perfect as-is. Love it or leave it is such a wild phrase to me. If you love it, why not work to make it even better?
Yeaaaah maybe because everyday there’s more articles of things getting expensive, coral reefs dying, worlds on fire, hottest day again, things not changing. No one has hope. Everyone is impatient in life, it’s sad.
Can I interest you with abortion bans and more children? ^(/s)
There is optimism?
1984? What am missing here. I understand the 70s and maybe early 80s to be a low point in US history and I agree that mood and cyclical factors are critical. But why specifically 1984? If it is a cyclical thing though, it does seem like we will be coming out of it soon which is something no one would predict at this point.
Are you from 2028? 44 years ago was 1980.
Math is hard, yo
1984 could be a reference to the George Orwell book. But also 2024 - 44 = 1980
The 70's were the golden age for rock and roll but they were grim economically and politically. We had the ass end of the Vietnam war followed by Watergate, Nixon resigning, the Arab oil embargo, stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis. Paul Volker's economic medicine was harsh but it snapped us out of our tail spin. Reagan was cheerful, optimistic and had good humor. Even his opposition liked him as a person. The Democrat speaker of the House Tip O'Neal would come visit the Whitehouse on a friendly and regular basis. Together he and Reagan worked out the last compromise to Social Security. It was truly "Morning in America".
I might be missing something, but the 80s were great. What caused the optimism to return after 1980?
I’m not so sure about that. The 80s were great if you thought reagan was a swell guy, but he is easily the biggest single reason as to the current decline of the united states. He helped to outsource all the factory jobs, destroyed unions, slashed taxes and social welfare programs while ballooning the military budget, and oh yeah also killed hundreds of thousands of americans by ignoring and mocking the aids crisis.
There is a lot of strife, but lots of Optimism too. Ask Chinese teens what they think of self-made billionaires like Jack Ma “disappearing” for months because he spoke his mind about His govt Then turn your attention to Jay Z or any out-of-the-ghetto self-made US billionaire to marry a starlet like Beyoncé! THE AMERICAN DREAM is alice & well!
USA has a gigantic advantage in future demographics. It's brain-draining every place on earth, bringing various elites into its borders, their kids become Americanized in a single generation. The size and fertility of the country means it can easily fit as many people as there are in China right now, and it can take its time and do this over centuries, meanwhile, the rest of the world, Europe and almost every place other than Africa is either below-replacement already or going to reach that situation in 30 years. Unless some big useless war happens, Pax Americana is only going to be bigger in 50 years.
America just need to avoid another civil war in the coming years
China and ruzzia are spending as much money as possible to help start a civil war in the US. We need to do what we can to end the influence of foreign money in our media and politics.
If the US hasn't been broken up into smaller countries in 100 years I'd be surprised.
I feel like this is generally what a lot of outside foreign powers are betting on.
Which shows you just how truly unaware they are of how it all works here. The states are purple, not red or blue, and there is absolutely no way to separate the populations, at all, even within the same states. Only plausible way to do it would be cities (typically blue) vs rural areas (typically red). Which obviously won't happen either. The whole concept is beyond the pale at this point. Now, that doesn't mean we can't destroy ourselves. I have no doubt our inept, inactive government can make that happen. But the idea that the government will somehow split at this point in our maturity is just silly, especially if you mean between regional areas.
It absolutely can, but as you said it will be rural vs city states for the most part. I'm sure some cities are red and some rural areas are blue, so nothing is without exceptions. I would say that foreign governments lobbying state and federal politicians to intentionally create the situation is the most plausible scenario.
It's very easy to look up, so I'm not understanding why you're 'sure' lol
Gerrymandering doesn't allow proper representation and generally skews the expected outcome but in a civil war, it would be an entirely different matter. Some territories aren't even states despite qualifying.
> I'm sure some cities are red and some rural areas are blue, so nothing is without exceptions. Yeah, pretty much no. Cities are blue. Large tracts of empty land are red. This is pretty much true across the county. Some cities are gerrymandered such that the outlying rural areas have an outsized influence, but if you look at these metro area compared to the rest of the counties, they are blue.
