I'm old enough to remember the threat of the Japanese economy during the 1980s. Joe six-packs smashing Japanese electronics in front of the Whitehouse. Calls of "Americas glory days are over" were heard over and over. And yet here we are today.
The current way I interpret news articles that proclaim huge shifts in the world is this: if the article takes any short-term trend and applies it over a future time period I immediately discount it.
I'm waiting for the next new article "American teenagers grew an average of 10 inches in 3 years, if this trend continues, American will be an average of 13 ft tall in 2050!!!"
Middle class jobs were leaving America and Reagan pushed the national debt over $1 trillion dollars. And college tuitions were skyrocketing. Tufts students were complaining about an $8,000 a year tuition.
Yeah - I went to a rust-belt high school in the 80's, and remember all the excessive pessimism. On my return visit this spring, I got to see how the story unfolded.
Burned out buildings. Unpaved streets. City reverting to wildland.
Things truly fell apart. The center could not hold.
>Calls of "Americas glory days are over" were heard over and over. And yet here we are today.
Yes, here we are today.
With the economy in a bad shape, jobs that wont be coming back, a huge public debt, a crushed middle class, fewer prospects for the younger generations. And Japan, who faced a similar shakedown, still going strong, but replaced by China as a main US competitor. A country, who, unlike Japan, is not under supervision, but a superpower on its own.
I guess people were expecting something like complete ruins or some post-apocalyptic landscape to consider decline a real thing? It's not like somebody comes in and in a couple of decades steals peoples houses and things. It's that slowly, their status and prospects is declining over what it used to be. It's not something you can watch happening in real time, like a fire burning down a house. It's more like watching paint dry. It's slow, but it does dry.
To some extent, we always have to extrapolate from the short-term into the long term, but the point is to remember that we are doing so, and to reduce our confidence accordingly.
The current way I interpret news articles that proclaim huge shifts in the world is this: if the article takes any short-term trend and applies it over a future time period I immediately discount it.
I'm waiting for the next new article "American teenagers grew an average of 10 inches in 3 years, if this trend continues, American will be an average of 13 ft tall in 2050!!!"