> Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day[0][1]
This is from 2017. This has gotten, in my view, much worse and is not continuing to alleviate itself, and I believe climate change is only making this worse over the next 5-10 years as wealthier nations and their wealthiest citizens try to insulate themselves further from its effects at the expense or perceived expense of the poor. I don’t think the current political climate is going to prove its sustainable.
Couple that with serious economic pressures as in part, a result of globalization and coming shortages and issues of natural resources and it’s a recipe for real disaster
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170418-how-western-civi...
[1]: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/3/4/470/2669331/Modelin...
The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars.
But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West.
Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.
This is orthogonal as to whether a collapse is around the corner or not. If you look at the science in the IPCC report, combine with the inability to hit every single emissions target defined in every single climate treaty. It seems civilization collapse is on the table.
Also:
We probably are already at 2C locked in: https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26...
Billions of refugees by 2100: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...
Etc.
If we don't drastically reduce emissions in the next decades, it seems very probable that this global civilization will end. Which might not be a bad thing in the long run, but in the short term it will cause a lot of suffering.
We're in a sports car hitting the gas as we head towards a cliff and you're talking about how much better the interior is on this new model compared to the last.
You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.
so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"
... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc).
E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars". Global warming is already a big factor and is only expected to be more so in the future.
And that's not even before any real battle for resources such as water, crops, and dwindling minerals start, mass immigration due to climate change brings its own conflicts and challenges, the decline of the US hegemony brings forth new hegemonical and tons of peripheral claims, and lets not even count inflation and other pressures (including boomer-era people coming to retirement age en masse with lots of savings issues in the US, and broken pension systems in Europe). I haven't even mentioned a possible permanent (or long term) covid mutations situation (we're already 2 years in, and measures already had a huge impact on economies).
>Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me.
Not to make it sound like equivalent times, but jewish people had an extremely hard time imagining their German co-patriots would try to kill them too, plenty of such historical accounts from pre/early WWII, even up to the point they were already dealing with force registration in ethnicity lists, deportations, and so on.
First, there is no local mechanism by which having too small of a fraction of the total wealth that exists everywhere will cause a group to “crash”. Groups “crash” (assuming a sane interpretation of that word) usually due to local effects, like not having enough money to buy food, and not because they’re poor compared to someone else somewhere else. Obviously relative poverty could inspire a political movement or something, but I’m not seeing the “crash” here.
Second, power law distributions for wealth are natural, seem to have existed for all of civilizational history, and are arguably the only kind of stable equilibrium state that is possible with current technology.
Third, the appeal to greenhouse gas emissions seems less like part of a coherent economic argument and more of an irrelevant appeal to the idea that wealthy people (90% of Americans, in this case) are bad because they do wealthy people stuff like enjoy abundant food and energy.
Climate change by greenhouse gas emission is just the cherry on top. The knife to the eye, so to speak.
Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity. Our biological support systems are collapsing all around us. System shaped by natural selection are extremely resilient. That has prevented much of the damage to manifest itself in clear signals. But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore and we start to witness more and more systems fragment and fail. See the Great Barrier reef.
This is just the start. Water is beginning to get critically scarce in many regions of the world. The political upheavals caused by the effects of predatory over exploitation and pollution will bring down nations.
And so forth.
However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted.
Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is not going in a direction which inspires confidence in our future.
What does it mean for the "working population" to "crash"?
In the West and the rest of the world, those with the lowest income have the highest birth rate. So it can't mean a decrease in population due to low birth rate.
[0] https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/143127950480736666...
The reason the baby boomer had a much larger share of the national wealth is because they were a much larger share of the population. If you do the same graph per capita, you'll see that there's pretty much no difference between generations.
Our predatory exploitation of our biological life-support system and the massive reconfiguration of the climatic setup will cause enough disruption so as to lead to a breakdown in global cooperation. The damage wrought by pollution and over-consumption of natural resources will finally lead to a breakdown local ecosystems and to famine. Huge waves of refugees will (rightfully) demand a place to live sheltered from the calamities of climate change and they will be denied. Global commerce will stall and then stop, as refugees from failing states and countries turn to banditry and piracy. This will disrupt global cooperation and lead to regional conflicts that turn will lead to war over resources.
At least that's my best guess.
