Ask HN: Do you think society will collapse within 10 years? |
Ask HN: Do you think society will collapse within 10 years? |
To turn this around on you, if you think society is doing well and has almost no chance of collapse you probably have a net worth/assets of at least 1 million dollars.
To this extend, if AI takes all the jobs, people would be able to still be alive. Call me sci-fi romantic, but this is basically Star Trek. And they have still a society where everybody can pursue their interests regardless of income because computer and robots taking care of basic needs.
I think society has nothing to do with money, sharing and caring is more important. And every individual in a society can contribute to this, regardless of wealth.
Even so, the housing market problem is largely a modern one - we went from a society where the majority of homes were multi-generational to one where homes are nuclear. So per capita, the demand for homes has skyrocketed. But also as baby boomers are retiring and shedding assets, I would anticipate this situation could improve itself in 10-20 years.
The administration is doing some pretty horrible stuff by modern first world standards, but is not actually out of alignment with how politics existed before the Cold War. We'll probably witness the end of Pax Americana, but society can continue to exist even in illiberal times where war and violence are more common.
The pendulum swings.
This might get worse before it gets better. Germany and Japan grew after Nazism. China, despite its flaws, has seen their people grow happier and is leading the charge in many domains.
The future is scary and the administration is doing harm. We may lose our advantages as a nation, we may struggle economically or scientifically. But a collapse of economy - let alone society - in just 10 years is astronomically unlikely outside of a nuclear or biological war.
Even if we plummeted to Russia's level of economy and corruption, Russia still exists after a hundred years of it all, with some of the largest scale genocides & repression campaigns in human history.
But that's not really happening. Despite it all, the US is largely doing fine? The markets seem to believe they can bear the worst of it until the pendulum swings again.
You see, society to too big to fail. Even when core virtues (precepts) are invalidated (eroding competence and moral lawful claim), society as a collective organism eating and shitting to survive will just keep on going.
There may be upsets, though sudden and dramatic change are not how these things work (however they appear post dramatically).
Slow gradual decline is like erosion, looks fine one day, fifteen years later when you’re dealing with something else the foundation gives.
We won’t riot war and starve out, we will be dejected apathetic and morose while what we love in it all dwindles into an old song.
No doubt today we have unique challenges but I am optimistic we will overcome and thrive. Like a poster mentioned above, perhaps its time to log off and go for a walk.
Entire cities were ravaged and collapsed - half of the entire population died not only from the disease but the ensuring famine resulting from supply chain collapse. Cultures were erased in their entirety, wars were started that lasted an entire lifetime, it defined the socioeconomic landscape of the world that came after. It's one of the reasons the Mongol Empire collapsed, religion took a stronger hold, and peasantry rose!
Now we live in a much different world. Tens of millions in a single city, utterly reliant on importants. Farming that requires fertilizer imports and machines.
It wouldn't be extinction, but a similar event would be utterly horrific and absolutely qualify as a collapse of society.
Do I think society will collapse on 10 years because of politics / economy? No, absolutely not. But to point to the black death and say it didn't collapse society is utterly ridiculous.
In all seriousness societal collapse is extremely slow and not particularly eventful. Look at South Africa if you want to see what that actually looks like in real life. It's not like how Hollywood shows it.
I think it's also important to remember society is not the economy. It's more of a spiritual/social thing that the economy exists within. That's why I can say it's already gone and people just haven't fully acknowledged it.
Or do you just mean American democracy ? It's hard to tell where the various groups and institutions might draw their lines on that. But democracies aren't a law of nature, so perhaps.
Caveat: if someone presses the nuclear trigger all bets are off. I wouldn't rule that one out, but it seemed inevitable back in the 70s so here's to hoping.
The markets might collapse. And then stay stagnant. That is not see type of price growth we have seen. But whole society is not going anywhere.
We had two bad years, 2021 and 2022, and then it's declined. It's not stellar, it'd be nice if it were lower but it's not "crazy". In US history, the 1970s and 1980s were overall far worse, and if you look at other countries around the globe our worst isn't even that crazy.
https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.DEFL.KD.ZG?locat... - Argentina. That's crazy amounts of inflation, and that's not even the worst out there. Meanwhile, Argentinian society is overall doing alright.
If the US collapses with 3% inflation, then it wasn't the inflation that caused the collapse. Something else is fundamentally wrong with a society that can't be resilient against that.