I’m back in the states for holidays but this time it was such a shock to realize everything looks so old, like from the airport to the convenience stores, malls, gas stations, etc. Why does everything look like it hasn’t changed from the 90s? And I was out just for a couple of months but things look newer and shinier in Panama and El Salvador compared to here. I cannot even imagine what some of you coming back from east Asia must feel. Did our country peak in the 90s and other countries are going through their renaissance? I love the convenience of the US where everything is open 24 hrs and you can get things delivered to your door basically overnight if you pay the price but I feel like we’re stuck with very old and boring infrastructure, makes me feel almost the same way I felt when I went to eastern Europe
The simple answer is that the US is in decline.
It’s a slow decline, barely perceptible, but historians centuries from now will point to the country’s crumbling infrastructure, lawlessness, and profound social division at this time as emblematic of its inevitable downward spiral.
Ray Dalio has a fascinating (if long) video on YouTube that talks about empires and their rise and fall and in it he hypothesizes where the US is on its decline. Its early, but it is in decline
lawlessness? Crime has declined sharply from our ‘prime’ decades, the 80s and 90s. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough police, the problem is an extreme wealth divide and a government that is uninterested in investing in the future.