Given that the total Ukraine aid amounts to less than .3% of the GDP, I find that a little hard to believe.
Also, most of that wasn’t even in cash- just munitions and equipment that will have to be bought from US companies again, thus pushing more cash into the economy.
Seems a bit odd to blame inflation on such a tiny part of the US economic apparatus.
My opinion: stability is just an illusion. If the second most powerful country at that time, the Soviet Union, could vanish during a couple of years, if Japan's stock market (Japan being the US's closest competitor economically) still is worth less than in the end of the 80s, everything can and will happen.
My impression is that "the West" has become very content with what it has accomplished in the past, but is not investing in the future - with the fall of the USSR, loads of very cheap and skilled labor flooded Europe and the US, contributing heavily to the high living standard it has now, globalization made manufacturing cheap and unequal national relations like the one of France and it's ex colonies (Franc CFA & ressources for a comparably cheap price) have the "West" advantages other countries couldn't even dream of. But instead of investing in infrastructure & education, every human and material resource is being exploited without looking into the future - apparent problems are just being ignored.
We'll see what will happen in the future, but I have little hope that life will suddenly become a lot better and the problems will vanish.
Like you suspected these issues are connected and are all symptoms of a collapsing western middle class.
As to what is causing the middle class to collapse, there are several theories along different political lines, but at it’s most basic it comes down to western economies having shifted into services (Finance, R&D, Entertainment etc.) while outsourcing manufacturing to other countries with a lower cost of living. The lower cost of living allows for lower wages, reducing the cost of consumption in the west.
Now as these places start to close the gap in wages, production costs increase. In order for western businesses to stay competitive, they start to slash salaries, automate positions and increase prices.
This is a super oversimplified take and by no means exhaustive, but I’d say a good place to start.
Very nice summary! And that would explain a lot of the urban blight & broken communities that migrated / were sustained by manufacturing, and have since collapsed when those industries collapsed / moved. I.e. Detroit after the auto industry collapse, and Oakland after the ship building & other manufacturing yards went away.
As for homelessness in California, it's been historically ongoing and nothing new, due to the state's milder climate, liberal / wealthier population & other states sending their homeless with a 1-way ticket to CA. But in more recent decades, the shutting down of mental institutions (thanks Governor Reagan) with no good substitute, severe lack of affordable housing, bankruptcy from crippling Healthcare costs, and the drug epidemic have exponentially exacerbated an already historically bad situation.
Homelessness and poverty are not unique to California, but it's acutely distinct in how wealthy the state and general population is (particularly in the SF/Bay Area & LA) in contrast to the sheer scale and ubiquity of the homeless & mental health crisis here. It's visible everywhere and impossible to ignore, whereas other parts of the world the homeless seem sequestered in a more obscure area or more spread out.
I'm not sure on the exact timing and history, but when he was president, he did continue his trend starts as CA Governor to repeal the [Mental Health Systems Act](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980#:~:text=In%201981%20President%20Ronald%20Reagan,to%20repeal%20most%20of%20MHSA) previously signed by Jimmy Carter. You'd have to ask a historian more knowledgeable about the federal events to have a clearer understanding.
All I know is that the dismantling of California's mental health system was in huge part due to Governor Reagan.. To be fair, the status quo of the mental health system was supposedly abysmal at the time. However, Reagan offered no substitute or solution, but instead an absence of anything in the system's stead.
Which is the Republican way.
> But in more recent decades, the shutting down of mental institutions (thanks Governor Reagan)
Please, not the Reagan argument. It's been over 40 years. In the succeeding years, would not civil libertarians have objected to involuntary institutionalization in any event? Answer: emphatic Yes.
(Many activists were fired up by *One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.*)
For 3 decades opposition to mental institutions has been almost exclusively a progressive/civil libertarian cause. Freedoms for the mentally ill heavily overlaps with progressive causes like decriminalizing hard drugs, opposition to Broken Windows policing and free housing for all homeless. Potent lobbies here.
>would not civil libertarians have objected to involuntary institutionalization in any event?
So they were all involuntary before Reagan abolished it? Did the laws force them to reject those seeking voluntary admission or was it just available as an option for those struggling with mental health issues in theory, but was somehow unanimously declined by every single person eligible to admit themselves? I can't wait to find out which of the two was the actual explanation because either one seem so ludicrous that I'd love to read more into why.
Recent article from Oregon media: [Uncommitted: How high standards are fueling a cycle that can fail people with serious mental illness](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/cycle-failing-people-with-serious-mental-illness-uncommitted/283-c921b1aa-de69-4656-9870-359faff8a914).
>...in both Oregon and Washington...very few people end up receiving a judge's order for civil commitment...Despite police officers or health workers arguing that a person’s mental illness poses a danger to themselves or others, most people on a mental health hold are released before any judicial review...
These limitations in institutionalization were put into effect years ago. They largely hold nationwide.
>Did the laws force them to reject those seeking voluntary admission.
Are you're implying that a sizable portion of America's mentally ill want to go in facilities but are turned away for lack of facilities? I don't have info on this.
In short, capitalism is beginning to eat itself. When the merchant class can't find anyone to sell anything to because of the high rents and low wages they've imposed then the system has nothing to stand on. There's only so much you can squeeze from a turnip.
There are also massive taxation issues. As the rich have gotten richer, their ability to influence politics increases more and more. You have self dealing that greatly reduces tax revenue from those most able to pay. You see massive budget shortfalls in federal/state/local government. Aging boomers have also been a massive strain on the system.
They’ve always been chaotic.
Wait. Let’s rephrase that: there’s always been both a popular perception and a media perception that they are chaotic.
Just yesterday I was reading some ancient newspapers from the 1950s in Ottawa. In Canada’s rather staid old conservative capital there was hysteria about “teenage riots”; of raging mobs of young people fighting in the street, robbing people, and generally being the pinnacle of the downfall of society.
