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Notes -
Yes, that's called "corruption", the natural consequence of technological stagnation such that the multiplicative effects that should come from serving the population's needs and driving it forward are outweighed by any other factor (in China, this is complicated by raw population making any gains sufficiently seizable and replaceable; in the US, it's... other things).
When the woke say that more economically equal societies form a type of bulwark against this kind of corruption, they're right (and trivially so); it's just that literally everything they do is designed to create an unequal society that uniquely privileges that corruption with appeals to morality as its cover- and that should be predictable behavior from the more corrupt part of that society bifurcating into high and low because the ways to be middle (and thus having to compete on positive-sum merit rather than a zero-sum
puritycorruption spiral) have been enclosed or obsoleted.The problem with the US is that, in its 250 year run, it's only ever had to deal with this once, and that was after the mass industrialization centered around 1900. If you think "citizen perceived stability and prosperity" has anything to deal with TFR, you'll notice that by 1920 TFR was down barely above replacement in a country that was still 50% agrarian (so if the rural areas were still averaging 3 kids, that means the urban areas were down to South Korean TFR).
Now, to be fair to the American public, the then-unnecessariat would get a massive amount of concession from Roosevelt in the 1930s, but those reforms were for a different time, in a different place, under different economic conditions- what needs to be tackled now is the corruption inherent in free-trade laws (that are, from a macroeconomic standpoint, indistinguishable from the legalization of slavery; the fact that you're allowed to violate American worker rights laws so long as those crimes aren't committed on shore has not gone unnoticed by the now-unnecessariat).
Interestingly enough, "massive influx of slave labor" is arguably the thing that destroyed the Roman Republic- slave labor from conquests pushed everyone into the city, and Caesar was able to take advantage of it before it died out. I could believe an argument that the current socioeconomic policies of the US are designed to stretch the tail of this population out and dilute it enough there won't be enough support for a Caesar- but this is probably just a convenient side-effect, and events could still transpire that makes him a reality (for instance, if AI shrinks the pie more).
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