When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
The fall of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable due to trade imbalances that ballooned in the 1960s. The U.S. Dollar was pegged to an artificially high value and the French central bank was right to arbitrage it by withdrawing specie. Simply resetting all the exchange rates was not sufficient, especially since the Federal Reserve under Nixon continued inflating the currency. The need to have variable rates was decades in the making.
Speaking completely out of my ass in the interest of stimulating thought on the matter: the fall of the Bretton Woods system was not inevitable, and the trade imbalances of the 1960s were mere symptoms of the true source of the collapse of our ability to maintain the peg.
Post-war, we embarked on a number of massive and economically-inefficient expeditions, driven largely by xenophobia and racism, which inflated the labor and time costs of American life across the board, both in the short and long terms, and made monetary inflation a necessity in order to forestall an economic collapse. The most prominent of these are the creation and expansion of suburban America and the car and consumer cultures required to make it possible, and the expansion of the military-industrial complex in the midst of the Cold War.
An America that had spent the 40s, 50s, and 60s continuing to build densely (reaping the benefits of efficient servicing of public needs), and focusing industry on export-ready products and services (preempting trade imbalances), would not have incurred the ever-rising costs of creating and maintaining sprawl, and would have benefited from pro-trade spending that actually delivered a return rather than falling into a black hole.
If I might be slightly hyperbolic: American hubris and intolerance blew up the American experiment about 80 years ago. It's just been exploding very, very slowly.
You're factually right. The high government spending of the 1960s was avoidable. By the 1970s, the loss of the peg was inevitable due to what happened in the previous decade.
I have a more sanguine feeling about America's development through its short history. It embarked on a series of many experiments, many which were successful and many which had terrible externalities. At the time, most people thought they were doing the most reasonable thing. For example, the huge benefit one family got from owning a car, it would follow that all families owning one would have even more benefits. It turned out that suburbanization hits scaling limits, but it was not immediately apparent at the time.
Overall, the standard of living for the median American is higher than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the immediacy of information has caused widespread anxiety. In the 1990s and 2000s, we thought the same optimistic thoughts about interconnected information networks.
I have faith that we will adapt to this new reality, just in time for the next technological wave to catch us off guard. Maybe it will be cheap artificial intelligence.
When I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.
These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.
In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.
True for the empire, not true for the republic (which still took decades but not centuries)
When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
1970 or so. There is this version of it
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.
The fall of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable due to trade imbalances that ballooned in the 1960s. The U.S. Dollar was pegged to an artificially high value and the French central bank was right to arbitrage it by withdrawing specie. Simply resetting all the exchange rates was not sufficient, especially since the Federal Reserve under Nixon continued inflating the currency. The need to have variable rates was decades in the making.
Speaking completely out of my ass in the interest of stimulating thought on the matter: the fall of the Bretton Woods system was not inevitable, and the trade imbalances of the 1960s were mere symptoms of the true source of the collapse of our ability to maintain the peg.
Post-war, we embarked on a number of massive and economically-inefficient expeditions, driven largely by xenophobia and racism, which inflated the labor and time costs of American life across the board, both in the short and long terms, and made monetary inflation a necessity in order to forestall an economic collapse. The most prominent of these are the creation and expansion of suburban America and the car and consumer cultures required to make it possible, and the expansion of the military-industrial complex in the midst of the Cold War.
An America that had spent the 40s, 50s, and 60s continuing to build densely (reaping the benefits of efficient servicing of public needs), and focusing industry on export-ready products and services (preempting trade imbalances), would not have incurred the ever-rising costs of creating and maintaining sprawl, and would have benefited from pro-trade spending that actually delivered a return rather than falling into a black hole.
If I might be slightly hyperbolic: American hubris and intolerance blew up the American experiment about 80 years ago. It's just been exploding very, very slowly.
You're factually right. The high government spending of the 1960s was avoidable. By the 1970s, the loss of the peg was inevitable due to what happened in the previous decade.
I have a more sanguine feeling about America's development through its short history. It embarked on a series of many experiments, many which were successful and many which had terrible externalities. At the time, most people thought they were doing the most reasonable thing. For example, the huge benefit one family got from owning a car, it would follow that all families owning one would have even more benefits. It turned out that suburbanization hits scaling limits, but it was not immediately apparent at the time.
Overall, the standard of living for the median American is higher than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the immediacy of information has caused widespread anxiety. In the 1990s and 2000s, we thought the same optimistic thoughts about interconnected information networks.
I have faith that we will adapt to this new reality, just in time for the next technological wave to catch us off guard. Maybe it will be cheap artificial intelligence.
[dead]
Kinda hard to pin down a date.
When I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.
These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.
In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.
[dead]