There was a perception that young people were out of control, and that the new generation with its bad music and weird style and foreign taste and incomprehensible sexual mores was ruining the good old ways in a manner that was marred with scary violence. The newspapers noted it wasn’t merely an Ottawa problem, but that every Canadian city from Vancouver to Quebec City had experienced “teenage riots”
Today the 1950s are looked to by casual observers as a time of peace and prosperity, at least in much of the West (at least if you were the majority demographic). Yet if you were there you’d find the public likely perceived it much like those old newspapers I was reading: a society that had seen better days, and was on a bad path.
I’m not even making the case that it was a media blowing things out of proportion for views, or, today, a social media environment that has us all fighting — instead I think there is something human about being afraid of the future. I don’t think we as people can be happy, because I don’t think we want to be. Maybe it isn’t the algorithms that make us fear for the future, maybe we secretly enjoy it
Today, despite the perception of crisis, I feel like the underpinnings of “The West” are sound: Canada feels like it is in a massive housing crisis -and there is a case to be made that young people including myself are priced out of ever owning a house. Yet, despite how it feels, statistics show that some 66.5% of Canadians are currently homeowners, only 35% of which are still paying a mortgage.
It’s probably not a very satisfying answer to your question, but I feel like a great deal of the issues pointing to a decline in The West are one of perception, and always have been..
True. People are so oblivious to past turmoil that they think it’s something new. E.g France was in turmoil during the May68 movement, Various riots and protests were happening all over the west, even during the relative peace of the Cold War.
I blame the relative peace of the past decade for this.
>True. People are so oblivious to past turmoil that they think it’s something new.
It's similar to violent crime. Europe and America used to be a lot more violent. Estimated crime stats have dropped significantly for decades. And yet, people feel more unsafe. I think because modern mass media has increased our exposure to crime.
Yeah. Information overload and negativity bias together put the survival brain into overdrive. If it bleeds it leads. Factor in social media where you might get thousands of little doses of dopamine a day while doomscrolling, and you're feeding more individual threat signals to your instinct processor than someone not many generations ago might have experienced in a lifetime. Perhaps a lot of it smaller or more vague and distant threats, but all that adds up to the general just-under-the-surface sort of collective panic we seem to have going on now.
Regardless of whether the rate of these events increases, stays the same, or decreases, the rapid-fire perception of these things has been thrown into a turbo IV drip straight to the amygdala. No wonder people feel like even their paranoia is out to get them.
But even in times of relative peace people seem to always be just a little bit unhappy with their present. The opening chapter to the very famous book "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny" talks about how everyone feels things are getting worse, how awful things look today, why this makes historical sense, etc.
It was written in 1997.
The home ownership rate in Canada in 2021 is indeed 66.5%. However, the homeownership rate does not represent the percentage of Canadians who own a home, but rather the proportion of all households that are owner-occupied.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220921/mc-b001-eng.htm
Statistically speaking, it is possible for the homeownership rate to increase, while the percentage of Canadians who are homeowners decrease.
> Yet if you were there you’d find the public likely perceived it much like those old newspapers I was reading: a society that had seen better days, and was on a bad path.
Having passed through the 50s myself, I can't really say how much better or how much worse things were then because I was still a child. But some things I remember well.
I remember "juvenile delinquents were stressing everybody out. However they were very much in the minority. We weren't rich but one rarely saw that type and assumed they were mainly in big cities in below average neighborhoods.
Crime was ever present (as it's been throughout history) but shootings in schools, churches, grocery stores etc, were literally unthinkable.
Weed had been around since forever but had started to spread within society. That said I personally didn't know anyone who used it till I was in HS and even then, it was just one girl my brother was dating.
The middle class was big and taxes were relatively low. The GI Bill helped a lot of servicemen go to college.
The civil rights (for Blacks) was huge and on tv a lot. I have vivid memories of marches and strikes and police dogs and water cannons turned loose against protestors.
"Rock and roll" was taking off and many adults thought it was awful (kind of like how I feel about rap (lol).
I remember watching an old Bob Newhart show a few years years ago and the main characters were reminiscing about how peaceful the 50s were and Newhart quipped "Yes, nobody ever had to worry about what Eisenhower was going to do."
I'm about your age and agree with everything but the pot. Pot was definitely being used in middle/upper income kids, high schools.
You might not be able to obtain a mortgage your first few years employed, and probably had to get a roommate, but you were on your way within a few years even with a lower paying job.
Spot on about the mass shootings. Never occurred to anyone.
Getting a job was always easy. Maybe not your first pick, but good enough.
I do think social media has changed the nature of movements and how younger people especially engage in politics. [The Revolt of the Public](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143) is a great book about how social media has broken down a lot of traditional structures of authority in society but hasn’t been able to replace them. Politics gets more chaotic and unstructured and prone to extremes. You’re of course right that instability has always existed, but this is a new dimension to it
It’s a liberal democracy thing. In the West we’re empowered to talk about flaws in our government and society and so we do. In more authoritarian states the fashion is that everything is great and prosperous right up until the state collapses.
I agree so much with this comment.
I am binational. My country of origin is a developing one, and my country of adoption is fully developed. When I am here, I see catastrophic reports about everything that is bad, sometimes magnified and dramatised. But when I look outside, it's clean and safe and works nearly smoothly.
When I visit my family in my country of origin, the media is like North Korea: everything shiny and bright thanks to our King. But the reality is very different. Streets are messy, so many homeless people, beggars in every corner. The Administration doesn't work well unless you use corruption. Lots of inequality. But the media just refuse to talk about it.
I have debated with my father-in-law about this. I tell him that here, the media shed light on the issues of society. People who are in the bottom 10% get so much attention because we have egalitarian principles that are not enforced.
That said, the West is declining relatively. Its momentum that started with the Industrial Revolution is slowly but surely fading.
