The American Empire in Decline

in america •  6 years ago  (edited)

May you live in interesting times is supposedly an “ancient Chinese curse” but the saying is apocryphal. But, oh yeah, we live in interesting times. Post-WW2, the United States of America was the dominant economy in the world. And that held true for several decades. But all empires die. Some with a whimper (the British Empire for instance), some with a bang (the Japanese and Austrian-Hungarian Empires).

”The life-expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.” - Sir John Glubb

Jerry Robinson of FollowTheMoney.com points out in a SilverDoctors interview that when GDP is measured by Purchasing Power Parity, China’s GDP is already larger than America’s:

Wikipedia has articles about the two ways of measuring GDP:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Are Americans psychologically prepared for the decline (and fall?) of Empire? How will Americans deal with decline and loss of dominance? Semi-gracefully as the British Empire did? Stumbling into kleptocracy à la the Soviet Union? Or does the rise of a decentralized crypto-economy raise the possibility that it really will be different this time?

In other news,
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First of all, purchasing power parity is an absolute joke in an international system, given that it offers no way of knowing if one's money is worth anything at all the minute one leaves the country being measured. A nation using sand as their currency can lead the world in PPP if the people all agree on a set value for sand.

I'm sorry... but if you spent a month here in Beijing where I live, walking along streets lined with Human feces while makeshift tuk-tuks clatter past you on the side of the sidewalk-less roads, ridden by shop-owners who can't afford a car to drive on China's substandard streets even though they work 18 hours a day, you'd find all the talk of China's rise and America's fall very, very, very hard to take seriously.
Fun facts:

  1. More than 70% of China's population lives below the World Bank's poverty line.
  2. China's Debt (at least the debt they admit they owe) is $34 trillion (and growing), 75% higher than the US's debt, while their GDP is half of ours (and that's even if you believe their GDP reports, while there is reason to doubt them).
  3. MOST DAMNINGLY... if China is rising while America is collapsing, why is the entire National People's Congress, down to the last man, without exception, sending their children (if they have them) to US universities (Xi Jinping's daughter Xi Mengzhi, for example, went to Harvard, though the papers she turned in while in attendance are far below Harvard quality) while putting most of their money in US banks and seeking to acquire homes in the US while selling property in China?

My entire Steemit blog is built on examining China from the inside, and let me be blunt: these Western nail-biters who are worried about China's "rise (never mind that the world is starting to catch on to the fact that this 'rise' has ended)" are getting scared over absolutely nothing. The only way China can achieve their openly stated goal of re-establishing Sinocentric Tributary Hegemony in the modern era is through media-ploys, such as convincing the world that they already have done so.