America Is Headed Towards Collapse
Last edited Sun Jun 4, 2023, 04:03 PM - Edit history (2)
America Is Headed Towards Collapse
June 4, 2023 at 8:34 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 128 Comments
https://politicalwire.com/2023/06/04/america-is-headed-towards-collapse/
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Peter Turchin: “All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.”
“These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.”
“The U.S. has gone through this twice before. The first time ended in civil war. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it.”
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Competition is healthy for society, in moderation. But the competition we are witnessing among America’s elites has been anything but moderate. It has created very few winners and masses of resentful losers. It has brought out the dark side of meritocracy, encouraging rule-breaking instead of hard work.
All of this has left us with a large and growing class of frustrated elite aspirants, and a large and growing class of workers who can’t make better lives for themselves.
The decades that have led to our present-day dysfunction share important similarities with the decades leading to the Civil War. Then as now, a growing economy served to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The number of millionaires per capita quadrupled from 1800 to 1850, while the relative wage declined by nearly 50 percent from the 1820s to the 1860s, just as it has in recent decades. Biological data from the time suggest that the average American’s quality of life declined significantly. From 1830 to the end of the century, the average height of Americans fell by nearly two inches, and average life expectancy at age 10 decreased by eight years during approximately the same period.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I’m guessing the second time was the Depression.
But in the meantime…
Welcome to DU, frisbee7!
I don't want to say that one particular news network is the problem - though they've definitely been stirring the proverbial pot for the last 25 years. This is a long, slow boil. And the right wing hate bubble is going to burst, and it won't be pretty when that happens. 
