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Is it possible that the US has peaked? Sure, depending on your metrics I can grant that.
Does that mean that it's not worth living in?
Heavens no, even by the standards of liberty you espouse, you'll be hard pressed to find places that compare.
If you're concerned about government overreach in the affairs of its citizens, come have a look at what we have to deal with in India. Or the UK for the matter.
Much like democracy is the worst form of government but for all the others, the US is the same to its own ideals.
More importantly, while I appreciate liberty, it's not the only concern she or I share. I'd happily live in Singapore too.
Except when people say things like "it's worth living in," and then they point to things like medical technology or supermarkets, they're trading on the term 'America' as a proxy for simply talking about 'material wealth' and modern society. Of course, who would want to go back to times without modern anesthesia? And without Deng Xiaoping's hat tip to neoliberalism, the average person in China would be a subsistence farmer in 2023 and wouldn't live in the relative material exorbitance that they now have.
If this was your experience growing up in the US, maybe rolling the dice as a relative middle class person in Bulgaria may not look so bad. That's not to say I don't appreciate what I have, I'm not complacent, but America isn't exceptional in this regard. Countries that are fairly materially well off, don't look with so much envy to the US. They're as equally content where they are in their home country as I am here.
That’s my thing too. Right now we’re cruising on the inertia that was built 100 years ago. Yes, it’s still a good place if you’re wealthy enough that you can avoid the slums in the cities, you can afford a decent private school that bypasses state schools that are more interested in teaching propaganda than literacy, numeracy, and scientific literacy. But I don’t think it can last when we must import the majority of our engineers and computer scientists from abroad, when we’ve stopped inventing, when generations are incapable of understanding the modern world due to poor education, and where infrastructure is bad enough to cause derailments. Sooner or later, as conditions in India and China improve such that importing our brains doesn’t work, and our native kids are too poorly educated to maintain, let alone build or create modern civilization, when our kids are too obese to fight to protect shipping lanes or allies, and when bridges and roads are no longer useable because we can’t maintain them, the makeup won’t hide that.
We're cruising on the inertia of the 1990s - early 2010s, the various tech booms and the great decline in crime.
Being poor sucks anywhere. The slums were much worse in the US from roughly the race riots of the 1960s to the early 1990s (later in some places). They're getting worse again but they haven't reached those lows.
That's what suburbs are for. Maybe small cities without much of a progressive problem.
We don't see table 5. Software developers are the highest at about 40%.
A section of I-95 collapsed (due to a major fire, not lack of maintenance) in Philadelphia and re-opened (granted, a temporary fix) within 12 days. We're decadent, not incapable. At least so far.
This is something every wealthy society becomes in danger of losing knowledge of - overtime. People have always looked at me funny when I tell them there are places in the US that resemble third world countries. I'd rather be broke in the US than broke in India, but I'd probably much rather be rich, living as a middle class American in Russia, than a well off Russian trying to live in the Bay Area; if I really took the time to sit down and do the math.
I've actually thought about this and wondered how the surge in remote work made by COVID, will turn the major cities into economic superstructures that are built on quicksand. Especially when the service sector and technology that's less reliant on physical inputs (but rather the quality of fewer inputs) continues to eclipse even more of the industrial sector. You're already seeing people take tech jobs and moving far out of state.
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Must? To the extent that having more engineers and computer scientists is better, it seems weird to complain about having more of them. You're starving your competition of the best intellectual resources after all and enriching yourself.
Dunno about China, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for India to catch up, unless the country literally bans emigration, which is not on the cards.
Leaving aside that even in the absence of transformative AI, most wars as far in the future as you're assuming will be fought with drones, obesity is the least of your concerns. Maybe you might get better drone operators if they're all chubby gamers.
I'm bullish on ozempic and co myself.
I’m not complaining about too many engineers. My complaint is that we aren’t producing our own engineers. I’ve gone to lots of graduations, and the engineering department in most schools is graduating far more Chinese and Indian students than native born American students. This is a problem because they’ll only stay here so long as our lifestyle is substantially better than what’s possible in their home countries or in other countries. If European countries are a better “get rich” location for them, we aren’t going to keep them. And thus having a good enough education system to create native born engineers is critical to our future as a civilization. Unfortunately our K12 system is so bad that most graduates of that system are simply too far behind to go into engineering.
To quote myself, see table 5. Also table 6.
Europe is moribund, having taken up leveling and socialism to a much greater extent than the US ever did. The more likely danger is that the US follows Europe down that path, not that Europe somehow becomes a better place to get rich.
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