[hash872]

I dunno, seems a little overly dramatic. Previous world powers didn't collapse, they just faded- Britain, Spain, Portugal, etc. This seems much more likely, especially as budget issues prevent the US from deploying the same overwhelming military power all over the globe. America already spends more of its federal budget on entitlements than the military, contrary to what progressives will tell you- when push comes to shove, we'll always fund Social Security over another aircraft carrier or 30,000 troops in South Korea. So, a slow fadeout seems way, way more likely. Plus, declining birth rates & declining business dynamism.

The states that actually collapse are the more rigid, authoritarian ones like the USSR or the Ottoman Empire. Plus the US has one advantage that previous stable empires didn't have- federalism, a decentralized system. Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders.

No offense but I have to roll my eyes a bit at these disaster fetishists. Orlov is apparently a foreign-born one, but we have tens of thousands of domestic ones here in the states, this is a very old belief system. (Hell, my parents were back to the land hippies fleeing Nixon & the imminent nuclear apocalypse!)

[routerl]

Portugal absolutely collapsed, due to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Voltaire wrote about this[1]. The Portuguese Empire couldn't cope with the near total destruction of their capital, and never recovered. During the Napoleonic wars, the emperial court moved to Brazil and, basically, hid. They were a shadow of themselves.

The United Kingdom, similarly, collapsed, under the weight of two world wars. Europe as a whole was devastated, and the whole world started to coalesce around the only remaining global powers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po%C3%A8me_sur_le_d%C3%A9sas...

[empath75]

The UK itself didn't collapse, but the end of the British Empire resulted in an unbelievable amount of war and violence as they withdrew -- the Indian partition alone had up to 2 million deaths.

> Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders.

It would not be unheard of for those local state leaders to go to war with each other -- they've done it once before, after all. The point is that once power centers fail, the consequences aren't predictable.

[rumanator]

> America already spends more of its federal budget on entitlements than the military, contrary to what progressives will tell you

Do you have a source that supports your statement?

[manfredo]

This isn't just by a small margin. Both Social Security and Health and Human Services are close to twice the amount spent on defense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

[MattGaiser]

Here you go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Sta...

[eel]

The raw data can be gathered from congress.gov, but here's a summary graphic for 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

It depends on your definitions of entitlements and military, but for example, social security spending was at $1.0 trillion compared to $676 billion for defense.

[pinkfoot]

Notice that veterans affairs and a lot of the DOE is filed under 'not military'.

[rumanator]

To be fair, some of the US's defense spending sounds like a way to covertly fund "socialist" programs in a way that's politically tolerable. For example, a bunch of weapons programs appear to be driven by the need to artificially create jobs in some precise locations.

[hash872]

If this helps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#M...

[Der_Einzige]

It's common knowledge. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone account for more than half of the total federal budget (before covid)

Progressives will tell you that these are expensive programs. Progressive wants to significantly cut the military, and replace medicare/medicaid with a single-payer universal system which would be far cheaper. They also want higher taxes to help fund these programs and redistribute wealth from the wealthy to the poor.

[diag]

Medicare is hardly a wealth redistribution scheme. Everybody needs healthcare.

While a fully organized single payer health system is obviously a massive expense, it is still the more financially moderate option compared to what we have today.

[zozbot234]

Our countries may not be authoritarian but they're certainly rigid in the sense of having a huge amount of accumulated "technical debt" in their social organization, that by definition is simply not amenable to gradual change. A collapse of some sort is then the only feasible form of restructuring, and is a natural consequence of such circumstances especially given outside stressors. So I would definitely not put it beyond the realm of possibility.

[pfraze]

I do agree that the US is rigid in its thinking. We accumulated a lot of wealth in the mid-20th century and a lot of national policy debates are around how that wealth is distributed rather than about undertaking new national ventures to bring in significant new wealth. It's understandable to a degree - we have a lot to risk by taking big national projects - but it feeds into our distribution problems because we want to be capitalist but we don't have enough new frontiers for capitalism to create opportunities for the younger generations.

I'd argue we're in a preservative/cost-cutting mindset rather than a generative/competitive mindset, which can be seen reflected in anti-trust policies. The philosophy has been to focus anti-trust around consumer benefit (eg lower prices) rather than to ensure competitive markets. We're more concerned with consumers' purchasing power than producers' opportunities.

