To be clear, of course political opinions are not ordinal. I think that point has been hammered in by this point, and I certainly said nothing that implies that I think talking about left and right is anything more than very clumsy shorthand.

Not directed at you. I’ve learned that the left-right political axis is too entrenched in culture and public education to assume people skimming posts are aware of the greater context. The fact that it’s come up in this thread so often is why my disclaimer is perfunctory, but I’d never exclude it.

I tried to argue that Trump voters are intrinsically dumb like 150 pages ago, but Jon`C got mad at me for giving up on democracy and then said something about how we're going to have another civil war with my attitude.

They aren’t dumb.

Ah okay that was it. I think I was smugly *****ing about how they represent a harbinger for Idiocracy, without addressing any of the important underlying dynamics.

And you will. Of course you will, but worse, because it’s not states or regions at odds, it’s counties against counties, or the rural against the urban. It’s not a line you can draw on a map, where if you’re far from the line you’re safe, where the war is fought on and over the line. It’s not even a line you can draw culturally or economically, as the once well-to-do, from the working class all the way up to a handful of ill-adaptive billionaires like Donald Trump, struggle for survival against the entrenched and popular powers of neoliberal economics.

It doesn’t matter what you think of their grievances, they have them, and if you want to disabuse them of their more toxic views you need to give them a legitimate alternative. The Democrats aren’t offering one. As far as they’re concerned, the Democrats are the problem, and they aren’t even wrong.

Yeah. Idiocracy is a fun bit of political catharsis, but has no basis in reality. It’s also not the kind of social decay that would happen in the US. It would most likely decay into city states or unified economic regions, similar to what happened in the Middle Ages after the western Roman Empire fell. The transition to city-states has already started.

The big question in my mind is, which city state is responsible for paying for all the foreign occupations in the Middle East? Well, looking at past empires like Britain, I guess probably none of them....

The fragmentation of the United States would be a blow to global order.

So basically roll the dice then? Probably like the demise of the British empire, a foreign power would step in. (Iran?)

um, China.

I’m kinda surprised nobody brought up China’s new Yuan denominated oil exchange yet. It’s like y’all don’t even listen to me.

yfw you realize stagflation never ended, US buying power and government deficit spending has been sustained only by the petrodollar system which China is now actively working to dismantle.

RIP.

From what I've heard, China is already all over Africa and the Middle East. They're also in South America.

Now bear with me for a second. Things like roads and trains and MRIs cost about 4x more in the US than in France. What if it’s because

what if

the US dollar is priced 4x higher than it should be.

Because foreign demand for USD to trade oil, which before China got involved was exclusively denominated in USD, was buoying the price of USD over where it naturally should be from international trade.

Exercise. Assume something like this happened. What would that do to the domestic economy? Industrial production? Domestic services and labor costs? Does it look familiar to you?

Something like this?

Accelerating the decline?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-29/us-to-seek-social-media-details-from-all-visa-applicants

No. Well, maybe. I’d need to think about it more. But for sure domestic manufacturing would decline, because it would effectively make it cost 4x more than it otherwise should.

Wouldn't something like the opposite of the Dutch disease happen? If the dollar suddenly was worth 1/4th of what it was, the buying power of other currencies against the dollar would go up, so US exports would become more competitive, all things being equal.

A problem of course is saying "all things being equal" makes my last suggestion nearly meaningless, because a lot of other crazy stuff would happen.

Well, that kind of is what's already happening in the Middle East: Iran is filling the vacuum left behind by America reducing its influence in the Middle East. But Iran is only a regional power, and it likely won't ever have significant influence outside of its neighborhood.

Russia is also filling the vacuum in the Middle East.

you have it backwards

Because, as you said, producing goods would cost 4x as much?

If each dollar becomes 1/4 its current fraction of US GDP, then goods become more expensive to produce because the same number of dollars will buy 1/4th as much material for production. In other words, for the same amount of money that I used to be able to produce a widget for, I can now only produce a quarter of a widget.

In the past, you've said that it's worth thinking of a dollar as a fraction of total US GDP. If a widget used to cost $1, it now costs $4, which means that the value of the widget is now equal to a larger fraction of the GDP (presumably the overnight devaluation didn't coincide with inflation, so the same number of dollars are out there). If I want to buy an American widget, it's now more expensive, because I'm now buying a 4x slice of American GDP than I was before every time I buy a widget. Is that the correct reasoning? A little convoluted, I know.

Yeah I wonder. Talking about coming urbanization trends does sound like another form of the view that blamed Brexit on the older generation, or Obama's arc of history view. Right? Some said that Brexit voters, who were generally older (or at least the story goes) voted for a regressive policy, but at least they're going to die off soon, and once they do, only sound-minded, enlightened cosmopolitans will remain. In other words, time will solve the fact that a sizable part of the population disagrees with me, because eventually the only people around will be people who agree with me. The dissenters will die off.

