I actually believe something far scarier. I think we're going to see a worldwide disintegration of governments and then sort of a feudal anarchy - basically the Syrian Civil War, but spread across the globe. People will stop taking the government seriously and just go do what they want, with a lot of local bullies and warlords springing up to take their place.
The financial picture Dalio paints is the first stage of this, but it merges with a lot of other trends to make something horrible. There's the ongoing migration crisis; conditions are becoming inhospitable in areas like Central America and the Middle East, which is driving migrants to developed nations like the U.S. and Europe and destabilizing those countries. There's the climate crisis, which is the root cause of the migration crisis. There's a trust crisis propagated by the Internet and Big Tech, where nobody knows what to believe anymore. There's a pending military technology shift where cheap autonomous weaponry fundamentally changes the power balance between large nation states and small insurgencies. And then there's a population that's just fed up, as evidenced by the Capitol Riots and lockdown protests (as well as plenty of Internet vitriol).
Unfortunately fleeing the U.S. won't do anything for this, because if the U.S. goes, the whole world will erupt in flames. Better to put down roots in a community whose values you agree with, ideally one in a well-defensible location with plenty of natural resources.
While interesting, I have a feeling that your prediction may be subject to recency and availability bias. If I picture myself looking from within the US, your scenario sure resonates. But looking from outside, I'm not convinced it does. From the other side of the planet, it looks like the US is having a moment but the other governments aren't sitting idle and letting entropy increase.
I'm also not sure that 50 years from now, the Capital Riot will be recorded as being a majorly significant event in US history. It'll probably be mentioned in history books but I'm doubtful it'll be referred to as a pivot point in US history.
Migration crisis: I feel there's been larger migration events in the past. Doubtful the climate crisis will actually be creating a massive scale migration crisis.
I do think climate change will change the dynamic in various areas.
I otherwise also agree on the paradigm shift in military technology.
In Bangladesh alone 150 million people are projected to be displaced by rising sea levels by 2050. Many South American countries are suffering from spiking rates of kidney failure as the climate warms, which is already a factor in the US border crisis as an increasing proportion of migrants suffer from kidney disease.
I think there will be displacement, but over many years/decades as opposed to a single large event. That's why I'm not strongly confident in a migration crisis. I don't say this with confidence, but it doesn't seem likely to be as bad as say, a World War forcing 150M refugees overnight.
I think there will be a few levels of displacement and migration waves from climate change.
Things like sea level rise, rising temperatures, and more frequent blizzards or cold snaps act over decades. That'll be a gradual shift in migration patterns, not a crisis.
But a lot of the second-order effects operate on much smaller timescales. Hurricanes can cause large dislocation on the timescale of a week: look at Rita & Katrina in 2005, which cut the population of New Orleans in half and gridlocked all the freeways out of Houston for days. Wildfires also can trigger large migrations within a matter of weeks. We've been lucky that most of the West Coast wildfires have been in relatively unpopulated areas, but if one were ever to jump highway 280 in the Bay Area or get into the Pasadena/Glendale/Burbank area by LA, we could have a mass evacuation crisis. Crop failures too: that's what's driving a lot of the Middle East migration. If it happened in the U.S. or China millions of people would starve.
There's also violence caused by resource constraints. We see that in Central America now, in the Middle East, and increasingly in the middle of U.S. cities.
I've been predicting something like this since about 2005, long before recent events. It just it felt like it was far off in the future, not something happening right now.
The other major factor is a demographic crisis: worldwide, we have a large bulge in the number of people who are just about hitting 30 in 2020. Historically, when a lot of people reach reproductive years and there aren't the resources needed to support all of them having families, violence and social instability tends to result. This has been predictable since all these kids were born in the 90s, but obviously I'd hoped it'd go differently and technology would find some way to alleviate resource limits. Now we're here and seeing all the discontent from peoples' lives not turning out quite how they envisioned as kids.
Ah, so you read what you want to hear into current events and seek confirmation bias. Your whole world-view comes off as a bit prepper / Great Replacement-crank.
It's the nature of negative black swan events that there's always a reason to believe they won't happen right up until they do. If you hold these beliefs over a long-period of time, based on long-term societal trends, "your whole world-view comes off as a bit prepper / Great Replacement-crank". If recent events bear you out, it's Availability / Recency bias. If the events actually come true, then we won't be discussing it on an Internet message board, we'll either be dead or spending our effort trying to survive, in a perverse form of Survivorship Bias.