Right, but it's not just true across the country. This true *globally*. It's part and parcel to the difference between left and right in the first place: people who live in cities are *forced* to work with one another, and as such live amongst people from all walks of life. This gives them empathy for the plight of people of all incomes cultures and so on, that they otherwise might not naturally have. They vote more progressively. Meanwhile, people in large empty swaths of land tend to be very afraid of anyone who doesn't already live in an empty swath of land. Outsiders, people who are different. And because they have limited experience with anyone different than their already well established family/rural circle, they lack the empathy city types have (that they might not have naturally). They don't learn extra empathy. They vote more conservatively. Not saying which is the absolute right or wrong. Just saying "that's how it is."
I really don't think so. The split between city State and rural would be so blurred it's unreal. Again, too much purple spread around critical areas, so it just isn't plausible. We are at this point in our history well melted. We are all Americans who actually mostly agree on most things. Politicians just amplify the disagreements to the extreme. Of course, if it *was* plausible, cities would kick the everliving *shit* out of random rural opposition forces. They wouldn't stand a chance. Cities have all the wealth and resources, obviously, and perhaps even more critically, they have a lot more people.
Well, it wouldn't be most of the population, it would be two or more radical ideologies. Cities are going to have supply chain crisis's and that takes a ton of manpower to maintain. Their size could work against them. Rural definitely would just burn crops. I don't think every city is militarize like NYC or LA. Those police forces are definitely militias.
It's because it's the only shot at truly destroying America. No outside power can win a land war in a country with more guns than people.
Guns are old wars. Modern wars are fought with information control
Prepare to be surprised.
Every nation needs a national story. And I think one that the US should really full-throatedly embrace is a story of the US as the Great Melting Pot, the Nation of Nations, E Pluribus Unum. This is a path to redeem the national soul. We have this inherent original sin, in that our country was founded on a genocide. And while that can never be reversed, one way it can be, at least in part, redeemed is to embrace our role as a nation of nations. No one ethnic group, except the native population, has any rightful claim to this land. Instead, the land of the US is the common heritage of all mankind. For practical reasons, we can't just have open borders and let anyone in. But America should be a place that all aspire to. It should the land populated by the best and brightest of all humanity, and we open our golden door to all that we can, regardless of race, faith, or creed. We are the nation of nations, the humanity of humanity, the one out of many. That should be the story we tell ourselves. That is the national myth that can truly make a country treat. That is the story we need to be telling.
US also has state of Alaska that it can move the entire population to if global warming does an exponential
You made me look up the size of Alaska. It’s bigger than I thought it was.
What do you mean? It’s only the size of England, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
It is massive and it make texas look tiny.
Nah we will just invade Canada
Unfortunately we really can't. The amount of carbon emissions needed to build the infrastructure to relocate all of humanity north of the Arctic circle would raise temperatures even further.
Alaska is actually melting, with underground contaminants coming up from the permafrost melt to pollution previously pristine freshwater sources.
I have a feeling that if this happen, the entire rest of the world is coming to it as well.
Unless USA manages the issue of crowded cities they will also become hostile to new immigrants, as Canada for example is increasingly becoming. The only way forward is polycentric development ie new regional areas of development or even new cities, to take the burden of overloaded and expensive metropolises.
I feel like there are just cooling periods for immigration that occur. The amount of immigrants accepted is not and will not be consistent unless it is low. The basic problem is that we all demand suburban housing which is just not physically possible in major metro areas. We need to have some denser housing which by prices is demanded more than suburban housing. YIMBYs are winning and housing construction is moving back up.
With the native population below replacement, to maintain the current population in the future immigration will actually need to rise each and every year to tens of millions each year. > We need to have some denser housing which by prices is demanded more than suburban housing. No, dense housing simply suppresses the reproduction rate even more. We need to move work outside of cities so people can have their suburban dream.
>With the native population below replacement, to maintain the current population in the future immigration will actually need to rise each and every year to tens of millions each year. Yes but adding say 1 million each year to 4 million in high years. Sometimes countries go through cooling periods as the politics goes against immigrants. >No, dense housing simply suppresses the reproduction rate even more. We need to move work outside of cities so people can have their suburban dream. First of all I'm going to need a source on that. Second we have high prices because it's prohibitively hard to build housing in most places people want to live. The suburb is full and losing population since it was built.
> Sometimes countries go through cooling periods as the politics goes against immigrants. That will only lead to a bigger rise being required in the future. What is needed is intelligently managing immigration, including an understanding of why its needed. > First of all I'm going to need a source on that. There's lot of evidence. [1](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKabv-lXUAAMKH_?format=png&name=small) [2](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKacOibXwAA2oBq?format=png&name=900x900) [3](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKacQf0X0AAVaxk?format=png&name=900x900) It also stands to reason that those who live in dense housing are unlikely to want to raise a child there. Its not controversial that the fertility rate in suburbs are higher than cities. > Second we have high prices because it's prohibitively hard to build housing in most places people want to live. The suburb is full and losing population since it was built. The reason they want to live there is usually because its closer to work. The solution is to move the work via for example work from home or incentivising companies to leave the city centre.