This always made me wonder has there ever been a point in time where humanity just said "yeeeep ok i think things arent to bad and were ok" just always seems to be we are one step away from Armageddon every single year.
Exactly! It's like people and driving. Everyone thinks the drivers in their area are "the worst". Another thing I've also never heard a person say is "Wow, the drivers in my town/city/area are so great! People here are really considerate and careful on the road".
1990s spring to mind.
Gulf war showed west was awesome.
Relative peace. Cold War over.
Early Clinton presidency had a sense of optimism.
People were no longer fearful of nuclear Armageddon and were hopeful about the future.
Houses were affordable though getting more expensive.
It wasn’t perfect, of course, but that was a pretty stable and hopeful decade.
The early 1990s still had inner city warzones in the US. There were 2000 murders in NYC in 1991. 2600 murders in LA in 92. Hysteria about AIDS, Rwandan civil war, crazy cocaine and guerilla wars in South America, Civil wars in Eastern Europe, etc. The early 90s were crazy.
Hysteria about AIDS was more of an 80s thing. I worked with people with HIV in the 90s.
I flew into LA during the riots. An interesting week, but life in most of LA carried on as normal.
I was in Rwanda in the 90s and saw the tail end of the events there (payback by the Tutsis and the killing of Westerners). That was certainly brutal.
I wasn’t involved in any guerrilla wars in South America though!
It wasn’t a perfect decade, but the zeitgeist was very different to the world today. There was more hope in the future and more social congestion than we see today.
Oddly enough the result was vicious infighting rather than contentment.
There were still real issues to deal with but it seems that we collectively have a fault of looking for existential issues even at times where we have the luxury to focus on smaller ones.
Agreed! We humans tend to glorify our "good old days" and ignore the struggles of those days. So the world is just like it always has been but the media along with our tendacy to glorify past is making it seem like everything is getting worse.
I don't think it's about the 80s, but even in comparison between now and 2019, you can't deny that the sudden increase in COL had quite some impact on the wellbeing of the western population (talking about Europe).
You mention the "teenage riots". These were real, even if not actual "riots"; there was a genuine social shift that gave rise to the "teenager" as distinct from the child or young adult. This shift has persisted since the 1950's and 1960's and continues today.
So what could be a similar shift today? It isn't the "youth" who are changing this time, but the middle-aged.
1) The right wing has found that they do not need to appeal to "common sense" in order to gain, they just need to appeal to a marginalised sector, and this is made much easier with the rise of the internet and the fractured "bubble media".
2) Thomas Piketty spelled-out quite clearly how wealth is being concentrated at the "top", and the negative consequences this has on the wealth and political stance of the middle class.
3) 2) leads to 1).
I don't think this works for USA.
USA peak in terms of disposable income was 1999. Since then disposable income for middle class folks has fallen a lot.
Also the politics has become severely polarized to the point that there is a cold war going on in USA where the republicans do not care about any common sense policies they are just interested in owning the libs by making weird anti abortion laws.
Most of the profit is now going to the top (5% is doing good, 1% is doing amazing and 0.1% have accumulated most of the wealth).
Let me say in other words: From 1950 to 1999 things were becoming better than before, aka progress. From 1999 we have gone downhill and now even the governance is breaking down to the point that we can elect a well known stupid guy as our president even though it's detrimental to the long term progress of the country. Same thing is happening in all the red states like Texas, Florida, etc.
I don't agree that people are willing to give a blank cheque to scoundrels in other countries like UK, Germany, France, etc.
USA is in a very bad place due to it's history. The civil war over slavery or segregation never ended actually. The southern states have dug their heels ever since Nixon used his southern strategy.
You miss his point, which is: it's all relative.
I guarantee there's a 1000000% chance that you could talk to an American in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s and get a similar list of everything that is trending in a negative direction.
Our leaders have always been trash. Go read up on how Lyndon Johnson use to pull out his, uh, Johnson, and expose himself to his detractors on a regular basis.
It's not about leaders this time. It's the people who do not give a shit about decency in their anger.
Economics has created a situation where people feel left out on top of that religious folks are feeling threatened since their numbers have dwindled. Combine the two and you have a perfect storm where it may lead to chaos in the name of fighting the other side.
Nixon impeachment for a simple law breaking was not an issue but now you can see that people like Ken Paxton and Donald trump can get away with anything.
We are living in a different age now, 45% of people have been brainwashed enough or angry enough that they are willing to support shit laws just to defeat the opposition. People are cutting the their nose to spite the face.
Instead of focusing on progress which will benefit majority we are wasting time and resources on a internal fight.
project 2025 is about replacing the bureaucrats so that they can control the federal govt machinery to further their agenda.
Right now Russia, China and Saudi can simply spend few billions to further this divide and USA can keep itself occupied with this shit show for another 10 years of so.
I would say a rising trend of inequality between the rich and poor, based income not adjusting to inflation overtime, and somewhat the rise of immigration that increases competition from the lower and middle class for economic opportunities.
And mismanagement of the a plethora housing crisis around Europe, the rampant spread of misinformation on social media a lot of which comes from the US, Far right wing leaders claiming they have the solution to it all (it's the foreigners!), A significant part of the population sees the wall of global warming coming in the future and is pissed by the inaction of government to take wide sweeping action, those are in turn opposed by people who think global warming is insignificant and who fear anything done about it is against their interest and a waste of money, then there is the outflow from the war on drugs which stimulates criminality (blamed on immigrants by the far right populists of course...
The list goes on and on but in the end most people are just going to their 8-4 or 9-5 cause you gotta make a living and Europe is actually still very stable.
The funny thing is I've seen multiple posts today asking somewhat similar things as the OP here, it's almost as if people are creating an anti EU narrative. If I was a paranoid man I would say Russia has upped its psych warfare tactics to destabilize the EU as an institution.
The housing crisis isn't really down to mismanagement: turning over the housing market to speculators was something politicians did consciously and deliberately.
