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I strongly appreciate engagement with my point!
It's reasonable to replace this with two factors: fertility rate, and % of children living with two parents. The current fertility rate is .001 off from the rate of 1980! I think a lot of that is immigrants having higher birth rates and arbitrary luck that 1980 happened to be the lowest fertility of that era. I agree that not having two parents isn't ideal, but it's plateaued since 1990, and doesn't represent a meaningful decline for the middle and upper-class americans who still have reasonable families. It's still unfortunate.
This is misleading imo, like citing coal consumption per capita or 'pharmaceutical consumption per capita' as targets. The development of computers has allowed the same amount of useful work to be done with less energy. Is it bad that, instead of shipping physical books, we now transmit bits over cables? When we miniaturize a chip so that it does the same work with 2x less energy, something that happened many times in the 1960-2000s - energy consumption maybe 'declines', despite nothing bad happening.
I'm not sure what statistic you're referring to - 'real' means inflation adjusted, generally, and googling I only found this, which seems to go up. And the percent of the population that earns a salary only decreases with time bc aging, so changes in composition can't be the reason.
I agree these have risen and are bad! Homelessness has doubled since 1990. But they are sort of ... qualitative issues for the majority of people, not quantitative ones. Some people have it very bad, the majority of people still have it fine. What I'm discussing is more material / economic / functional declines for everyone.
I don't think this is true, really. The shale oil boom in the 2010s helped make the US a net oil exporter.
This doesn't really fit with the original topic of human-caused decline, and I'm pretty suspicious of its truth anyway. Maybe there are more of some events in some areas and less in others. However that actually means 'genuinely uncertain', not 'secretly believes it's totally false and is JAQing', it really could go either way.
The US government is incredibly respectful of privacy, tbh. There's no technical reason your computer doesn't send all your keystrokes to the Anti-Crime Division or whatever, but we don't! We have all sorts of anti-privacy laws that are mostly respected. Most of the threats to privacy are private actors who sell data to other actors. Getting cancelled from your job for a political heresy by entirely private actors isn't great, but that's not a 'surveillance state', it's basically the default during all of human history.
I am entirely unfamiliar with this topic, but find it plausible corruption isn't much worse than it was in the past. Especially the 'this is just the way we do business' kind of 'corruption'. Analogous to political machines. Again, entirely unfamiliar.
Manufacturing output has plateaued, not declined (note I'm not confident that graph means what I think it does). Manufacturing employment has declined, obviously - but this is just because our service jobs are more useful than manufacturing jobs. There's a reason manufacturing employees in Bangkok or Shanghai earn les than coders or financial analysts in America, and it's not because we're tricking them - the exchange rates between us and them are set by their demand for our products, compared to our demand for theirs. Foreign countries with a lot of manufacturing want to participate in & purchase our services enough that they're willing to price their labor at a lot lower than ours, per capita! We're just specializing in more complicated and capital and IQ intensive work. China wishes they had our service jobs and we had their manufacturing jobs! They'd swap in an instant. As would Thailand, Mexico, and Niger.
Not informed. This might refer to two things: One, the 'our infrastructure is old and not being upgraded quickly enough' thing, which I think is arguably true but I'm not sure it's that important, or that it was that much better in the past.
The other is (probably not what you meant but) that building and bridge collapses are in the news every so often, and twitter RWers quote tweet these with 'AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS DESTROYING OUR SOCIETY'. I assume that isn't your argument, but 1970s and 1920s newspapers also had lurid details of infrastructure collapses at arguably higher rates.
So of your points, I agreed with partially 'rates of family formation' and entirely agree with 'homeless/fentanyl', and wasn't informed on a few more. If my understandings are correct, I think this supports my point, mostly - things aren't really getting worse on the whole. Like, nations are big, you'd expect a few things to get worse on the net no matter what, alongside many other improvements.
If you're going to measure the fertility rate like that then you need to start looking at individual populations and demographics as well. The "immigrants having higher birth rates" part is the real killer - I think that is actually masking a drop in fertility and family formation among the original population, and the fecundity advantage of immigrants disappears within a generation or two. You've actually just pointed out that the problem is even worse than it appears, because the numbers are being artificially inflated by recent immigrants. Remove them from the equation and look at the original population and their descendants, and it becomes clear that something is wrong. Importing populations high in fertility but low in human capital and mean IQ (the kind of mean that matters for regression) and claiming that this fixes the problem is like saying that you don't have a debt problem because you can borrow more money to cover the existing debts.