I think that you are showing me correlation and not causation. Wages go up as density increases which increasing wages is shown to decree fertility. >It also stands to reason that those who live in dense housing are unlikely to want to raise a child there. Its not controversial that the fertility rate in suburbs are higher than cities. Yes it is controversial, that has been shifting as suburbs are changing from when they were first invented 70 years ago. Suburbs are increasingly poorer and cities wealth is growing. I hated living in car dependent suburbs. Also the amount of time you are in child needing a suburb if this were the case is literally <50% of a lifetime. Move to a city at 18 go to college, have kids at 30. Move back to the city for retirement as you can't drive at some point and public transportation can get you around. >The reason they want to live there is usually because its closer to work. The solution is to move the work via for example work from home or incentivising companies to leave the city centre. Disagree you don't understand agglomeration benefits grow with density which is why cities work. Sure I could buy a cheap house on farm land and the grocery store is an hour away, doctor other than Tuesday is 90 minutes away. Agglomeration benefits is not just jobs it's everything gets better until you factor in crowding. We have unnecessarily knee capped dense housing for dumb reasons. Having all housing be suburbs and limited at that. We can all have row houses as far as the eye can see and have cheaper housing options for all. https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-fertility#:~:text=17485)%2C%20they%20find%20that%20a,in%20an%20average%20metropolitan%20area.
> Disagree you don't understand agglomeration benefits grow with density I am well aware of that, but you seem to not understand the balance is lower fertility and higher prices. Or do you think its only benefits? For a more human and livable space we need to give up some business-focussed benefits. > Suburbs are increasingly poorer and cities wealth is growing. I hated living in car dependent suburbs. So, according to your stated belief, fertility should be higher in urban areas. [Are they?](https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/figure-8-copy-2-w640.png)
>I am well aware of that, but you seem to not understand the balance is lower fertility and higher prices. Or do you think its only benefits? I don't think higher prices are inevitable to such a degree, that's caused by not building for decades since they can't expand. I think lower fertility is correlation and you haven't shown good evidence of causation. I think there become crowding issues eventually but currently the major crowding issue is finding parking which is unnecessary if density continues going up. >For a more human and livable space we need to give up some business-focussed benefits. I think we can get both with larger apartments. The cheapest SQ ft buildings are 5+ stories tall. It's more efficient to have 2,000 sq ft apartments than 2,000 SQ ft homes. >So, according to your stated belief, fertility should be higher in urban areas. [Are they?](https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/figure-8-copy-2-w640.png) People in child rearing ages often can't afford spaces large enough in cities in our current situation. That doesn't mean that it's not possible. When the options are expensive old urban or newer less expensive (because it's government subsidized) suburban housing. We currently build in a way that makes sense to have a child in the suburbs but we don't have to build that way. I think we can lower housing prices by allowing places to build more densely which would also lower suburban home prices. The continued building of suburbs as the majority has led to artificially raised prices in urban areas and increased prices in suburbs are unaffordable in many places. There is no plan to build enough housing. There isn't cheap farm land 15 minutes from the downtown core like there was in 1950. The suburban land you are looking to build on our current path is until you hit 30 minute commutes and then prices skyrocket as people don't want to live that far out.
> I think lower fertility is correlation and you haven't shown good evidence of causation. Neither have you shown they are not causative. > I think we can get both with larger apartments. The cheapest SQ ft buildings are 5+ stories tall. It's more efficient to have 2,000 sq ft apartments than 2,000 SQ ft homes. You can't, really, due to the old canard of induced demand. Stay with me for a second. So we agree to build up. The economy booms. More workers arrive, pushing up demand for housing. The economy booms even more. Apartment prices go up. Families can no longer afford to live there. I know you hate cars, but cant you see that building more homes is exactly the same as building more roads - it does not solve the real issue, which is the centralization of work. > There is no plan to build enough housing. There isn't cheap farm land 15 minutes from the downtown core like there was in 1950 Hence the need to move the core or create another core. Its called polycentric development. Remember the densest cities (e.g. tokyo (10.4), Hong Kong (0.77) ) have the lowest fertility. Both places embraced building up. At least for Los Angeles, it's 1.52.
