I was just telling someone the other day how all the talk of civil wars and unrest were overblown, Americans will never resort to that with the economy the way it is. Even in the '08 recession (and even worse scenarios), recovery was a possibility. There would be no jobs at the time, but you can reasonably expect them to be created in a few years. You could go to school and switch careers.
But I think right now there is a dreadful perfect storm of sorts.
- It's not just LLMs, the social/political environment just doesn't favor risk taking, which means less opportunities.
- The US will be alienated from all its good trade partners for a decade plus at best. They'll still do trade, but the era of relying on US companies, or relying on a stable US consumer base is over.
- The dollar will decline, by how much I don't know but it will. Less buying power for American companies.
- Education is in shambles, and skilled & educated immigrants who can leave the US are doing so in droves. Brain drain will be real, the pipeline to replace them will take a generation, and that is if it was fixed today.
- Historically, there is a natural re-balancing of powers that happens as a result of people getting upset and organizing change or some sort. But the ability of the population to organize meaningfully is curtailed because tech, moderation and surveillance capitalism.
- I won't say too much about the current admin, but things are really scary. Not as in "i'm upset about this" or "so much for democracy" but more like "i'm scared for my life" levels of scary.
- Erosion of trust is huge, you don't take risks if you don't have some trust. consumer spending, loans, business spending,etc... and the erosion of trust is fundamental and hard to repair. Trust is also heavily asymmetric, it costs a lot to obtain, but it takes little to lose it. Once lost, gaining it again is usually orders of magnitude more costly.
let me stop there for brevity, but my point was how the US has never truly been in a situation where the economy is doing bad, and the politics is untenable. You have people who are in power and well incentivized to make things even worse, you can cancel elections and deploy troops better if things are really and truly "bad". When people stop having their basic needs met (and I don't mean health care and affordable houses - but food and shelter), I'm concerned there will not be many ways left where the rule of law and peace can be sustained.
It's one of those things, like "you can't unspill the milk". If things get as bad as I fear, right now, today is as good as it will ever get in the US. What scares me is that Americans aren't terrified enough, those that know better are in catatonic state of "what can i possibly do about it?" - and I mean all Americans regardless of politics.
From what I understand, things will get bad but for 99% of the world, the rest of this century should be bearable climate-wise. There simply aren't enough fossil fuels in the ground to keep it burning longer than 2100~ish anyways. I mean, the problem is very real and millions might die, but at the same time the majority of the billions will do ok as well, so no real cause for nihilsm on that front. Especially considering the mortality rates at the same decades a century earlier would still be significantly higher.
Wars, economic crises and other turmoils however, that's a tough one. Even climate change alone will stress out too many things and exasperate those areas.
It's more like we've had it really good post-WW2 over all, and that will go away pretty soon. Even ocean currents collapsing and acidification of the ocean, as bad as it is, it won't yet be the worst or cataclysmic I'm afraid.
Widespread undesirable situations like that tend to result in humans coming up with solutions too. It took us WW2 to get nuclear energy. It took slavery and colonialism to get us the industrial age. Bad things and good things tend to come and go alike.
I can only speculate, but many are going back to their home countries. China is also ok-ish from what I hear (at least in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen). Native born americans are also trying very hard to move to Canada, UK and EU.
But your question is what is a better country for them? A year ago, I would have said none. But I'm sure you're seen the same news that I am where even when immigrate legally, work hard, obey the law,etc.. even having real-ID proof is of no use, they get jailed. the threat of imprisonment alone, just for existing is scary, I'd say just about any other country that won't throw you in prison for existing is better. They're also talking about revoking citizenship of Americans so non-nonchalantly, hardly anyone cares. I don't even if the US is safe right now just for getting your degree at an Ivy-league school.
You said "especially for americans" - they're talking about getting rid of H1Bs right now, my comment is about the brain-drain from immigrants. The majority of the time, it isn't to save money, but the talent just isn't there in the US. Even in software-dev, there is a sort of flood of compsci grads right now, but it's only so because so much of these positions are filled with immigrants. Many other fields will have strong demand, and if the supply could be bootstrapped in a few years it isn't a big deal, but while americans get degrees (which isn't happening like before! it's really really bad right now) american companies lose their competitive advantage. Look at the CEOs of Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, they 're the type of people ICE would be eager to throw in prison were it not for their wealth and connections. Go to Arxiv.org to see pre-prints on research papers from various industries, look at the names of who's publishing.