The sad thing is that we probably all see it coming, but we are in denial of it's reality. At least as a civilization. We're still chasing profit margin where where should gear for a fight for survival.
Classic Greek tragedy!
This is an absolutely moronic premise to start with. The portion doesn’t matter as long as the purchasing power stays static or is increasing.
The population doesn’t collapse when people are still getting abundant food, shelter, etc regardless of how well the rich are doing. The focus on the income of the rich instead of poverty is a distraction to pull people into a power struggle they otherwise wouldn’t care about.
It’s better to have obscenely wealthy + a high earning middle class than poverty across the board. However, the reframing of everything into income inequality makes the latter sound somehow better.
But it seems common to claim that dealing with it will make this worse. Is there any actual reasons behind this or is it just "renewable energy will kill birds" again, a sociopathic attempt to use peoples empathy against them?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever less so all the time.
If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, although our existing division is a weak starting place. A civil war destroys us from within, full stop.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.
What's annoying to me is having to lead coworkers though a rational thought exercise about "do you really think we're divided? as compared to what? how exactly do you measure division?" and so forth just to get them to admit it's mostly some generalized feeling and not some rationally considered measure.
I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this. Americans love a common enemy, and if they caught wind of how much they are truly being manipulated it might shift the narrative. Maybe that would embarrass too many citizens to realize the stuff they mindlessly parrot is largely a planted narrative.
Why? For better or worse, the average person in America is lazy. Arguing online is easy, but actually engaging in kinetic warfare over a sustained period of time is extremely difficult. Even the minor conflicts that erupt at protests are tiny and irrelevant compared to an actual civil war.
There's also not much money to be made in actually destroying things, as compared to drumming up outrage (which is how the media, large and small, Alex Jones to CNN, makes its money.)
My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's basic geopolitics. Every large state does this to each other. The US to China, China to the US, US to Russia, Russia to US.
I don't think the population is capable of a civil war just due to their health.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States
What are they going to do? Fight each other on their Power Wheelchairs?
Yes I am aware of the far right arming themselves and training for years for a coming 'war'. I think with the Parler leaks + Facebook, I suspect the government knows the exact location of the overwhelming majority of these people and wouldn't hesitate to gun them down if some calamity broke out.
I agree that the CCP, Soviets and others are probably devoting some resources to spreading division. It is so cheap to do in the grand scheme of things so I guess that everyone including 'soft allies' might be participating but these tactics only work due to real issues in the society that have been unresolved for decades.
Besides...long term China has more serious problems to contend with. Things such as the coming population collapse, extreme climate change that threatens their food supplies, and growing unrest as the population starts to expect more and more from the CCP.
If those are your options, what is wrong with being destroyed from within? The two sides can split the country and each get a share - say, in proportion to their numbers.
The British aren't exactly suffering after their empire dissolved. Life still looks pretty good for them.
There is no reason to unite people who do not want to be united.
This is not only a terrible American exceptionalism thing to say, but also probably wrong if you look at history of failing states. The Russian emipre was it the brink of collapse before WW1, participation in that war lead to its collapse sooner then it probably would have.
From an outside view much of the world is long since tired of American exceptionalism, and American influence on the rest of the world. For many people the collapse of America would be a preferable option over the status quo. Me personally would prefer no war at all (neither civil nor world). However I would love to see American influence dwindle in favor of a more global solidarity of the workers of the world (including American workers).
Progress toward that point needs to be arrested or reversed judiciously, with rest stops along the way being some of the most useful.
Sometimes it can be worthwhile to point out that after WWII peace had been achieved but there were only three types of people in the world remaining.
Those that won WWII, Those that lost WWII, and those that were saved by the ones that won WWII.
Everyone else was killed.
That's what made it a world war.
Everyone living is descended from only these three types, spawned for better or worse out of their hard-won environment of unprecedented world peace.
Anyone dissatisfied with this, the only way they can change it is to start WWIII.
Got any ideas if there might be somebody willing to take us further down that road anytime soon?
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a full-time job for a large number of Russian KGB, and Chinese state security employees.