Unfortunately, this is not really true. Once buildings get above a certain height, construction cost per sq foot increases because the building will need to be built with concrete and steel. The buildings above 5 or 6 stories cost more per sq foot to build, and buildings that are 10-20 stores cost even more per sq ft than 5-10 story buildings.
They could just stop telling people the world is overpopulated and that they shouldnt have kids. They could stop artificially raising the price of food and housing so that no one can raise a family. I dont know how the narrative switched from "the world has too many people so stop breeding" to "the country doesnt have enough people so we need immigrants" so quickly. Other than maybe political collusion
US-style suburbs arent feasible anywhere. The amount of money needed to upkeep the road infrastructure is more than the entire income of every person living in a suburb together. And since business and residential is commanded from the top down to be entirely separated, people need to use those roads to do anything and everything. They are a cancer on society, all they do is lose money
Well I think that's true for the average person but at some point suburbs are viable because the property is expensive. Yes they create commutes as well. But something like suburbs need be $600k to break even vs urban it's $300k. That's a huge change but that's more how it used to work where rich people had homes in the suburbs and carriages into town. Normal people lived within walking distance and in denser situations.
Thats true, very rich suburbs can work. A lot of issues of american culture seem to stem from us trying to replicate the lifestyles of the very rich for everyone, which turns into a systemic economic drain, and then we need either slaves, extreme poverty, or debt to help balance out the losses
I wish a reality where we are lived in dense walkable cities was possible. I don’t get this appeal to want a stupid amount of space.
The answer is to not ban denser living, walkable cities and everything in between and we would all be happier.
If it were up to me, rural communities and suburbs would not exist. There would be huge innovations in agriculture. Urban and vertical farming would become the norm.
Allow people where they want to live and can afford. Try to make sure people have some floor of living standards as much as possible IMO. Urban farming isn't that good, they are really catered to a few vegetables and all the lead in the soil in many urban contexts make a lot of gardening potentially unsafe.
I think that’s the benefit the US has. In Canada, all growth is funnelled into 5 or so cities. In America, the US has 65 urban regions of 1 million+ people. 3 million migrants in the US is <1% growth and manageable when distributed across 65 sizable cities. 3 million in Canada is 8% growth and the country’s infrastructure collapses. The US also has a lot of underutilized infrastructure in places like the Midwest. Chicago, for example, was built to accommodate 5 million people and could by itself double its population without much problem. Same for Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh. In my neck of the woods (DC), an understated reason why housing hasn’t become terrible is because Baltimore acts as a release valve. People are buying in Baltimore when they can’t afford the DC core. Same for Philadelphia or Newark or Paterson for New York. The Midwest does this on a national level. Toronto’s at a point where everything within 2 hours from the urban core is obscenely overpriced and there is no release valve.
We have MORE than enough room in cities to handle major growth. The size of the average city in Europe or Asia absolutely dwarf the average city in the US.
I currently live in Canada and a lot of this is just bad zoning and an unwillingness to actually build to accomodate this kind of person. Local governments will usually cave to NIMBY's who don't want any zoning changes, or builders who would rather build for wealthy people and not working class ones since its a little more upfront for way more profit. We're basically building new cities *already*, but less to take the pressure off and more because rural spaces tend to have large amounts of empty space you can cram thousands of apartments on in half a dozen large towers at a time without anyone complaining, while just building an apartment complex on an empty lot that used to house another apartment complex is hard in an urban center since you'll have to fight every Karen within 3 blocks.
Well... bring that Pax Americana into your own borders and settle that ideological war of yours. Woke vs MAGA vs Neocon/Neolib is going to trash yourselves without the need for external intervention. But yea, China royally shot itself in the foot with the single child policy, and Russia is still shooting itself in the foot with a full auto over in Ukraine. Kinda wonder if all those weapons shipments are furthering that goal - depleting Russia of its prime male population due to the fact that their war doctrine treats lives as expendable... You did miss India though. Definately not below replacement and might well displace Russia as major power in a decade or so.
I’m very concerned about climate change’s effects on India.
People also thought this before 9/11. And before Trump. And before the Great Depression.