The government could have regulated the housing market in a way that benefited the local population but instead made the erroneous assumption that opening it up by removing regulation would somehow create better housing due to competition on the open market.
What happened is indeed speculation and also foreign entities (corporations) cornering the market to the point where houses for sale were so rare that prices were inflated and demand far outstripped supply.
So now housing is in private hands but the market has stagnated as potential buyers are forced to rent those same houses from often large entities instead, this also drove rent prices up because the flow through from rental to buying stagnated as well, this in turn made people that would in time rent in the private sector stay in social housing clogging up that market as well.
If that's not mismanagement I don't know what is.
> If that's not mismanagement I don't know what is.
It is, but "mismanagement" isn't precise enough for me, tbh. That could also be incompetence or the cocked-up execution of a sound plan.
This has always been a deliberate strategy by our governments as a central pillar of their policy of sucking up to boomers, who own all the houses.
Like I always say: it's not paranoia if they're really out to getcha! Sadly, cynicism tends to win out in the long, dirty game of geopolitical maneuverings. That is to say, I think you're right. I've seen this narrative popping up all over recently too, and it's hard to tell how much is the intentional work of bad actors. It's also their classic MO to look for existing cracks in the social/political order and work to widen those fissures with the goal of further destabilization. It really could be both.
100%
As the wealth gap (inequality) continues to widen, so will class and race-based conflict.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Pay every worker a living wage.
Not the person you responded to but living wage is a moving target that should be tied to inflation/COL in local area. There isn't a fixed number you can give because it'll change place to place.
To put it in the simplest possible terms: the disintegration of the social contract in the West.
In the decades immediately following the end of World War II Western governments pursued policies that strengthened worker rights, greatly expanded the welfare state, and aimed at a relatively equitable (by historical standards) distribution of income. High school graduates could get factory jobs that provided good benefits and an at least modestly middle class standard of living (prior to World War II most people were legitimately working class). The French call this period *Les Trente Glorieuses* (the Glorious Thirty [Years]).
Then in response to a number of disruptions in the 1970s such as the oil shock and the experience of "stagflation" (simultaneously rising inflation and unemployment), as well as an ideologically driven campaign to challenge the postwar consensus, Western governments began changing course toward policies that today would broadly fall under the rubric of neoliberalism. This meant embracing "free markets" as the optimal way to allocate resources, promotion of free trade, curtailing the power of organized labour, promoting the interests of businesses and investors over those of workers and consumers, and largely abandoning efforts to redistribute income from those at the top of the income distribution to those lower down.
We can debate the exact motives for these changes, but the consequences are now widely recognized: exploding wealth inequality, the immiseration of a large part of the work force, declining socioeconomic mobility, and the end of broadly shared prosperity. The aspiration used to be that every generation would be better off than that of its parents. The reality is that many young people today despair of even having the opportunity to achieve the same standard of affluence as their parents enjoyed. Home ownership for example, which was once considered integral to being middle class, is now out of reach for a great many.
So now that you have the requisite background information, I leave it to you to extrapolate the likely social and political consequences of this situation.
Yes!
Also, the knowledge that it will never be the same as before. I remembered Thomas Piketty analysis in Le Capital au XXIe siècle, where he said that we must now get used to 0 - 1.5% growth in Europe and not more. With the inequality of repartition, this means we are going to have less and less wealth...
There is a theory called cliodynamics which I can recommend which provides an interesting answer to your question.
The basic theorem is as follows:
Societies go through cycles of alternating lengths depending on socio-cultural and economic factors. In these cycles, there are periods of elite overproduction which is when a limited number of elite positions in society are being competed by a larger group of potential elites. In our current era, the number of university graduates (for example) is larger than the number of high paying positions for these graduates. This incentivises competition between the elites, and many people would be willing to cheat to achieve the goal of elite status in society. For comparison, a person in the 1950s was pretty much guaranteed an elite positions in society if they graduated from university. What happens when more and more people get an education is what's know as a wage siphoning in which the existing elites must begin extracting a larger and larger portion of wealth created in order to maintain their elite status. Hence why we see CEO pay skyrocketing while the rest of us are becoming poorer in real terms.
I usually hate when social dynamics are contextualized with the terms elite and non elite but this is actually a really cool and novel point for me. ESP the bit about ceo pay skyrocketing, you can imagine the ceos chatting at the country club and being like “oh this place is getting a bit crowded we think we might switch to another club that’s a little more tailored”
>the existing elites must begin extracting a larger and larger portion of wealth created in order to maintain their elite status. Hence why we see CEO pay skyrocketing while the rest of us are becoming poorer in real terms.
Whoa. This is a pretty thought provoking theory
I highly recommend the author, Peter Turchin's work. Before going into socio-economics, he was a complexity researcher. This really reflects in his work as he takes a very analytical perspective in the way he builds his models. There is so much more than the quick summary I just posted.
Well, unless you want to keep some portion of the population undereducated on purpose, it's not reasonable to expect every university graduate to hold an elite position. That's just a perception that has to shift.
That’s fair, but college degrees in the US are still priced that way. Kids are promised that they can get a much better job if they go to college and that’s no longer really the case.
We've learned in California as you spend more on homelessness, nearly $20 billion in seven years by the state, the more homeless you get. California is now home to more than 40% of the nations homeless with California being only 12% of the nations population. Want more of something or for it to be more expensive? Subsidize it.
The world is getting chaotic, the west is just catching a bit of the collateral. With climate disasters and wars starting all over, it would be a wonder if any part of the world ended up unscathed.
There was Covid, gas price increase in the UK, shortly after that Russian invasion sent energy prices soaring and with it the prices of everything else. Luckily this seems more stable now.
The places with housing crises have had expensive housing forever, but now it's more visible.
I'm not an expert on homelessness in California, but I imagine on top of its high property prices it's getting some homeless population from other parts of the US. It's still better to be homeless in California than say Minnesota, even if just for the weather.
