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Comment by pelliphant | Hacker News Reader

Haven't China been the obvious world power for atleast 10 years now?

Or, atleast, that it have been obvious that they will soon be...

I think what will happen is that a larger percentage of the US will realize it and not like it. I think the US lives in a bubble but other parts of the world are feeling that shift already.

I wonder how many Americans know that Europe trades more with China than the US. Or that Japan also trades more with China than the US. Same with Africa.

The US is retreating into protectionism, internal struggle, and the opiate of social media.

It’s not that China didn’t play dirty. It’s just that the US is losing.

Having the most expensive military force isn’t nearly as useful if other sides possess nuclear weapons like you. Then it becomes a struggle along other dimensions.

The US seems full of entrenched institutions there just to increase their own power. Yet it is these institutions that are causing the greatest issues.

You have medical costs spiraling out of control. You have educational costs spiraling out of control. You have infrastructure costs spiraling out of control.

Changes in the political order have changed none of this. I don’t see the latest change addressing these either.

You can see this in the actions of the current alpha and the previous alpha. Neither addressed or is addressing how the above consume the largest and ever increasing percentages of GDP without producing corresponding gains.

Are Americans living longer and healthier lives? No, they are living shorter and less healthy lives.

Can a high percentage of the population make good incomes with their expensive educations? No, many are relegated to low wage, dead end service and gig jobs.

Why do we have to deal with inadequate and overpriced transportation, water, and energy infrastructure? How many consecutive years of forest fires does California have to live with?

The new administration just patches things without taking on the institutions themselves.

$15 minimum wage and making college free doesn’t make college more useful. It just provides an endless trough for bad education to feed.

More medicine for all doesn’t address the problem that it is way too expensive. It just feeds more money into a money eating pit.

More purchasing of clean energy infrastructure but enforcing domestic production doesn’t address the problem that your companies produce uncompetitive products. Will buying Ford electric trucks at higher prices than you could get elsewhere help anyone but Ford?

The US and to a lesser extent the EU sold their manufacturing sectors to China without any idea of what to replace them with or what to do with the populations who relied on that work, we are feeling the pain of a self inflicted wound. They did this at the same time they dismantled the social safety nets that could have maybe kept people going. Now millennials are feeling the pain of those decisions in an economy that frequently crashes, with houses and education that are increasingly unaffordable.

Yes, but I think both are happening in the US. Hollowing out of manufacturing along with entrenched interests. Millennials get to feel both: expensive schooling ending up in low paid, dead end service jobs and gigs.

From my view it looks like the US optimized their political/economic system for the situation they where in just after WW2, when most other developed countries had been bombed quite a bit.

It sort of made sense then to focus so heavily on growth, they had an entire planet (not really, but a large portion) that would buy their stuff. Worring about income distribution seemed a bit unnessecary when there was so much growth that "everyone" gets a piece of the cake.

This really isn't the case anymore, but a large part (maybe even a majority) of americans still seem to think that growth is the most important factor when designing their economic system.

The new administration doesn't have a mandate to change this, Biden didn't win because he promised reform, he won because he promised to stop trump from dismantling american democracy. And he won with a really small margin.

While I generally argue that the american institutions are dysfunctional, I really wouldn't blame the current administration for not addressing the issue, not only do they not have the mandate, but their stated political ideology is "liberalism", not social democracy, so why would they want to?

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