[40acres]

If you ask me, the fall of America from the lone 'superpower' to a 'great power' is all but assured as long as the structural racial inequality in this county persists.

Let's take a look at education for an example: USA ranks pretty low on global education rankings despite the fact that we have some of the best schools in the world across all levels, its hard to think why that may be the case but when you consider the inequality in school systems due to property tax law and de facto segregation it makes a lot more sense.

Look at the criminal justice system: we have over 1 million prime aged men who are basically frozen out of achieving economic prosperity and contributing to this countries success because of bad policing and disproportionate enforcement of law.

Look at healthcare, there is a huge gap (although closing) of life expectancy between races.

India and China are not utopias by any means, but they have 1B+ people: these countries are growing larger and larger in influence and will create a middle class that contains hundreds of millions of people. The US is getting more and more in-equal and at a certain point we will reach an inflection point where we are too damn lopsided for our own good. People want to talk about lower productivity and lower wages, when you have 1.5 missing men from the workforce what do you expect?[0]

0: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missin...

[gooseus]

Doesn't India's vestigial caste system create a similar structural racial equality problem there?

Would America's racial inequality not be an issue if we had 3x the population?

[40acres]

I think you can mask a lot of issues through sheer population numbers. India and China have really structural issues with their economies, democracies, etc. But if India can get itself to 50% middle class as the US that's 200M more people than we have in this country right now.

[rb808]

Can you name a time in America's history when there wasn't segregation and inequality?

[40acres]

There has never been a time where America wasn't segregated or in equal. I think throughout America's history we've had a long runway: the fact that the continent was open to use w/o a well organized Mexican or Indian state to stop expansion, the isolation from WW1 & WW2, the fast amount of land in this country and natural resources, the decline of Europe and relative weakness of China, etc. We've been able to take advantage of these conditions for 200+ years. The rest of the world is catching up though, we will need to really unlock the potential of people who in the past have been marginalized to continue our run as a superpower.

[hokumguru]

The wealth gap isn't even as bad as it has been before. During the industrial revolution Rockefeller amassed so much wealth he puts modern billionaires to shame. Unlike 100 years ago, however, we've severely raised the economic floor for our population.