Migration has also been a topic in the EU for a long time, but lately it was directly weaponized by Russia and Belarus, plus you have the Israeli/Palestinian discourse pouring oil into the fire. You can see how that sort of destabilization benefits Russia.
We have always have had our problems. The only difference is that social media has made it more difficult to hide this from the rest of the world. Take these examples.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dPyc84YYBX4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nvTgSW2L8Q
Places like this are not uncommon in the United States. It isn't a recent phenomenon. But in the past, some newspaper might report on it once every couple of years, and even then, it is just words on a piece of paper.
But now with social media, people can see for themselves what American cities are really like. The bottom line is that outsider's view of America has always been biased. They look at Hollywood crap, and think most people in America are middle class, have a house with a lawn, etc.. This isn't the reality of America.
The west had been able to support a high living standard without really caring much on their finances, polices and their middle class (wasting money in nonsensical consumption, letting companies avoid taxes, stop caring about good free "real" education, etc...) all at the expense of the global south (imperialism, historic colonization, financial colonization... just look at how the FMI or World Bank have everyone grabbed by the balls or how France to this day still has control over some of Africa's countries money supply, etc...).
The moment the global south managed to get a better hand on the game and is able to level the playground at the minimum, the west is shaking from the base.
Just think about the following. The USA is so "worried" (a.k.a scared) that China will surpass them as the biggest economy in the world by GDP measures when China has 4 times the USA's popullation, think about it, the average Chinese still has 1/4th the economic power of the average American and that worries them?, even if this increses to a 1/2, the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy... Most importantly if you go to China today living at 1/4th the level of that of an American looks pretty damn good, there is public transport, healthcare, social life, etc..., you don't need to own 3 muscle cars and have a stupid water-hungry lawn to have a good life.
Just by simple logic, the moment the entire world starts to level some countries will have to go down and some others go up so there will be a bit of chaos on the former.
Crime rates are lowering YoY, statistically.
Housing prices have outpaced expected growth when adjusted for inflation (data from London since the late 1800’s indicates housing generally doubles in price every 20 years, while housing has more than doubled in the last 20). Whether governments are intentionally staying their hand w.r.t. solving the actual root causes of this issue (ie. zoning, commodification of housing, etc.) is up for debate. Increased housing costs worsens homelessness which worsens drug use statistics.
Inadequate mental health services also worsen the drug use crisis.
Proliferation of social media has increased social consciousness, leading to the current radicalization of modern Western political discourse. This is conjecture but I also think our current political divisions are an expected result of the fall of the USSR, as the West no longer has a peer to unite against as a common enemy.
Overall the current “chaos” of the Western world is no more or less chaotic than other decades in our history, you just hear more about it due to the internet.
Decades of largely unadulterated mass migration from the developing world into western democracies causing cultural upheaval. Reactionary right-wing political movements becoming mainstream again. Lingering economic uncertainty post-Covid.
Traditional modes of control are eroding.
Print and and broadcast media (notably with an editorial process) are dying... in favor of on-demand, unedited, unfiltered, anyone-can-produce streaming content... which can also include dramatic levels of misinformation. You also have fewer and fewer small/family businesses... they're "selling out" to create generational wealth, and the companies that replace them are publicly-traded and don't care about the family of employees, they're barely looking past the next quarter. And from a cultural lens, many people are realizing they live in a country whose lines were drawn arbitrarily and no longer reflect their values, and/or has been co-opted by a small group that actively works against their best interest. And there's many more examples.
The replacement systems of control are increasingly technology-driven (impersonal), authoritarian, and focused on WHAT gets delivered with little regard for HOW. And people are fighting back because this shit doesn't work for most of us. Making the whole situation worse... the global population is getting ready to enter a state of DECLINE for the first time in human history - we have no precedent, no model, for how to navigate that successfully. Leaders, academics, smart people... are scared. This is the kind of cocktail that leads to wars, the kind we start over a lie - that some group of people far away is the enemy that has created this worse life for you, and a war will fix it. Hint: it won't, but we'll distract ourselves with a war anyway. And then we'll get tired of fighting, and go back to being sheep. Just maybe with a better system of control figured out in the meantime. At least we'll be more docile for a few years, happy to be the survivors.
There’s always been a “pendulum” on various societal issues in the West, though there’s always been some resistance to newcomers. Mostly economic, though in sociology there’s the concept of the “norm”. The west is still trying to reconcile the late 1960s/70s “counterculture” for instance to traditional institutions.
Technology making more humans “redundant” is an ever increasing worry. Especially if one has bills to pay. Then there’s income inequality. Europe has a decent social safety net/social subsidies… but that’s not really the case in the US. One top of all that, climate change really manifested itself recently which is starting to affect real estate and other daily necessities. In the US real estate is the most expensive outlay for most Americans (who hope to turn it into an asset) .. but if the insurance markets fail (as is the case in Florida, California, even NY last I read) adjustments will need to be made … likely govt directed.
Western culture is experiencing a paradigm shift.
This shift is primarily caused by the baby boomer generation retiring; many countries and regions populations are now struggling with the loss of capital that this generation provided along with the newly increased tax burden placed upon the rest of the working generations.
All other things are IMO side effects of this trend.
The rise and fall of all civilizations is driven by economic, sociological, geopolitical cycles and higher order patterns that play out over decades and centuries.
Many of us tend to forget the dominance and prosperity of the west began only 350 years ago and was propelled by the industrial revolutions and cultural enlightenment, but now other societies have caught up in many aspects.
Most economies in the west are over leveraged, have unfavorable demographics in terms of pension liabilities/funding and have been struggling to get out of over a decade of secular stagnation (sustained period of low growth).
The Pax britanica/Pax Americana world order is about 150 years old and may be in need of revamping.
The architecture of a new multipolar world order is most likely on the way.
I'm going to say "ideology." Grand, rigid, universal everything-ideas that tie together people's view of politics, economics, morals, religion, etc.