It seems like one could say, a lot of the people who are standing in the way of the liberal agenda will effectively be forced to migrate to cities, because it will no longer be economically feasible to live in rural areas. And when they do, they'll abandon their distinctively rural ways, and become good cosmopolitans with cosmopolitan values. However, these people likely won't bring much capital with them. So they'll probably be moved into slums, if the transition happens too quickly, which might preserve their distinctness and prevent them from integrating...

Just spit balling here. Also, super jet lagged.

To clarify, I / we were talking about current conditions and consequences. The hypothetical is, if infrastructure and healthcare costs are reflective of “real” monetary value, then something like the petrodollar system (foreign demand for US currency) would be propping up US foreign buying power by like 4x. (I suspect it’s probably even worse than this, but it’s not like I’ve done the research. Its just an idle thought I had on a long drive.)

If the petrodollar system ended, then what you’re saying you were saying before is accurate. To be clear though, it wouldn’t affect US GDP. From an American reference frame it would just look like imported good prices quadrupled and everything else would stay the same. Which, I think, is something that many Americans think they’d want. US GNP would take a dive but GDP wouldn’t.

Edit: Because I realized I didn’t quite understand your last post. If this US currency manipulation ended it would make US domestic manufactured goods much more competitive, whether for domestic consumption or for export. However it would reduce US buying power greatly, at least in the short term.

City-states doesn’t imply urbanization, it means dividing the country into independent regions that are centrally administrated by a proximate and economically significant city.

It means the strongest and most politically significant authority in the life of a rural Northern Californian will be seated in the San Francisco megacity, instead of D.C.

Arguably this is already true.

I'd expect a city-state to be a state, meaning that I'd expect it to have a considerable degree of political autonomy, maybe even to the point that it'd have its own foreign policy. What you're describing doesn't sound very different from the relationship between states and state capitals.

A city-state is an independent country that has sovereignty over the city itself and its dependent rural region. So yes, it’s similar. The distinction is over whether the relationship between current US states and capitals is sustainable as independent entities, or whether those states would also decay.

Regarding your other point about shades of classism behind liberal hopes for urbanization, I neither know nor care. My (much) earlier point about the unsustainability of low-density residential mostly concerned the car-centric suburban lifestyle crossed with a ream of exceptional infrastructure planning blunders that has left most US counties, and even most major cities, saddled with an infrastructure they cannot afford to maintain. In some extreme cases, infrastructure maintenance costs exceed the entire gross product of the municipality.

The US developed its infrastructure knowing they couldn't afford to maintain it, under the assumption that they'd grow themselves out of the problem. Well, the US stopped taking immigrants and white people stopped ****ing, so that isn't gonna happen now, is it? That means **** is going to fall apart, cities are going to retreat away from the suburbs, and services for surrounding rural areas are going to decrease. Because they, logically, have to. There is no other option. The US has neither the money, nor the resources, nor the manpower to maintain this infrastructure. It's going to degrade, it's going to fall apart, and it's not going to get replaced. You can live in the jungle if you want, but shooting the messenger isn't going to change the fact that it's going to be a jungle.

"It's so weird that Flint doesn't have safe drinking water yet. You'd think they'd have done something by now."
"That's strange, NBC just said a third of Puerto Rico still has no power. It's been 7 months."
"Rome sure hasn't paved that road in an awfully long while. I hope the empire's doing alright."

I assumed that manufacturing had already declined because of the strong dollar?

No idea what will happen when the petrodollar collapses, beyond what you've predicted (and I am still reading). Anyway, I only linked to the article on Dutch disease to draw a loose analogy with the idea that wealth and natural resources may have already caused US manufacturing to decline.

Also, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Sorry, I meant it as a thought exercise. Take a country with a normal, functioning economy and its own currency. Then require all other countries to buy that currency (which, recall, are shares in the former country's wealth), because it is required to intermediate some other necessary transaction. What happens to industry in the former country, what happens to imports, what happens to the costs of goods and services which are obligatorily domestic?

I didn't mean to imply it hasn't already happened to the US, what I meant was to make people help validate my theory about what has happened to the US.

Edit: brain fart. My brain compressed tulip mania into dutch disease for some reason.

Yeah, that seems like a good connection. But it's worth emphasizing that it's not because of US natural resources, but instead because even wholly-foreign commodity trades are (were) required to be transacted in USD. It's not an inflow of wealth so much as (China-style!) currency manipulation.

I wonder, what would the right neoliberal economic policy be to soften the blow of a collapsing (petro) dollar? Or maybe there is none, since it is assumed we can grow economically forever.

Neoliberal? Suicide booths.

Suicide booths could stimulate the economy since they will remind people to buy Futurama episodes

Neoliberal policy: "the market will solve the problem"

That doesn't sound so much like policy so much as looting. I am sure the rich will simply emmigrate before thinking about undoing the damage caused by their greed.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/88705064/super-rich-americans-buying-land-in-new-zealand-as-bolthole-from-apocalypse

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm#THE_REPAIRER_OF_REPUTATIONS

Weird.

This is my plan for reducing world population, is mass mailing out a copy of THE KING IN YELLOW stageplay that doesn't exist.

You may have noticed the mythology from True Detective was based on that weird ass late victorian sci-fi