Nevertheless, we know from history that these events do occur, and they occur much more frequently than those of us alive now believe (again a form of survivorship bias - folks that don't live in a time of peace tend not to survive). The 250-year stability of the United States - and the 75-year Pax Americana after WW2 - is a historical anomaly. The article gives a bunch of reasons why the 2020s will be different, financially, from the 1980-2020 period, and I gave a bunch of reasons why it'll be different sociopolitically. You can choose to believe them or not, but I (and Dalio) at least explained the dynamics that lead me to believe them.
> There's a pending military technology shift where cheap autonomous weaponry fundamentally changes the power balance between large nation states and small insurgencies.
It would seem to me that this shift towards remote weapons would favor the military, not insurgents in the event of civil strife.
Autonomous/remote weapons let you take the human out of the weapon system, which lets you drastically shrink the weapon system. We haven't really seen the full effect of this yet, because we haven't expanded along the dimensions of freedom this allows: cost, quantity, expendability, scalability, and taking the human out of the kill loop. So far our remote weapons look basically like our piloted weapons, just with a computer and a data uplink in the driver's seat. But imagine that you make your remote weapons 1/100th the size, 1/100,000th the cost, and build 100,000x more of them. That fundamentally changes the nature of warfare. The goal is to overwhelm the enemy's decision-making and manufacturing capabilities as much as it is to outmaneuver them.
Shrinking the weapon system usually results in physics limitations on range and speed - a 20-ton plane can carry enough fuel to go 2000 miles, but a 1 kg drone might have enough charge to go 2 miles. This favors the defender and prevents the use of these weapons for power-projection. Drone swarms are great for close air support, field defense, and urban warfare, but you can't do precision strikes across a continent (but you can defend against precision strikes, as long as your drones are accurate enough to intercept a missile). That fundamentally changes the balance of power toward smaller political entities.
I wonder what is actual realistic minimum size and mass for effective drone in warfare. We are still using essentially projectile weapons, be it bullets or missiles. These have minimum effective mass not to forget delivery system. Even theoretical energy weapons have to get the power from somewhere...
> I think we're going to see a worldwide disintegration of governments and then sort of a feudal anarchy - basically the Syrian Civil War, but spread across the globe.
Your perspective on this seems to be a bit U.S.-centric. No developed country in the world botched its national response to Covid-19 as badly as the United States did. In several countries — like Australia and New Zealand — public trust in government has grown as the public benefited greatly from its government’s world class results in handling the Covid pandemic.
Granted, it does seem that most people these days consider their own government to be at the very least incompetent. But I don’t get the sense countries like Australia have anywhere near the same level of anti-government resentment to contend with. It seems to me a good deal of the blame for the dysfunction of modern America falls on American culture.
> There's the climate crisis, which is the root cause of the migration crisis.
I’d think quality of life factors and economic opportunity would be the primary drivers for migration from the global south to North America and Western Europe. Am I misreading your take on this? It’s a bit of a leap to pin it all onto climate change.
I know the US press has been busy telling you that your country handled this uniquely terribly compared to everyone else, and this idea has spread to the rest of the planet just like all your other politics. Meanwhile in the real world, the country everyone was pointing to as the big European success story that proved everyone else had fucked it up not so long ago - the Czech Republic - is actually the one with a worse Covid death rate than pretty much everywhere else on the planet, and the other countries in the region aren't doing too great either. (Also, all along the comparisions used misleading tricks like comparing the number of detected Covid cases when the US had much more widespread testing for it than Europe.)
I’m curious, since you seem to have thought a lot about this - any suggestions for defensible locations with plenty of natural resources? I’m guessing suburbia generally doesn’t meet that definition.
When I looked into it the top locations were in the Pacific Northwest (extending down to the Lost Coast in California) or Northern New England. Ample rainfall, surrounded by mountains, lots of timber, sea routes to reestablish trade or for fishing, and potentially farmable.
Some runners-up included the Bay Area & Coastal California (easily defensible & fertile, but has overpopulation, water issues and limited timber), the Great Salt Lake valley (ditto), and the Colorado & Wyoming foothills (pretty dry, but a great mining/oil shale area). The worst areas were in the Southwest (which already has a migrant crisis and is going to get totally screwed by global warming) and the Great Lakes area (overpopulated relative to its natural carrying capacity).