It also wouldn't surprise me if the CCP or Russia or both are conducting propaganda campaigns to break up the U.S. without them firing a shot. These strike me as very shortsighted; the threat of an external adversary is pretty much the only thing holding large empires together, so both of those are next on the break-up list of the U.S. splits. (Arguably, the primary factor behind political divisions in the U.S. was the breakup of the Soviet Union; without the external threat of communism we have nothing to remind us that we're more alike than different.)
How is this a conspiracy theory and how is this a bad thing? The so-called Cold War (i.e., WWIII) was won by the USA "without ever firing a shot", by exactly the same method: sowing division within the socialist bloc. Do you think that the U.S.-influenced division of its enemies was a bad thing? Would you have preferred an all-out war between the two nuclear powers?
Classical liberalism is a necessity for pluralism, and pluralism is necessary for a country as diverse as the United States to survive. As soon as you drop "live and let live" as a fundamental principle and start trying to micromanage personal choice, you're on the road to division.
The Right should stop trying to ban gay marriage or abortion or TG folks from public schools. The Left should stop trying to ban guns or family gatherings or large sugary drinks or the rebel flag or traditional pronouns.
Until American can break the habit of trying to control one another and make other Americans live a certain way, we will never live up to E Pluribus Unum.
EDIT: Case in point...
I stopped reading right here. The Western Empire fell in 476 (for many reasons). The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) lasted until 1453. Even that isn’t a perfect way of articulating it, given the continued influence of the Catholic Church had well into the 1500’s (Luther).
In some ways one could argue civilization has never ended, but paused in different areas of the world. Also, taking a myopic view on civilization focused on the western civilization ignores the inter-continental trade that existed around Africa, Asia and Europe, doesn’t seem fair to the history.
I know that’s a reductive argument, but I do think global civilization has been continually making progress, all be it with some slow downs and set backs along the way. Yes some empires went away, but we still read writings from Ancient Greece, so is it correct to say even that civilization ended?
Long way of saying, “no” but things might change, and it could be uncomfortable for a while.
* A trade crash across the Western empire
* A crash in manufacturing
* Widespread famine
* A retreat from cities and villas
* The withdrawal of the military
* The withdrawal of centralised government influence
* Their replacement by regional warlords
* A huge decrease in civil stability
* A huge increase in petty violence and lawlessness
The millions of people living in the area certainly didn't experience continued expansion and prosperity.
And most writings from Ancient Greece and Rome were lost to the East. Only fragments survived. Byzantium wasn't enough of an outpost to preserve the rest.
What was left in Europe until the Renaissance was a kind of Christianised cargo-cult of the original empire, with most of the knowledge and working features lost. After the Renaissance there was a superficial rediscovery of some of the writing, the architecture, and the history, and it had an influence on modern European culture. But again in a kind of cargo-culty way which eventually turned into something else entirely in every area except politics. (A Roman senator would understand exactly how the US political system works, while being baffled by the technology.)
You can argue that empire building continued elsewhere, but that's a different argument. There were empires in India, China, and the Middle East, but they were distinct and unrelated entities. If anything they've been even more forgotten.
This framing is also relevant to present-day conversations. Claiming that our civilization is collapsing makes people eyes roll. Claim that we're losing state capacity is a message people are more receptive to.
I get your point, but I think it misses the mark. By this measure, no civilization has ever ended. If you go that far, you have to argue that the end of a civilization is the same as the end of the human species.
I think it's helpful to think of it more like the end of the French revolution. No one can agree on a point in time when the revolution ended, but we all agree that it happened.
The Kingdom of Italy also maintained Roman institutions like the consuls and Roman senate, which continued to exist as an organization until the 7th century.
With Odoacer acknowledging Nepos as the nominal ruler, referring to himself with Roman honorifics (usually as a patrician), and Roman institutions being preserved, I bet the average Roman civilian wouldn’t have experienced too big of a difference between 474 and 478 even if the Western Roman Empire had already been ‘replaced’ by the Kingdom of Italy.
The Christians have done it for 20 centuries now, as one example.
During my life, it has always been a common expectation, though the expected cause has shifted a few times.
My hunch is that maybe we're hard wired to expect the world to end, for some undiscovered reason.
Again, I remind you of my amateur status!
The pressure we are putting on other species and flora is immense but humanity’s future has never been so certain.
The only way to claim civilization collapse is to move the goal posts to a population decimation. But even that would still only put us where we were less than 200 years ago.