While some of these changes are due to increased efficiency I think that a lot of it represents a real decrease in productive work being done - outsourcing is something I view as largely bad for the nation engaging in it and that would also have shown up in these figures. Some of the factors driving these changes are absolutely good, but some of them are very much not.
I actually made a mistake - I meant Americans who earn a wage rather than a salary, so my fault here. I also think that inflation statistics are massaged in order to mask this decline and make it less obvious when compared with the methods used in previous decades, and if you calculate inflation using historical metrics the decline becomes a lot starker.
There are tent cities forming around multiple state capitals, and the homeless population is causing large problems in San Francisco and other cities. The amount of homeless people doubling in 30 years isn't a warning of decline or a signal - it IS decline. Those homeless people obviously have a lower QOL than they did before (and they are probably using less energy too), and they also decrease the QOL for the people near them. It doesn't technically hurt everyone (the people on Martha's Vineyard won't give a shit) but it very clearly represents material decline.
It doesn't matter what you think here because you are wrong - oil discoveries are down and have been continuing to decline. The shale oil boom is in my view a temporary mirage, but that is immaterial here considering they don't represent new discoveries. Shale oil fields have been known about for some time, but were largely considered uneconomical to extract. As a source of oil, they have a much lower EROEI than conventional light sweet crude, and this creates an energy tax on the rest of society. Dipping into the crumbs at the bottom of the oil barrel is not a sign of a recovery!
I think climate change is a real, serious issue and one that is directly caused by human activity - we are already starting to feel the effects of it, and those impacts will continue to get worse over time. But actually litigating this would be a massive undertaking beyond the scope of this comment.
You should go back and read the Edward Snowden disclosures. The US government is absolutely not respectful of privacy and there are ultimately no protections against oversight-free surveillance. They were willing to violate the privacy of Donald Trump during crossfire hurricane despite having explicit knowledge that there was no real Russian collusion, and pass on private details to the political campaign of his opponent. People being cancelled for heresy is also bad and a sign of decline (failing power structure desperately tries to remove critics to strengthen popular perception) but that's a bit more vague and hypothetical than something like declining oil discovery rates.
I don't find that plausible at all, but statistics on this are hard to come by. I have seen a lot of news stories about corruption in federal procurement contracts (million dollar bins etc) and there have been multiple expensive boondoggles which have not resulted in any actual military advantage - I think the F-35 has been an incredibly expensive loser, for instance, but I also admit that I can't really prove that objectively without throwing them into combat with equivalents from the Russian/Chinese military.
I also have my doubts about that data but I cannot see exactly how it is generated and if there are any nasty tricks that obscure the kind of decline in capacity that I'm talking about here. More importantly, total output isn't what I was talking about - there are severe bottlenecks in multiple important manufacturing industries (defence, shipbuilding etc) and supply-chain requirements. A lot of chips and other vital components are manufactured in China, to the point that it is actually a serious military issue and there are frequent prosecutions of people who sell Chinese-manufactured gear to the military.
But more importantly, what I said there was capacity. I'll switch to a specific category now - shipbuilding. Right now the US shipbuilding industry has undergone a catastrophic decline, to the point that China has roughly 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the USA according to the navy. There's more to manufacturing than just GDP output - the knowledge-base, supporting industries, infrastructure etc all take time to build up (or mothball), and if there's any kind of crisis that impacts international trade then those differences will become extremely relevant.
Transportation, clean potable water supply, reliable electricity - and I'm talking largely about the flyover states. There are real, serious problems in the American heartlands that aren't just "black women made this bridge that then fell down". The statistics for rural life in America show clear and undeniable signs of decline in a huge variety of ways.
My position is that the US is declining on the whole, and this is obscured by financial chicanery and the uneven distribution of the decline. Some areas are prospering, and combined with massaged financial statistics the overall decline is obscured and hidden - but it shows up in a few places if you know where to look.
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