Suburbia could be a decent place, if the population density is low enough and it's surrounded by arable land and resources. Livermore, for example, wouldn't be a bad place. But the rows upon rows of tract houses (say San Jose or LA) would become a miserable place without the rest of society to support it, as would the inner cities. I think that the ideal density would be a small self-contained city of say 50-80K people: small enough to maintain social cohesion, but large enough to support some division of labor and have enough of a workforce to support & defend the region.
Not the Great Salt Lake valley - too many people for the available food supply. That's not going to go well.
My own answer is Delta/Montrose, Colorado. It has water, good farmland, nearby mountains (timber) and coal fields. You could even do some hydro power from the river. It's somewhat defensible - an attacker would have to cross a fair amount of inhospitable terrain to get there, unless they came from the south, and the San Juans would not be that difficult to defend.
The one issue would be oil - there's oilfields around Aztec, New Mexico, but that's kind of a long way in a collapsed society.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I hope you’re wrong, but I can’t say that I haven’t considered a lot of the same things, and I had similar thoughts about PNW and New England being relatively good options. Hard to really look at this kind of scenario and come to any conclusions with enough confidence to act on them, though - so many unknowns and fundamentally different rules.
People are just going to set your house on fire unless you have a 24-hour patrol. A bit of a fantasy to imagine you can just escape the total collapse of society.
Oh well in that case New England can't feed itself so you're still kind of fucked. Kind of hard to parse this out though since all of these regions have suburbs.
New England can feed itself minus the cities. That's what they did for hundreds of years - New England was almost entirely farmland until the 20th century. A lot of folks still have small-scale subsistence farms or vegetable gardens in Vermont, New Hampshire, even central/western Massachusetts.
And in this collapse scenario the cities -- incidentally where a lot of wealth and power tend to be concentrated -- simply consent to starve to death? Or are you defending against them too?
The cities are absolutely going to invade the surrounding countryside. Mobs and gangs of hungry people banding together to take what they can from weaker neighbors has been a feature of nearly every instance of state failure.
As a city-dweller, your strategy for surviving this is to join one. As a wealthy suburb dweller, you better hope you have a private security advantage where you can kill the whole mob before it kills you. As a rural dweller, your strategy is to be far enough away, high enough up, and insignificant enough that it's not worth going after you. Gas will be in short supply after a collapse; it's not worth driving 100 miles to take food from a farm that you don't know exists. Most of the towns and small cities in the regions I mentioned are easily that far away from the nearest city.
It's pretty likely that the dominant political organization after a national collapse would be city-states. However, that doesn't mean that it's best for an individual to be within them. We might see 75% depopulation within cities, but people in rural areas can go on about their normal business, if they don't get conquered entirely by the local city. It's a choice between living in privilege in the aftermath of the collapse but having a good chance of not making it there, vs. a higher chance of survival but you'll be a vassal state to the local city.
I'm not sure that the life of a subsistence farmer is necessarily one of privilege, especially if we're imagining there's no gas and presumably the recurrent drought issues in MA aren't getting better. Seems like you might be better off getting in the pod.
You might want to define unfree markets because American lives with regards to some key metrics seemed to improve more notably when it's markets were comparatively less free in the post ww2 era and china is also doing quite well and manage to get trough the 2008 financial crisis unscathed with it's application of Keynesian economics compared to US/EU.
The financial picture Dalio paints is the first stage of this, but it merges with a lot of other trends to make something horrible. There's the ongoing migration crisis; conditions are becoming inhospitable in areas like Central America and the Middle East, which is driving migrants to developed nations like the U.S. and Europe and destabilizing those countries. There's the climate crisis, which is the root cause of the migration crisis. There's a trust crisis propagated by the Internet and Big Tech, where nobody knows what to believe anymore. There's a pending military technology shift where cheap autonomous weaponry fundamentally changes the power balance between large nation states and small insurgencies. And then there's a population that's just fed up, as evidenced by the Capitol Riots and lockdown protests (as well as plenty of Internet vitriol).
Unfortunately fleeing the U.S. won't do anything for this, because if the U.S. goes, the whole world will erupt in flames. Better to put down roots in a community whose values you agree with, ideally one in a well-defensible location with plenty of natural resources.