By the way, is there any sort of memoirs from ordinary people before WW2? Like did people at the time see it coming 1 years, 5 years etc. before?
Some are not exposed to this, so they may think nothing can ever go wrong. Or they processed the New Testament or focused on that in their upbringing. Everyone else is just getting second hand panic or second hand calm.
I was exposed to both perceptions of reality growing up. That means I take loads of psychiatric medications and am still prone to meltdowns.
The fall of the Roman and Aztec empires would be the benchmarks. Would we also consider the more recent Nazi Germany or Ottoman Empire falls as collapses?
Oh and don’t forget the French Empire fell in the 1700’s.
But does that count or did thet just evolve into a new form?
There is a really interesting talk on this: https://longnow.org/seminars/02009/feb/13/social-collapse-be...
The expectation that civilization will collapse nowadays comes from scientific knowledge based on verifiable data. We are witnessing:
- a massive decline in biodiversity
- a massive decline in biomass
- fragmentation of ecosystems
- collapse of ecosystems
These are already observable and documented facts. These by themselves present a real and urgent danger to our global human civilization. Then there are the probable consequences from the climate crisis:
- massive population migrations
- destabilization of countries and federations
- civil wars
- actual wars between countries in order to fight for resources (i.e. water).
We are headed for calamity. Let's not be delusional about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof
This has four potential archetypes: 1 The Amniotic Universe; 2 Cosmic Engulfment and No Exit; 3 The Death-Rebirth Struggle; 4 The Death-Rebirth Experience
Number 3 can be characterized as the valiant heroic struggle against huge odds which leads to a peaceful new age. (i.e. vaginal birth, which is extremely challenging for the child as well as mother).
Since most of us were at one time in a womb and then left it, this idea that our current state might end is indeed, as you said, hard-wired into the human brain.
I can't say that the reason has been discovered, but Grof's theories cannot be immediately discarded.
If we get another FDR style reset, things should be good for a generation or two, if not... the horrors of history will rhyme once again.
Edit/Update: The New Deal provided a social safety net which greatly relieve the inequality that ripped apart Germany and other countries.
It also provided the infrastructure that just happened to make it much easier to out-manufacture the rest of the world in WWII, and benefitted society for decades later.
A more complete collapse might have rendered the US too damaged to focus any effort outside of itself. As it was, many people opposed entering the war on precisely those grounds-- that the US should deal with its own internal problems rather than those a continent away. FDR plowed through those objections, and incidentally sparked the economic recovery fueled by massive industrial mobilization.
Whether or not you agree with FDR's handling of the Great Depression, you cannot separate that from the course of events that shaped the outcomes of WW II (both good and bad)
I'm old enough to have known a lot of people who lived through the Depression _because_ of FDR's programs. Whether the New Deal alone could have saved the country is literally academic to the tens of millions who were saved by jobs in the CWA, WPA and CCC, or the relief provided by the FSA, SSA and economic aid to businesses under the NIRA. It seems unusually cold hearted for any historian or economist to ignore the tremendous suffering those measures spared so many, just because they didn't meet some theoretical threshold for full recovery.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/19/histo... https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B01M34NBLZ&preview=new...
As long as the world remains human habitable, I agree with you.
If even 10% of the landmass where humans currently live becomes uninhabitable due to the impacts of climate change like flood, heat, drought, stable society as we've know for ~50 years has little chance.
Hundreds of millions of people will have no place to live, no food, and no water. The only possible outcome would be immense upheaval, violence and another world war.
What amazes me is people's ability to put their fingers into their ears and go "Lalala, I'm not hearing you. I'm not seeing the problem, lalala!"
Every rational observer should be able see the calamity we're headed for. I guess even the prospect of /possible/ having to give up /some/ comfort is enough for most people to just stop thinking and retreat into the ivory towers of wishful thinking.
"There's nothing wrong with our current societal setup. It's going good for me, isn't it? And of course there will be a magical mystery technology that will save us all."
We're so fucked.
Africa too, is capable of supporting a much higher population IF we want to get really serious about doing so.
For the latter part of the past-decade Hubbert's theory was rubbished because of new supplies from fracking and tar-sands, but the basic hypothesis: that there is a finite supply of cheap oil remains.