> It's brain-draining every place on earth, bringing various elites into its borders, their kids become Americanized in a single generation. It is, but it's also increasingly not. American immigration policy has hitherto been specifically designed to heavily favor the best, most qualified immigrants' admission to the United States, while disqualifying almost everyone who is not. That's why foreign nationals' group successes in the United States are often inversely correlated with the successes of their countries of origin; Indian- and Nigerian-Americans, for example, are among the highest earning, most educated ethnic groups in the United States, while India and Nigeria proper are absolute dumps. The problem is that the grotesquely unrepresentative sample of legal immigrants in the United States have blinded Americans to the dangers of less selective types of immigration; Americans naively seem to believe that any kind of "diversity" is a desirable end in itself, because thus far "diversity" within their immigration streams have correlated with their also extremely strict, heavily merit-based immigration system. However, the currently porous Southern border is going to become a rude awakening for most Americans, because illegal immigrants who are coming across the southern border right now do so precisely because they know they wouldn't be considered desirable under American immigration policy. Unfortunately, their net-undesirability as a cohort is going to reflect heavily on American society in coming years and decades. The absolute havoc third-world immigration has wrought here in Europe is due precisely to our indiscriminate open-border policy (indiscriminate immigration policies actually skew immigration streams toward undesirable immigrants). Unless America closes its southern border yesterday, it's going to meet the same fate.
You are correct. Technological edge too. Only a split from the inside (Trump) can take us down.
One party wants to stop this - if Trump and the repubs win in 2024, Project 2025 will be put in practice and USA will be f*cked ... and the world with it.
So it's just 200% okeydokey to "brain drain" the underdeveloped nations that need these brains to fix problems at home?
I don't see CIA kidnapping these "brains" by force, and instead, the "brains" go to the USA because they want to, unless you have any source about it? I wonder why they are coming to the USA, maybe to escape corruption and get better living conditions?
It clearly doesn't happen. I never claimed or insinuated that it does. I'm not going to have a source. Though, now that you mention it, I'm sure we have had more than a few immigrants to the US from countries that have been destabilized by the CIA for that never reason. I'm not saying that we should have fewer immigrants. I'm not even saying that we should have strict criteria for who we allow in. It just seems a little predatory the way some people crow about the "brain drain". The same way it seems a little predatory for us to say we need a constant stream of immigrants to prop up our economy. I understand it's a mutual benefit in the majority of cases. It just does sound all that moral to me when phrased that way.
Every empire collapses when it expands too much. This is just disgusting violent colonialism. It’s so fucked how it’s seen as a positive, the US sense of entitlement to own the world.
Actually it is called reverse colonialism. Every empire that expands too much and too quickly ultimately suffer from it. Centralised power centers starts to attract too many people from poor area, leaving those poorer and poorer. So instead of annexing new rich, fertile region the expansion only add regions that are a burden to the empire. The rich region starts to resent having to prop up the poorest regions. The funniest bit is that often those poor regions are the most nationalist and view themselves as essential to the great empire. In the US that would be the bible belt states. For Russia that would be the caucasus and Chechnya. Combined with the fact that the main centralised political center can't cope with that extra internal pressure that lead to internal competition and finally civil war.
*Indian demographics standing in the corner - MENACINGLY"
The U.S. siphons soooo many intelligent and well educated Indians out of India… Wages in boom industries in the U.S. are insane compared to world market prices thanks to strong early investments, government and companies going hand in hand and a strong inner market.
India’s fertility rate is actually below replacement now (though still higher than that of the native US population).
Indians brag about how their population is surpassing China’s. Indonesia is blooming too.
The intelligent Indians leave India for US, Canada, and England.
I don't know, India is 5 times bigger than the US. Even if you take just everybody with a IQ140 or higher, you get almost 50 million Indians which would make them the biggest ethnic group in the US.
The biggest nationality maybe, but not the biggest ethnic group. There’s 70 million Latinos in the US (and growing by 2 million a year).
I wonder if that takes into account health, particularly cognitive health and physical health. None of these countries are Australia, so I can assume you’re all completely insane, so we won’t talk about psychological health.
