The states that actually collapse are the more rigid, authoritarian ones like the USSR or the Ottoman Empire. Plus the US has one advantage that previous stable empires didn't have- federalism, a decentralized system. Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders.
No offense but I have to roll my eyes a bit at these disaster fetishists. Orlov is apparently a foreign-born one, but we have tens of thousands of domestic ones here in the states, this is a very old belief system. (Hell, my parents were back to the land hippies fleeing Nixon & the imminent nuclear apocalypse!)
The United Kingdom, similarly, collapsed, under the weight of two world wars. Europe as a whole was devastated, and the whole world started to coalesce around the only remaining global powers.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po%C3%A8me_sur_le_d%C3%A9sas...
> Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders.
It would not be unheard of for those local state leaders to go to war with each other -- they've done it once before, after all. The point is that once power centers fail, the consequences aren't predictable.
Do you have a source that supports your statement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
It depends on your definitions of entitlements and military, but for example, social security spending was at $1.0 trillion compared to $676 billion for defense.
Progressives will tell you that these are expensive programs. Progressive wants to significantly cut the military, and replace medicare/medicaid with a single-payer universal system which would be far cheaper. They also want higher taxes to help fund these programs and redistribute wealth from the wealthy to the poor.
I'd argue we're in a preservative/cost-cutting mindset rather than a generative/competitive mindset, which can be seen reflected in anti-trust policies. The philosophy has been to focus anti-trust around consumer benefit (eg lower prices) rather than to ensure competitive markets. We're more concerned with consumers' purchasing power than producers' opportunities.
The fed gets it's money from GDP producing states. There are far more GDP draining states the further inland you go. If those states don't get federal funds, they will not be able to have a functioning judicial branch which is the only one that really matters during such conditions.
And in this putative local warlord future that you're imagining for the US, I rather suspect ownership of food production will matter quite a lot.
Your phrase "GDP draining" probably refers to the fact that some states receive more in federal services than their population pays in federal taxes, which has nothing to do with whether such a state will be able to continue to fund and administer its own "state" court.
Most matters, e.g., most murder trials, are adjudicated in the 50 state courts, not in the US federal court. When OJ Simpson was put on trial for the murders of Ron Goldman and Nichole Brown Simpson, for example, he was put on trial in a state court.
Plus the red states mostly grow their own food, which would be pretty huge
That's exactly what we're seeing right now with COVID-19. Since Trump and his troop of baboons have done nothing but throw their own poop around, state governors have stepped up to provide executive leadership. The US has never looked more like a union of independent states to me than it has in the past couple of months.
Rome?
We live in a more complex society and countries need each other more than before. Communication is cheap, transport is cheap so it makes sense to rely on other for your own need.
So, this lack of preparedness is true for USA, but also for many countries in Europe, and Asia. The more complex the society the more fragile it is to disruption.
Is it solvable? Yes. Local renewable energy is a good example of reduction on distribution complexity. There is more knowledge involved, but there is less countries participant in the complexity.
To stop believing in politics seems worse advice ever, thou. It seems more a receipt for collapse than a solution to be more resilient.
> "Took 10 years to recover"
Has Russia recovered? That also needs more probe. To be better that you were 10 years ago is not synonym of being recovered. Russia is just less chaotic, maybe.
Was there anything to recover? Sure they beat everyone to space but the economy wasn't exactly roaring. My family tells me you didn't really have any kind of choice when you lined up to "shop" for groceries, and you had to know someone from the store to get anything good (better meat, rare sweets like jam) before stocks ran out.
That's arguably something else to consider in this comparison. Yes we may have a further distance to go to recover to the US historic norm, but even under a collapse we may be closer to ensuring basic survival and even comfort than immediately post collapse Russia.
One of Orlov's points though is that there is a difference in tolerance levels (i.e. Russians were more accustomed to hardships). Thus the question ought to be, even with an assured higher level of comfort compared to the USSR collapse, will people handle well enough a hypothetical US collapse?
EDIT: to prove my point, russian life expectancy from fed -- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qTgj
I'm not dumping on Russia, but it's easy to look at the shiny place and forget about the other parts. If you were a time traveller from 1985, NYC looks like a magical fairy-land (at least on the surface). But Syracuse, NY or Utica, NY... not so much.
I guess China would fall apart next. It's a country that's stitched together by force and propaganda. It doesn't seem to have the ability to shift its internal borders. So its collapse would be more dramatic than the US.
It's hard to predict the future!
I would agree that the (East German) state and government was entirely unprepared for its own collapse.
But maybe the people were better prepared because they've been living at the brink of collapse for most of their lives. Shortages of one sort or the other were a normal occurance, you learned quickly to not depend too much on the state, but on family and other people. So when the state "disappeared" people more or less just went on with their business.
And at least in the GDR there was definitely a growing feeling that this couldn't go on for much longer during the 80's, which may have created a "subconscious preparedness".