You have to understand that the current environment and government in the US is specifically to drive out immigrants. There is a reason ICE has a higher budget than the US marines right now ($50B), they're not at the border arresting illegal migrants, they're hunting legal migrants in american cities. There are many countries where there are little opportunities for work, and population and government are very hostile to migrants (russia for example, or even japan in certain cases),but you will not have to fear being thrown in jail at-random, or constantly fear for your safety, especially for those who have family hear, I can't image what it must be like.
i'm also not really sure why the budget the marines is relevant here. the DoD has a nearly trillion dollar budget. if we're going to randomly segment out expense centers why not focus it even more narrowly to something arbitrary like how much the military spends on flour for pizzas?
for ICE, total effective/enhanced funding for FY2026 is widely reported in the $28–30B from what I can tell.
not trying to be a dick but dont want to spend more time wording this more softly
They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor. They didn't have instant comms and globalized commerce either.
Only tangentially related, the Nazis started the holocaust, in part, as a way to boost their domestic economy while making invasion supply chains viable. Less people to fight over resources, they were removing demand because of supply shortages, in literally the worst way possible.
> They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor.
Outsourcing manufacturing is new. But you are wrong about the other two.
Why do you think fascists (and proto-fascists and the unrelated look-alikes) keep losing wars all through history?
Fascism as a term started getting used with Mussolini from what I recall. Italy back then did not depend much on foreign supply chain or immigrant labor as far as I know, am I mistaken, or are there other examples you're thinking of.
Germany did enough for it to matter¹, Spain did. Everything in Japan was imported when they started warmongering around².
Italy was in an exception situation at the beginning of WWII, where they couldn't afford external goods.
1 - Mainly because they pushed their definition of "hated foreigner" to an extreme.
2 - They made a huge movement into replacing production chains, mandated by the government at the beginning of the war. But their lack of access to tech was still crippling at the end of the war.
But I think right now there is a dreadful perfect storm of sorts.
- It's not just LLMs, the social/political environment just doesn't favor risk taking, which means less opportunities.
- The US will be alienated from all its good trade partners for a decade plus at best. They'll still do trade, but the era of relying on US companies, or relying on a stable US consumer base is over.
- The dollar will decline, by how much I don't know but it will. Less buying power for American companies.
- Education is in shambles, and skilled & educated immigrants who can leave the US are doing so in droves. Brain drain will be real, the pipeline to replace them will take a generation, and that is if it was fixed today.
- Historically, there is a natural re-balancing of powers that happens as a result of people getting upset and organizing change or some sort. But the ability of the population to organize meaningfully is curtailed because tech, moderation and surveillance capitalism.
- I won't say too much about the current admin, but things are really scary. Not as in "i'm upset about this" or "so much for democracy" but more like "i'm scared for my life" levels of scary.
- Erosion of trust is huge, you don't take risks if you don't have some trust. consumer spending, loans, business spending,etc... and the erosion of trust is fundamental and hard to repair. Trust is also heavily asymmetric, it costs a lot to obtain, but it takes little to lose it. Once lost, gaining it again is usually orders of magnitude more costly.
let me stop there for brevity, but my point was how the US has never truly been in a situation where the economy is doing bad, and the politics is untenable. You have people who are in power and well incentivized to make things even worse, you can cancel elections and deploy troops better if things are really and truly "bad". When people stop having their basic needs met (and I don't mean health care and affordable houses - but food and shelter), I'm concerned there will not be many ways left where the rule of law and peace can be sustained.
It's one of those things, like "you can't unspill the milk". If things get as bad as I fear, right now, today is as good as it will ever get in the US. What scares me is that Americans aren't terrified enough, those that know better are in catatonic state of "what can i possibly do about it?" - and I mean all Americans regardless of politics.