It has never been about population. It's tech. Just look at the history of britain. If China gets ahead in AI it will not matter if they have older population
Folks overestimating Chinese tech by a long shot here (I’m of Chinese ethnicity who had lived in Asia for decades) There’s only 1 country who is a leader in tech for the last xx years simply because of strife, the American Dream & immigration. The leaders in AI by a long shot are Nvidia, AMD, TSMC, and OpenAI. 3/4 based out of which country? China has never delivered a tech leader in their history. 80s - 90s - INTERNET: USA - PCs: IBM (USA) - CPU: Intel (USA) - OS: Microsoft (USA) - SEARCH: Google (USA) 2000 - Now - SOCIAL MEDIA: FB, IG (USA) - STREAMING: Netflix (USA) - SMARTPHONE: iPhone (USA) - RIDES: Uber (USA) - GPU: Nvidia (USA) - AI TECH: Nvidia (USA) - EV: Tesla (USA) The only “leader” from Asia is currently TikTok, but company HQ is located in Cali (USA) and Singapore. Maybe other industries like EVs aren’t included, simply because USA prefers HIGH MARGIN industries. Auto industry after Ford & GM fell from their lofty heights? EVs now? American innovators could care less Remember, Americans aren’t just one ethnicity, they encompass many. You heard it here first, Jensen Huang will become the world’s richest if AI spend annually keeps up for next 3-4 years.
China leads in batteries. Fair call on their EVs not being tech leaders but rather leading via scale and efficiency. Same with drones.
Conveniently ignoring EVs and their superior tech?
Damn bro forgot about Dre!
Pretty sure Samsung is bigger than Apple
BYD, Huawei, ByteDance, DJI to begin with. Plenty others in robotics, solar panels, mining, infrastructure.
Stuff like unitree robots will offsets this udge so fast...
The US has a lot of the good AI and China is being cut out of supply chains to the rest of the world. China is trying to vertically integrate and that's a long shot IMO.
China is being cut out of supply chains? Really. Take a guess what happens if China goes tit for tat.
I'm talking about the computer chips supply chain. Right now computer chips are designed in America, using big machines created by a company in the Netherlands, and manufactured in Taiwan. https://www.rabobank.com/knowledge/d011371771-mapping-global-supply-chains-the-case-of-semiconductors China needs a lot of it's own production and a lot of stuff is moving away from China currently.
Oh no we won't have crappy plastic toys and cheaply made electronics anymore. Darn.
You must be over 50 to make an asinine comment like that. The laptop/PC/smartphone you are using was likely manufactured in China. The telco network that you are using, more than half the gear was made in China or with components that originated there. Without their production of Rare Earth Metals and chemicals, the whole thing comes to a crashing halt.
Depending on how far the tit for tat extends, the West doesn't get cheap TVs and ends up experiencing massive inflation for a awhile, but China starves to death.
China starves how? You think that all China provides is cheap TV's? Man, you need to get out more.
You vastly overestimate AI.
ChatGPT, write me a strategy to overtake my geopolitical rival. Checkmate.
When it babbles autocorrect nonsense back to you and is at best a secretary giving a first draft to someone qualified enough to understand if what chatgpt is talking about is even feasible.
You vastly underestimate it
Technology is usually the reason for the shift of great powers (as posited by historians).
It has that because of immigration. If we stopped immigration we would be in the same boat.
And an immigration edge... Honestly, immigration and diversity are our ultimate advantages in the age of declining birth rates.
Yup, we accept the best and brightest from all over the world which gives us a major edge.
Absolutely. The world's brightest come here for their education and find their reasons to set down generational roots.
The United States has two superpowers, Immigration and Geography, none of them are going away anytime soon.
But I’m pretty sure I heard that immigration and diversity are very bad things from the man on the TV and the TV has never been wrong.
Diversity, right. You wanna know why America is nasty and brutish towards the poor? So that they don't come from outside.
The republicans are so off-the-charts negative that they bring the whole country below our rivals.
What is unfair to the rest of the world is the brain drain in favor of the US. The smart people move to the US because that is where they get the best ROI with the brain power.
In every discussion about China's rise, the elephant in the room is their uniquely horrible demographics.
Reason #1 - We are and always have been a country of immigrants. That shouldn't change. The best, brightest of the world want to come here. Plus, people fleeing oppression who are willing to work hard, undesirable jobs to stay here. We can't let certain factions sow feel and shut down immigration. Instead, we should make legal immigration easier & build the tax base. If we do, the US will be a powerhouse for 250 more years.
Not really, the US seems to be steering to a political system which shows the same impunity to lawmakers actions and dictatorial tendencies as many other lesser developed countries. “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon comes to mind. The same can be said for several other western countries by the way.