And of course the "collapse of the GDR" wasn't an "apocalypse-style collapse", but in typical German fashion it was happening very orderly and predictable once the ball was rolling. And (here's a controversial opinion) even though many people had their lives turned upside down in the 90's, lost their job, had to emigrate into the "Golden West", even with all that... being poor in the reunited Germany still was a better life than being "rich" in East Germany (whatever that meant, because there was not much to buy for money anyway).
I'm not sure how people in "the West" would have dealt with its own collapse if the sides had been reversed. Maybe we'll learn in the near future though.
I heard stories and I'm inclined to believe that it may as well have been just the feeling of later generations. As I understood, people expected things to relapse to previous order since before the WW2, a sentiment shared both by former rich hoping, and by former poor afraid of loosing their benefits. As time passed, all of them gradually accepted things as normal, and the expectation for change was carried on only by following younger generations. I also think that people in North Korea may have had the same feeling for an impending change, especially hearing of USSR collapse, yet that didn't count for much.
Everybody distrusts the government, they rely on each other, learn to do things themselves so they don't rely on others. So, money doesn't exchange hands, taxes don't get paid, GDP doesn't grow, more money doesn't get printed.
This is all in a very interconnected world with a mostly free economy, so outsiders just come and buy up everything because at the end of the day, money matters.
Instead of preparing for collapse, how about preparing for being united in work and life and start trusting and depending on each other more.
The US will eventually suffer a collapse, that seems like a safe bet. Then it will probably recover, become dominant again (at least somewhat), and collapse again. If we look at Rome, that cycle could continue for 500 years or more.
Wondering who is 'prepared' for a collapse is a weird way to think about it. If you are capable of taking steps to prepare for a collapse -- you wouldn't suffer a collapse.
But it'll likely just fracture into smaller regional Nations made up of the states.
Worst case, it's 50 separate nations.
Especially now that we'll likely see a shift back towards state level autonomy, with the federal government's bungling of the SARS2 pandemic.
The US is decentralized to begin with, the USSR was not. Decentralized systems fare better in collapse situations.
1. This isn't really the US we are talking about, its the Western economic system
2. Things 'collapse' in different ways. A slow collapse looks more like a transition. Most things don't collapse anywhere near as quickly as the USSR for obvious reasons.
2. The military boondoggles have continued uninterrupted since the collapse of the USSR almost regardless of who is in charge. G.W. Bush ran on a platform of not getting involved in foreign entanglements the way Clinton did, then Obama ran on a platform of not getting out of the entanglements that Bush got us into!
That said, the solution to both of these is to abandon the Electoral College. This can be done either by Constitutional amendment, or by the agreement of a certain number of states [0].
What it wouldn’t fix is the huge body of campaign and election law and regulations that make it so there will always be exactly 2 major parties, starting with first past the post voting [1]. While Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem [2] practically guarantees we will have some paradoxical outcomes if we have 3 or more parties, even if we eliminate first past the post, I believe first past the post is one of the most anti-democratic practices we have in this country.
Finally, while this isn’t really a hard fact, it seems to me that parliamentary forms of government tend to last longer than presidential governments. Changing this in the US would be near impossible, requiring a Constitutional amendment, but it seems to me it is our best hope of lasting another 200 years.
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
Also, do you have any data points for presidential governments lasting less long than parliamentary governments?
This would certainly benefit the Democrats, but I don't see it as a "solution". It would give states without large urban areas even less political leverage than they have now. Presidential campaigns would not even bother visiting most states, since locking up enough votes in large urban areas (all of which are solidly Democratic) would be sufficient to win the election all by itself.
The purpose of the Electoral College was to prevent a slim 51% majority of the country from running roughshod over the rest. It is serving that purpose.
For example, communists killed and imprisoned all the kulaks (land owning farming class) to create their collective farms. Shortly thereafter the USSR was hit with devastating famine. Similar series of events happened in China under Mao. Coincidence or causation? If the latter, is this indicative of the nature of the USSR economy and perhaps provides insight into why it collapsed?
"Horsed don't die when dogs want/wish".
Original is "Nu mor caii cand vor cainii"
I've read some of his books (The Five Stages of Collapse, e.g.) and there's a lot of food for thought.
He's now spending his time designing and building "unsinkable" houseboats.
His thinkpieces, which in the past were quite worthwhile, are now behind a paywall at
People use the USSR in WW2 as an example of where central planning led to success, after all they mobilized the entire country for war and eventually won. However, the entire Soviet army was destroyed multiple times. Putting on a Russian army uniform was basically the same as suicide. The rest of the world didn't have the power to force their citizens into certain death, and as a result they thought harder and were able to find ways to fight the war without 90% casualty rates and having entire divisions destroyed to the last man.
Having to answer to your citizens leads you to be more prepared and more responsive to problems, not less.
This was my point. The only reason the USSR is better 'prepared' for anything is because they can make choices that countries like the US can't, at the expense of human lives.
"People use the USSR in WW2 as an example of where central planning led to success"
This is a good example of success in a country that doesn't care about human life.
USSR total deaths in WW2: 24 million United States: 418,000
I think we agree.
