The US has been a slow-growing country at the technological frontier for as long as almost all of us have been alive. If your country generally grows at 2%, you can expect to see your living standards quadruple over your lifetime. That’s much better than nothing, but it means that in the shorter term — over a five-year or ten-year period — your economic fortunes will be primarily determined by random shocks, not by the slow and steady march of technological improvement.
A spell of unemployment, a medical bankruptcy, a decline in the price of your house, the loss of a government contract or a big customer — any of these could wipe out many years of slow improvement in living standards.
In other words, to most Americans, risks loom larger than opportunities. If everything stays the same, then they’ll continue to be wealthy and comfortable; if something changes, they might not. In an environment like that, it makes sense to be afraid of change, because change means risk.
For most of Americans’ lives, technological progress has been a major source of risk. The advent of the internet put encyclopedia salesmen and term life insurance salesmen out of a job. Hybrid cars from Japan put competitive pressure on traditional carmakers.
I’m a big fan of Dalio’s “another one of those” thinking. This post really captures how America is sleep walking into catastrophe over decades. Our current political and economic environment optimizes to quarterly and at most 2 year terms. Meanwhile, other countries are building generational ideas.
As the saying goes, society prospers when old men plant trees they’ll never sit in the shade of.
No answers, just reflection.
Quote Citation: Noah Smith, “America is having its Ming Dynasty moment - Asia Times”, 2025-05-20, https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/america-is-having-its-ming-dynasty-moment/