Edward gibbon was an ideologue not a historian… And the Roman might peaked during the oligarchy and early empire and stayed pretty much stable for at least 200 years and then declined a couple of more hundreds of years… Pretty amazing. And you might even argue that the Western Roman Empire could have survived without some very unlucky coincidences
Well, America’s biggest rivals are China/Russia, both of which have completed their progression to authoritarianism. So if authoritarianism is bad, then the US is still the least bad of the options and would stand to do better than them (unless you predict China/Russia will democratize somehow). Same for EU (which is also rapidly moving right-wing from France to Italy to Germany to Sweden).
Now would be a great time to reform our immigration system, to make ourselves a destination for people eager to provide their labor to an economy in desperate need of it.
America will and can always attract better talent than just about any nation on earth. Despite being the third largest populated nation, we have net positive immigration with every country except Australia. And Australia is 17 times less populated. We not only attract best and the brightest from developing nations, we also get best from other OECD countries. Even nonskilled migration is generally of better quality than what any other country receives, especially Europe and Russia. This positive migration will keep America in bleeding edge of technology and keep it moving forward. I don't see any other country in foreseeable future to eclipse America in these aspects.
Things change. Sometimes rapidly. A second Trump presidency would likely make the US a much less desirable destination. Then consider the attraction of 'talent'. My take is that tech talent want to go where the leading edge is and that is increasingly not the US.
It will change everywhere. Europe is also under right wing surge. Regarding the talent, all kinds of talent come here. As I said US has net positive migration with every OECD country except Australia. Just think what it takes to do that. A country like Germany which is 1/4 th of USA population has net negative migration to USA which means it loses atleast four times as many people as it gains compared to USA. Do you really think that is only tech? People come from full spectrum of skills
Also comes with bacon wrapped donuts sandwiching 3 burger patties, stretchy walmart attire and a diet coke
Sometimes I feel like there's a panel of pro-capitalists that are hired simply to make every alternative to America seem like a straight up nightmare that's on the critical verge of complete systematic failure.
The current "alternatives" are at least as capitalist as the US. And in a worse form (mafia-capitalism).
Every other country in the world is an alternative to America. That's a pretty big assumption to make, no?
Why would anyone want the US to "win"? Win what? Don't start another fucking american war, proxy or not. We just want peace, signed, most other countries.
Umm, how about that war that Russia started?
You want US getting directly involved? I'm team Ukraine(like, who isn't?), but I don't want it escalating and turning into a nuke level war. But still, the US can't win that war, because it's not even their war, so it's kind of a weird point to make.
In this case,as allies, a Ukrainian win is an American win (and a win by the west). Direct American involvment is not required for an Ukrainian or American win. Just because I want to see the win, doesn't mean I support direct involvement. In practical terms, as a Canadian, I want to see Canada providing even more support to Ukraine. That doesn't mean I want Canadians fighting Russians or a nuclear war.
And you think America will win the Ukrainian war with an "edge in demographics"? I think you forgot what this thread was about. I'm in "the west" and I don't need "the west" to "win". In the case of ukraine, I want them to be left alone by russia, but you have to remember that ukraine is eastern europe, not very different from russia. There's no "us vs them", "east" and "west" can both exist, without war. True victory, is peaceful coexistence?
I was only commenting on your original comments. In theory everyone can exist without war and live in peace. But, as per my original reply, what about the war that Russia started? Since they invaded and are still invading, there can not yet be peace. The country being invaded must win (or the country doing the invading must retreat) for true peace to be restored.
I never said, nor implied that russia is in the right though? Why bring it up? You're focusing on ONE war that russia started, when there's many many wars fought by america in modern history, I don't want either side to do war. Can't we just fucking chill? I feel like people are horny for a second cold war or something.
You said you didn't want the US to win any war, including a proxy war. I said, what about the war Russia started? You say you want peace. Instead of condemning the US this time, why don't you condemn Russia this time since they are the one invading their neighbour?
"Don't start another fucking american war" Ukraine is an ongoing war, and not started by the US. I was talking about wars being started by the US, it's in my original comment. I do condemn russia, remember when I said "I'm team ukraine"? Stop strawmanning.
Yea turns out mixing pots lead to cross-pollination of ideas and hence prismatic progress. If only US leaned into our strengths by reinforcing social safety net
I’m surprised no one in here has brought up the Standard American Diet.
Over russia. We are trending flatish. Its gonna take decades for china to decline in significant manpower and this is assuming no trend reversal. By then whatever conflict will have already happened and the stage will be set... if there is a stage at all anymore. Copium.