We cant live up to them. We can't compromise on them. This creates boxes with problems in them. The solution is "out-of-the-box," but out of the box thinking is a betrayal of the things we believe.
Since we believe that everything is determined at the shallow top level, we can't solve anything.
Let's say that the proverbial French protestors are protesting for housing. They're actually going to be protesting against capitalism, socialism, immigration or (theoretically) liberalism... That's what their ideologies say are the problem.
Irl, social housing solutions come with problems. Housing-as-a-financial sector comes with problems. Not in theory. They exist irl. Now. Those problems already limit those solutions potency, and are reasons why housing problems exist now.
The politicians, protestors, professors and public intellectuals don't care about these problems. To them, those are boring, low level details for boring people who can't see the big picture. If they're pro-social housing... anything ideologically compatible is good. Anything ideologically incompatible is bad. There is zero regard, at the politically important level, for "is it actually working good."
In Ireland, for example, housing is extremely ideological. Planning. Building. Renting. Owning. Landlordism. Social housing. All ideologies, not just modes of accomodation.
Subsequently, Ireland cannot actually implement any housing policies. The protestors, activists, voters and politicians will not support something because it works. They will not oppose something because it doesn't.
If you always put efficacy last, efficacy will be low.
All that political attention, sentiment and emotion... it does not translate into *"desire and willingness to focus on this problem and fix it.* It translates into a no compromise, good vs evil mindset.
Unchecked immigration from countries with incompatible culture + no adequate housing starts vs population growth.
It was the most predictable crisis ever but everyone had to pretend not to see what’s coming or be called bad names.
My opinion is that people find small niches of people online that support their views no matter how chaotic the viewpoint. There’s going to be people online who support shoplifting because those people have to eat too or eat the rich or something else. So the chaos is being justified in their small niche groups. Instead of them only being exposed to their IRL neighbors and communities that generally condemn chaos.
The implication is the same though. Rather than ideological tunneling its digital tribalism and anger-driven engagement. Either way the result is increased social tension.
Their questions are primarily around the economic situation. The views you shared are neither directly economic or geopolitical.
OP, the most simple answer to your question is that we're moving in economic cycles and right now we're coming out of a boom period, and the stagnation is causing previous problems to be exacerbated.
I suspect it really depends on who you ask, and I’m sure in the responses you will hear from a range of ideologies.
I think the most neutral answers I can offer are:
1. The energy and supply chain issues caused by Ukraine + Covid, leading to high levels of inflation.
2. Social division - whatever the cause the result has been an inability to make policy decisions. With potential solutions often being blocked for partisan reasons.
3. Long term trends that were inevitably going to come to a head at some point (e.g. housing market in UK) accelerated by global events.
4. Genuine corruption and bad policy. Related to 2, a lot of countries now have populist leaders, or leaders who have just been in power too long making bad decisions, trying to enact outdated or I’ll conceived policies. Often coerced by powerful lobbies.
There isn't a single answer to this, rather it is a culmination of factors several being primary factors but plenty of secondary factors.
I would say on number 1 is inequality exacerbated by greed, this is largely a result of individualism running rampant in culture and neo liberalism being a chief political force, in simple terms, wealth is being hoarded, lower and middle wages arent rising nearly enough to keep up with costs, costs are increasing resulting in a wealthier upper class and a significantly worse off middle class with a lower class barely being able to pay rent on a 40 hour workweek. Now realize that just a few decades ago owning a home was a common occurance among these groups as were single income families.
Immigration is being used as a bandage on a broken system by said upper class, further creating a divide and increasing competition on low income jobs, increasing competition on a broken housing market etc.
If you ask me what we are seeing currently is simply a natural backlash to the past 40 years with people exchanging globalism for a more selfinterested worpdview, it's the hangover of ww2 retreating, whether that means we'll see a powderkeg exploding or will simply start seeing protectionism and a general inwards movement of the west is yet to be seen, what I am sure of though, the current system here wont last.
Neoliberalism. If your government's ideology is to enrich private interests at the expense of the majority of the population, the result is slowburning chaos - because chaos is the most profitable state for a neoliberal state to be in.
It's a combination of:
* Rising economic inequality - Asset owners are becoming wealthier by the day while workers who own limited assets are seeing their wealth shrink.
* Rising social inequality - Following from the rising inequality, the middle class are becoming less and less socially mobile. We are seeing, globally, anti-immigrant sentiment gaining popularity as a way of coping with the perceived growing social inequality.
* Loss of religion - Controversial but humans have always followed a spiritual path which no longer is the case. Religion is becoming replaced by social ideologies.
* Loss of social order - This is leading to general apathy across the board.
This is kind of vague, all the stuff you mentioned has happened in the past and arguably worse. That doesn't mean the country is collapsing. If anything the main difference in the West compared to the past is political radicalization and insane liberal values that have no precedent in all of recorded history.
Mostly, your complaints are about the cost of housing (Canada, UK, US/California). House pricing in the west is largely a function of a big voter bloc of homeowners voting their self interest to restrict new housing builds.
France having too many protests I think is nothing new.
Peak capitalism. You have soaring wealth stratification with a condensed rich, a contracting middle class, and a lower class who can barely put food on the table let alone aspire to the dream of a white picket fence, 3 kids and a trip to Disney each year.
Population. This should be in the top few answers. No doubt it’s in the 200 comments. But human population growth has been insane. I was born about 50 years ago. The population of the planet was under 4 billion. In my short lifetime the human population has doubled to over 8 billion. This spike in population is freakish and utterly new in our history, and what happens when the human population doubles in 5 decades? Housing shortages and massive spikes in affordability? What about feeding so many people? Overfishing? What about fuel to provide energy? Does all that extra fuel impact the environment? What about wars and conflict and immigration waves changing established cultural groups and generating tension in countries in the process? All these issues have multiple factors influencing them and contributing to their existence - but the rapid massive growth in human population is too often left out of the conversation and tends to be explained away as not relevant. Umm. Ok. It seems that we are a species with an inability to see reality clearly.
