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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6249 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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What are the "world issues" of our age?

I am a high school social studies teacher (lame) and our curriculum is very old. As such, it is adamant that kids learn about the AIDS crisis, SARS, the Millennium poverty reduction goals, UN peacekeeping, third-world debt and the IMF, etc. It's all very Naomi Klein, Michael Moore-type stuff, and feels like teaching in 1992 with books written during the Cold War.

Most of those issues are still around, but they are obviously no longer as relevant to the globally-minded. Other than stuff like SARS, which has an obvious analog in COVID, what issues SHOULD we talking about. In 2007 you could pretty easily list the things that were considered "world issues" by the bien-pensant class. Has wokeism bulldozed all that? Are there constituencies out there who are still worried about this type of stuff? If so, what are they worrying about?

AI. Can relate to how students should be taught to write given AI, and what work will be available when AI gets even better and we get cheap robots.

  • Current existential threats: AI, pandemics, nuclear proliferation (and Lybia, Ukraine, NK, Iran show the incentives for/against a country pursuing nuclear weapons)
  • The rise of global trade: semiconductor markets, shipping lanes (compare to Roman Roads), global financial markets / how and why the USD is the global currency
  • Global telecom and instantaneous communication
  • Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.
  • Chinese demographics (and the big question of economics in a shrinking population), China and Taiwan/Hong Kong (back to its origin in opium wars)
  • Chinese dependency on the West: China imports fuel and food, exports manufactured goods.
  • US military build-up in the Pacific vs. South China sea as a barrier to US containment
  • Hybrid warfare
  • Not current issue, but a fun thing for me to think about: "how to raise a country into an economic miracle" (Korea) vs. "how to destroy a country" (Venezuela, Gosplan). The relevant point I would emphasize is that you need some unit of value (money) which signals the amount of resources which go into a product, and which signals how many resources people are willing to give up for that product. This distributed computation cannot be efficiently centralized!
  • Within the US, the financialization of corporations and rising power of private equity/monopolies: downfall of Boeing (funneling money into stock buybacks), PE firms buying real estate and setting up local dental monopolies, market power being abused to add junk fees and raise prices (Ticketmaster), etc.

Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.

Perhaps more important than Russia falling and China rising is Russia and China getting friendlier with one another. The Sino-Soviet split was a major factor in the Soviet loss of the Cold War; now, Russia and China are becoming a single anti-American bloc again.

I think for me a big issue is the polarization of the United States. It’s probably not completely unprecedented, but it’s crazy to my self raised in the 1980s and 1990s that we live in a world where half of the country views the other half as subversive if not dangerous. I don’t think if you’d go back to 1985 and said that in 2025, people would consider the president elect a danger to democracy— especially given that such a sentiment is not a fringe thing, a major political party, hell the current president, have said so. I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.

The energy transition, with a discussion of peak oil. Low TFR and population aging. Mass migration, populism, social media.

AI, mass immigration and cultural fragmentation, the power of political Islam, low birth rates, the risk of biologically engineered pandemics, the effect of social media on population psychology. Not stuff most high schools are going to want you to spend all your time discussing in class.

The emerging second Cold War?

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