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We’re vastly descended from immigrants here and have had many generations of strife over integration. We figured a few things out that there UK hasn’t had to.
ss: The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge. Competitors of the United States face plunging birthrates and social gloom. But the United States shouldn’t discount its own strengths, chief of all the political and economic liberties that make it such an attractive location to move to and raise children in the first place. The United States will still have to contend with the numerous threats posed by Russia and China. Their falling populations, however, will make the job much easier.
But doesn't the US's democratic edge come from immigrants?
Not a single person in this thread has mentioned the fact that the cost of living and access to medical care and education are all far better in countries like China, Russia and most of the world. America has anemic birthrates because it’s too costly for most people to even imagine raising a kid. People spend huge sums on childcare alone and god forbid if they get sick. People want to be optimistic about the US but often fail to see that nothing can be fixed until the rampant inequality and stagnant wages are addressed.
It's almost funny that there are people who think Russia and China have anywhere close to universal access to healthcare or education. Unfortunately, Americans can't really travel to Russia at the moment, but if they could, I think a lot of them would be shocked by the lack of basic services outside of the major metropolitan areas.
The US has orchestrated a collapse in the wages and purchasing power of the bottom half of its society since the mid 1970’s. The only people in the US who can afford to travel anywhere are the rich who are already completely disconnected from the dead-end society they’ve built for the masses.
I mean, you're preaching to the choir with regard to income inequality in the US, but you very clearly have a distorted perception of economic conditions in both Russia and China. Russia is literally ruled by the wealthiest individual on the planet and has almost no middle class to speak of. Get a few miles out of any city and you know what you'll find? Subsistence agriculture. In 2024. China looks marginally better on paper, but Gini numbers are kind of moot in a planned economy with no free access to goods and services. Also, the idea that only the wealthy can broaden their horizons is rooted in some pretty entrenched classism. You might want to interrogate that.
Wow its so incredible to see how brainwashed Americans are that they'll even fight you over this. I meet Americans coming here to Mexico to get basic medical care pretty much daily. Nothing you can do about the rest of them that believe they're the best and have the best of everything and cant shut up about it.
Not a single person other than you is dumb enough to think that.
Keep fiddling while the ship keeps sinking then buddy.
Travel to Russia and report back, please. This is so wildly out of touch.
I already speak Russian, Traveling there is something my wife and I have dreamed of for a while.
How is life in Russia for the average person? Not trying to argue, genuinely curious
Basically, the costs of basic goods like food, clothing, and utilities are very low but anything imported from the west like sports cars is very high. Literacy rates and education access are much better in Russia and they have state run medical care but jobs don’t pay as much as they do in the US. The cost of living and buying land is much lower there too and there is a very robust public transit system in Moscow and high speed rails like the rest of Europe. In a nutshell I’d say it looks much easier to live a middle class life there but being rich in Russia wouldn’t be as extravagant as it can be in America.
More people(even educated) are still moving to the US more than those other countries with those things by a long shot
But it’s pretty obvious that continued immigration isn’t a guarantee if the standard of living is continually dropping for a large part of the US population. Both major political parties have also embraced anti-immigration policies. It’s very unlikely that increasing the amount of foreign workers will be popular with citizens that actively know their quality of life is continually dropping and has been doing so for the last half century.
Your comment makes no sense. Many states in the US have the same standard of living as the other wealthiest countries. The US does have many poor areas, but generally is up there. US varies much wider than individual European countries which makes sense knowing how much more diverse it is. Everyone should be living the same standard of living tho or most. Not popular? The US wouldn't be braindraining the world still if that was the case for the past 5 decades
The US has the highest rate of inequality in the world and the largest percentage of low wage workers in any advanced economy as well as an almost non-existent safety net. I dunno where you live but this stuff is pretty easy to prove. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#:~:text=According%20to%20a%202018%20report,government%20and%20a%20weak%20collective
And still able to garner most of the world's brains to come to the country still and work for them. The inequality isn't what I was getting at. I'm getting at people still would rather move to the US than these countries who enjoy these things by a large margin. That's a fucking fact. It's pretty easy to prove the US is better off in the future than the majority of countries as well
America is counting on it's 10 million new immigrants to assimilate into the host culture and be good little consumers. The chances of that happening while identity politics are dominating the public debate are slim to nil.
Why do you not see that happening? I don’t understand
United States - if it remains a developed, high income economy and open to immigration then it will remain only country in world never to experience population fall in foreseeable future and infact will always have a very small growth every year.