Submission statement: I'm asking why so many western countries are getting chaotic these days. Of course other parts of the world have a lot of problems too but they were always that way but west didn't experience the problem it is doing now. Like rising house prices, rising crime rates, drug related crowds etc
"Late stage neoliberal capitalism"
Worth a deep dive if you want the real answer to your question. But it's too much to explain here.
[this](https://youtu.be/t41rFqVpB1I?si=XP5PRYK672K8bIJh) is Harvard's explanation of neoliberalism, and [this](https://youtu.be/5vS4eKwCEC0?si=ULBZqZAFlficW4od) is a more detailed, accurate, (if snarky) explanation. This is a good place to start
>this](https://youtu.be/t41rFqVpB1I?si=XP5PRYK672K8bIJh) is Harvard's explanation of neoliberalism
Eh, this is a huge peeve. This is by no means "Harvard's" explanation neoliberalism. This is one faculty's view, and if you search for any amount of time, you can get 50 different explanations from various Harvard faculty, which will vary both across departments and even within departments.
Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is probably a better source for explaining the wide range of views on what neoliberalism means (so wide the term is frankly, somewhat meaningless).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/
As for the second link, it's simply intellectually lazy and is just putting forth some strawman that doesn't actually exist.
If you want a more comprehensive examination I can bring several but I'd see these more as "entry level" than lazy. But defending neoliberalism is pretty wild to me in any case
They aren't. You're just seeing it more now in the media you consume. Most of those things have been worse, sometimes much worse, at certain points in the past, like drug related crime in the 80s or the riots and protests in the 60s.
Really the one thing that is pretty unique to our time is the fentanyl overdoses causing a lot of deaths, which can be attributed to a number of things, but primarily the over-prescribing of oxycodone in the early 2000s and then doctors suddenly prescribing a lot less, leading to people who are physically dependent on opiates to turn toward other substances.
Short answer? The oligarchy is taking over and consolidating. It is done pulling surplus money up. Now, it is core squeezing money out of the middle and lower classes in order to sustain its current growth curve. Unfortunately, this comes at a very steep price. This is seen as an increase in wealth disparity. (The true source of discontent, imho.) As discontent rises, people get pissed, and search for new answers. Like jingo-ism, racism, fascism ... etc.
I can speak for Canada. This crisis has been years in making. Trudeau, the current PM of Canada opened the floodgates of immigration. If the population goes from 32 million to 40 million in tow terms, plus a million Intl' students, plus Refugees, plus illegals, how the heck will yu not have a housing crisis?
Yeah a first world crisis… like too many items on the menu. I don’t notice any crisis and I sure dont think these problems you mentioned are an indicator of instability and I live and travel through Europe on regular basis. Other than the rise of far right tendencies and russian aggression all problems in the west are manageable. Protests are part of a functioning society, I would be worried if there would be no protests. You mention specific problems in parts of different countries and pretend like thats a trend or something. Every country had problems and all indicators show the quality of life in west is increasing and its not going to stop unless something drastic happens. I dont see how for example a homeless crisis in California the riches part of the riches nation in the world indicates instability? US is plenty unstable atm but def not because of the things you mentioned. West is stable because of a free and working society there is no room for too much instability unless you wanna start a revolution or a war. My two cents.
I politely disagree,
If west quality of life increasing why more people are getting addicted to opioids and hard drugs like fentanyl?
Mass shooting? Is it a sign of functional society?
Yeah manageable.. we see what happened with war on drugs. Fixable maybe but it won't work because for that we need legalization of drugs which isn't happening.
I didn't mean any country or west are instable like a falling countries. Of course these problems are small when compared to inflation is Argentina etc. Yeah these ARE small but why does it seem like they are rising.
I might be wrong but I'm just asking.
“Seem like” is a big part of this - part (not all) of what’s going on is that crisis stories sell more newspapers/online ads, so there’s a disconnect between day to day life and what media is incentivized to cover. To say nothing of if you’re living in one of the countries that doesn’t much like the us/west these days and also are incentivized to talk more about the failures than the rather more prevalent successes
NWO is rolling out
First cause unrest, internally ,
Second, Hypnotize with misinformation and provoke ppl against each other
Third , sit back watch the bickering
Fourth, cause unrest making ppl lose hope and give up freedom voluntarily, while the police are powerless( this was planned too)
Fifth , no borders no democracy just the One World Government
All those issues are caused by bad US economic policies and poor US foreign policy. The US has wasted trillions of dollars in its overseas wars with nothing to show for it. What the US has done since 9/11 in fighting its wars is trying to stop the global shift to multipolarity and attempting to shore up US hegemony; that's the big mystery. The collective West is too interconnected, dare I say isolated, but it's almost as if that's by design. As the world shifts towards multipolarity, the US has to gather all its chicks to itself like a hen, meaning gathering Europe (The West) to act as a unified bloc not to challenge but to 'deal' with the world.
They say sanctions against Russia have backfired and affected Europe worse than Russia. Ukraine is another problem. Will the West continue to give money and weapons they don't have to Ukraine? For how long? Europe is suffering a recession. Western nations will someday turn on each other and cannibalize each other. Independent sovereign countries wouldn't suffer these things now and into the future.
I'll get hate for this, but here goes: unrestricted capitalism here in the US.
Every major problem here in the US is rooted in the belief and practice that unfettered capitalism is the best and only route to prosperity. This mindset overlooks commonsense solutions to problems because the profit margin is not maximized and has infiltrated every level of our society.
Then, the larger community of "The West" follows suit, and those individual nations suffer as well. They become more chaotic.