There is little doubt that this resource will run out soon, putting an end to cheap transport, cheap agri (fertilizers, mechanization), and pretty much everything else we take for granted in the new 'modern' world.
It's unclear how the world can support 10B population in this scenario, even taking into account the developments in electric and hydrogen vehicles etc. In fact, one wonders if the first world will be worse off because of its extreme reliance on this.
This is a far bigger reason for the eco push, much more so than Global Warming IMO.
Electric vehicle technology is ready to replace oil for all commuter and in-city use cases. Is it cheaper maybe not, but its not 10x more expensive. Maybe people will have to have an electric sedan instead of a $50k SUV. But people will make do.
According to https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... 66% of US oil usage goes to transportation. If we shift all short in-cities transportation to electric we can save oil for long haul trucks, trains, ships, planes, and industrial/agricultural uses.
As oil supplies dwindle the price will increase until most of the demand (transportation) is shifted to electric vehicles. Food and plastics might increase in price. But the average American will be able to continue their car heavy lifestyle by switching to electric.
I'm very optimistic on the future of solar and wind power. We may see average energy prices decrease significantly despite phasing out oil, coal and natural gas. But even if there are no further improvements in renewables I think electric vehicles will be good enough to avoid a peak oil crisis.
Climate change and our predatory exploitation of natural resources on the other way will end our lives.
We've already lost more than 70% of biomass and roundabout the same number in biodiversity. Since the 1970. This trend shows no sign of stopping.
Seriously; we're wrecking our own life support system. Systems evolved under the constrains of natural selection are incredible resilient. But we've been pushing it very, very, very hard for the last 250 years and we've pushed it very close to the cliff.
Just imagine the atmosphere at that workplace, must've been very heavy and brooding.
> Harappan Civilisation (Indus Valley Civilisation) [800]
But also missing is the Sumerian civilization, which I understand to have been over a thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer
On a microscopic view of a single life, at best we can cross our fingers and hope that we live through a calm bit.
There's also this strange idea that government itself is a bad thing (from Thomas Payne's Common Sense?), when the problem would be bad government. Someone has to make the big decisions, so if it's not the government, then presumably it's whoever has the most power?
Then there is the general abandonment of spiritual values in the west? (If you think the U. S. is a religious country, just try getting Sundays off - I probably didn't get hired at a grocery store once because of this - in the Carolinas.)
I do feel that Europe will probably find its own way after the collapse and the US will go from a global hegemon to a regional super power. A collapse of the west is still decades ahead of the average state of being in the global south.
Since China currently make almost everything, that could certainly cause some collapse-like symptoms, as key equipment becomes unavailable. Just look at some of the covid supply-chain issues for a taste.
The political system that produces governance is in itself a piece of social technology (set of laws, procedures, morals, behaviors etc) and it can easily become unfit-for-purpose. Why? because one of its primary tasks is to perpetuate an existing order. If it overdoes this "stabilization" task (that is, ignores material shifts in reality) it can hold society hostage. That period of disconnect between what society needs and what its organizational tech is offering can feel gut-wrenching and surreal.
All of the dysfunctions of the current era, e.g. environmental un-sustainability, absurd levels of inequality, rampant surveillance capitalism are well recognized and studied and, by-and-large, blueprints for solutions exist. Dig to find what is standing in the way and it is invariably i) an aged male politician and/or corporate leader who ii) has built a long career over decades knitting power networks with similar "winners" of his generation iii) is incapable of reinventing / invalidating himself and iv) will only be forced away from the cookie jar.
Maybe what is happening is not civilizational collapse but enormous resources and human talent (world-wide) are hostage to near idiotic (as in: non-adapted) political arrangements.
Wasting resources and human talent is not a problem in itself. It's suboptimal, that's it. You can interpret it simply as taming the whirlwind so that it doesn't disintegrate the structure and law, putting us back to pre-industrial times.
While that aspect of paralysis is mild, the paralysis in response to the environmental changes, to a next pandemic, to virtually any possible physical danger (whether it's an asteroid or an AGI...) is the problem to solve now. Our system needs to be much much quicker when handling dangers on a global scale.