[zozbot234]

> a lot of national policy debates are around how that wealth is distributed rather than about [creating] significant new wealth

This is a marker of a failed country - one where the collective political discourse is no longer geared towards actual social benefit but has been taken over by competing votebanks of entitled moochers, led by their uber-mooching enablers in the policy-making "elite". Acemoglu's How Nations Fail is a clear and comprehensive discussion of these dynamics.

[zelon88]

> Plus the US has one advantage that previous stable empires didn't have- federalism, a decentralized system. Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders.

The fed gets it's money from GDP producing states. There are far more GDP draining states the further inland you go. If those states don't get federal funds, they will not be able to have a functioning judicial branch which is the only one that really matters during such conditions.

[neffy]

If one was to be brutally fair about this, those so called "GDP" draining states, otherwise known as the Farmers who not only feed the USA but also sell half of their crop abroad, would be far better off as separate countries, with their own currencies and local banks to provide lending, rather than being the source of financial flows that prop up places like New York city.

And in this putative local warlord future that you're imagining for the US, I rather suspect ownership of food production will matter quite a lot.

[zelon88]

I'll be honest I never thought of it that way but it's a good point. Food production is the main export of the states I had in mind in my original post. However, food production shouldn't be counted as a "value added" (arguably, since they don't export enough outside US borders to turn a standalone profit) to the American economy. In the same way that Quality Control is not considered "value added" to a factory, but it is still very much a required part of manufacturing.

However, Japan has very few arable farming areas and get something like 70% (I made that up) of their food from the ocean. In the absence of American farmlands, I'd wager that fisheries would be able to sustain urban coastal areas almost indefinitely.

In all the Mad Maxx/Book of Eli style movies, the characters are almost always inland, trying to get to a populated coastal area where survival is more practical.

[frank2]

>If those states don't get federal funds, they will not be able to have a functioning judicial branch

Your phrase "GDP draining" probably refers to the fact that some states receive more in federal services than their population pays in federal taxes, which has nothing to do with whether such a state will be able to continue to fund and administer its own "state" court.

Most matters, e.g., most murder trials, are adjudicated in the 50 state courts, not in the US federal court. When OJ Simpson was put on trial for the murders of Ron Goldman and Nichole Brown Simpson, for example, he was put on trial in a state court.

[hash872]

Eh, I don't really agree with that. All the states really need are a paramilitary branch- the state police, local police, and maybe the local National Guard. You need rough men with guns to stop looting, bandits, etc.- and they'd probably do some bad stuff as well, but I mean that's the most fundamental level of civilization: the guys with guns. Judicial branch is quite a bit further up there on a Maslow-like hierarchy.

Plus the red states mostly grow their own food, which would be pretty huge

[SamReidHughes]

This is total nonsense. It gets more of its money from states with more profitable companies and high paid employees. Those are individuals, not states, and it’s a measure of how much surplus value they can capture, not production.

[rmrfstar]

Care to name these "GDP draining states"?

[zelon88]

Kentucky [1]

[1] https://www.wkyufm.org/post/kentucky-second-most-dependent-s...

[munificent]

> Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders.

That's exactly what we're seeing right now with COVID-19. Since Trump and his troop of baboons have done nothing but throw their own poop around, state governors have stepped up to provide executive leadership. The US has never looked more like a union of independent states to me than it has in the past couple of months.

[rplst8]

In some ways, this could be considered beneficial. There are multiple layers to our government and can be a check on each others' power.

[munificent]

That was supposed to be the job of the legislative and judicial branches, but the Republican Party has reached a point where they would rather undermine the US than give up power.

[traes]

> Previous world powers didn't collapse, they just faded-

Rome?

[dodobirdlord]

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (the western half) took centuries. The eastern half of the empire took an additional thousand years or so to follow a similar trajectory.

[VWWHFSfQ]

The Roman Empire, in its various forms, lasted for 1000 years.

[blululu]

Indeed, and even after the fall of Constantinople there were various Byzantine Rump Staes in places like Trebizond. There is some historical chicanery in the classic Western European telling of the story of the 'Byzantine Empire'. No such country ever existed as such - the name was applied to the Eastern Roman Empire by German historians after the fall of Constantinople. While it still existed, the Eastern Roman Empire was referred to as the Roman Empire (or Roman Kingdom or simply Romania).