I mean, it would be so embarrassing as a civilization to fall over some trivial bump.
the fallback, then, is to "change the system" (eg constitutional law changes, new checks and balances etc) so that people do the "right thing" by default
sounds great (even if a tall order). except this won't work either. there is no real "system" to change. you can write perfect laws and people will simply agree to ignore or subvert them if they are not internalized. we are after all just a collection of homo sapiens with our transient and volatile mental states
if I had a magic wand with a single spell I'd change the teachers. and hope that the generation they educate grows and takes control fast enough...
"as government loses control of its monopoly on violence."
but I can't articulate why...
Maybe something to do with a comparison to organized crime as a competition to a (possibly separately corrupt) government?
That certainly makes sense. The existence of organized crime does represent some failing of the state towards collapse.
I think people are a) hard-wired to expect the tomorrow to be the same as the today and b) socially trained to just keep our heads down and not stir the pot, even in face of calamity.
Because of a) and b) we're still - as a society - acting as if everything was fine and so we continue to ignore the real and present danger of a total systemic collapse.
It's been obvious for years, at least to anyone in my circle. Even my boss has said as much. We can feel it in our bones. Things are getting worse, not better, and it's accelerating.
We did this to ourselves, with our own greed and indifference, and now it's time to reap our rewards. Even now, rich nations are hoarding vaccines for themselves.
We have learned nothing and we will learn nothing, until it is too late.
Similarly, i can't see a problem with East/West divide. "Eastearn" civilisations are rising only as long as they adopt Western principles. It's not as much of a disadvantage of a Western civilisation, it's simply that it's losing it's exclusive position, because it WON: there is no alternative to market capitalism in today's world, no one even pretends there is.
There are alternatives to democracy, but success rate of democracy is a mixed bag in the West itself, and it may be simply an outdated form of government for the post-industrial world, and universal democracy where everyone votes was a short (<100 years) experiment anyway, so it's not a big deal if it ends. Democracy the way it was implemented in 200 years ago USA when 3% of people - actual stakeholders - could vote, would be the most sustainable form of government today, and it's more or less the way China is governed (where 6-7% of population are in the Party and can meaningfully vote).
1) the largest of the economies rising in Asia, being China, is funded in large part by state subsidies to this day. That won’t last forever. Few wholly Chinese companies that weren’t in Hong Kong before China took it back over have proven they can compete without these subsidies either.
2) As a result of the above, for instance, free market isn’t really “free” and I argue this about USA and EU too, yes, but China still requires that companies be 51 percent Chinese owned by default, hardly free enterprise compared to western economies all other things being equal. At least if I do business in USA or EU I don’t have to cede 51 percent of my companies ownership in that country to do business
3) globally a lot of critical natural resources are dwindling or being threatened due to climate change, depletion / overuse or just plain waste. Helium, for instance, was already a shortage pre pandemic, and is truly non renewable[0]. Oil, natural gas, and other critical resources are also reaching critical threshold levels
4) no country is immune from inequality issues, after all China, Japan and Korea have many historical examples of uprisings and civil unrest due to inequality
5) importantly, the USA is not a democracy, it’s actually a democratic republic
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775554343/the-world-is-consta...
People say this all the time to try to sound wise, but in reality it's sort of a meaningless distinction.
There's a wide range of functioning models for democracy, and a democratic republic is just one form of representative democracy:
Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy; for example, the United Kingdom (a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy), India (a federal parliamentary republic), France (a unitary semi-presidential republic), and the United States (a federal presidential republic).
The power of a sovereign to directly tax, and indirectly inflate its currency says otherwise.
You also need to quantify what it means for the economy to 'run off state subsidies'. There are particular sectors of the economy that are subsidized in China. The rest stand on their own. Smart subsidies reduce the overall cost to the economy, by building the foundation on which the rest could be built on.
100% of a state's economy obviously can't run off subsidies. But a smaller percentage can - and when invested smartly, grows the rest of the economy. Do you have any numbers for which fields of China's economy depend on these subsidies, and which percentage of those fields those subsidies represent?
Beyond that, the interconnectedness mentioned in the article allows hysterias to spread globally at an alarming rate. By some estimates, the reaction to covid did 100X more damage to society than it mitigated:
http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf
We saw childhood obesity rates skyrocket:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2783690
Education attainment levels plummet:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
But the hysteria surrounding covid has made any kind of rational discussion on the costs of covid mitigation strategies impossible.