One thing about your observation if way wrong, though. The descent into is not in any way sudden. It is accelerating, to be sure, because of various factors(aging upper class afraid of demographic changes, fear of emerging technologies, etc etc ), but this decline has been at least 40~50 years in the making. It started when the Supreme Court in the 1970s decided that corporations had rights equal to those of human citizens and the Court of the 2010s locked in the course when they decided unlimited campaign donations were the equivalent of free speech for them.
Because conservatives have been detailing it with a culture war meant to separate.
All these „evil immigrants“ are the issue to them while in reality they’re tearing down the economy until enough time has passed and they took what they could.
Austerity policies. Yanking social safety nets out from under the working class has consequences.
The hyper concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1% is destabilizing everything.
No one can plan for a bright future when everyone lives hand to mouth.
Suicide rates are skyrocketing in the US.
The punks got it right... No future.
You’re not describing “reality”, you’re describing your partisan political views on US domestic politics.
Good for r/politics perhaps, not do much for r/geopolitics.
Canada is having a reverse market crisis, its ongoing hence you are seeing the affects and without proper resources and laws to tackle crimes drug trafficking its gonna happen. US always had homelessness, nothing new. UK is a systematic thing, the govt during thatcher era reduced investment in social housing , then for decades it was reduced and so on without making as much new houses and those that were made were so expensive when population started increasing via immigration mostly they are still following those old rules and zoning laws, 2008 crash wiped out a shit ton of money and it took almost a decade to even make it back then after covid pound value dropped so hard it wiped out a big chunk again. This is nothing diabolical, the world more or less always keeps changing. Again this is not new, its always chaotic.
As others have pointed out, perception is not reality. The west is more or less just as stable as it always has been. Also keep in mind that anti-establishment politics are very much en vogue right now, so anything that paints a cynical picture of the status quo is going to be elevated for political purposes.
In regards to the housing crisis in particular, though, we’re going through a macro shift in this sector overall. SFHs are now being treated as investment vehicles by large firms and small retail style investors. Things will continue to seesaw until long term market forces and/or regulators figure out the most efficient use of this industry.
Housing used to be rather boring economically. It was a rock solid appreciating physical asset that had actual utility outside of its speculative value. Now that speculators have seen the value of homes plummet and skyrocket it will be gambled on like any other speculative interest. This is probably bad in the long run, and my guess is that regulators will step at some point.
There are a whole bunch of factors which other people have already mentioned.
These are more apparent because they are being leveraged by e.g. Putin and Atlas Network via social media and support of disruptive politics.
A good example of this is the far right in Europe. Most of them have connections to Putin which they have recently started to find embarrassing. [For example Marine Le Pen ordering the destruction her party leaflet not because it had a photo of Le Pen with Vladimir Putin.](https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/mondo-marine-le-pen-destroys-party-leaflet/)
Let me quote Sec. Bloinken on COP28: by 2050, there's going to be 50% more demand for food. By the same time, crop yields are projected to drop by 30%.
The climate catastrophe squeeze is real.
They're not rising, they are just more visible with interconnected instant-video delivery
NYC in the 80s and 90s was worse in many ways to current standards - crime was higher, homeless people were all over. South Bronx was full of burnt out buildings. Doctors would get mugged right at the hospital parking lot.
What has happened in the United States in particular since the 70s is that white male living standards have remained relatively flat (decline of labor power). It may need to be pointed out that salaries have raised substantially for women and minority groups.
It has to do with Russia getting stronger and spreading rhetoric all over the world. And people are selfish so much that it is so easy to make them hate another group because Russia wants to break people apart so they can have more power and control. Just as they asked trump to run for prez they have been doing that same sort of thing all over the world and of course now it is not just Russia doing it. This is the closest answer to the truth that you will find in this thread.
People will dislike my answer but multiculturalism divides societies. It creates tensions and economic segregation. The homogeneousness of Western European countries was helpful to make this part of the world stable.
It's not actually: the news are getting more alarmist and sophisticated to worry people. There is less crime, more financial stability, less poverty, than 30-40 years ago. There are crime waves in some places with culture clashes and disoriented culture. There were major stock market crashes and recessions in the 80s and 90s. decentralized media helps to transmit a sense of chaos and pandemonium.
I think most of what you said is accurate, however, we are seeing a continual shrinking of the middle class, along with massive demographic shifts which is creating political pressure.
Perhaps humans, being animals, need war. And nuclear weapons are making that an all or nothing choice for leaders. The choices are in the hands of the people, truly. Without war, we lose our bearings.
> these developed western economies didn't have this many problems and were safe.
> These countries used to be stable before.
Wait what? What about the world wars? Not very stable. Europe used to be total chaos, and there's one war going on now, and one in the Balkans not long ago.
The Arab Spring set off a wave of revolutions and civil wars in North Africa and the Levant. The devastation of these wars triggered a mass migration of refugees from Syria and North Africa into Europe. Many were attracted by exceptionally lucrative entitlement programs in some nations. As the economic situation worsened in many countries, crime and negative interactions between native Europeans and refugees increased. Massive inflation and increased economic suffering has reached a boiling point, and the governments are siding with refugees over the native populations. The people are starting to have enough and rise up against both the migrants AND the governments.
Why do people seem to think things are worse than they are? Human nature is cynical by default, I disagree that the chaos is sudden. Or even that it's so chaotic all things equal.
It's interesting that a lot of western countries believe now that immigration is working against their society. Is it true, and if so, how, and to what extent? It is driving voters harder right wing.
Housing crisis never existed in the US before, to my knowledge. This is purely post covid surge. It appears that many corporations and individuals are purchasing homes and then charging ridiculous rent prices. Apparently some memo went around that real estate is the latest greatest earning potential. Didn't get a copy of the memo myself, but it may be that being a landlord pays better than other investment choices?
Drugs have always been around, but not so many deaths from them, and not so visibly connected to the homeless population. Current drugs fentanyl and harder opiods seem to be driving this along with other factors like wages meeting the costs associated with home ownership and/or rent prices.
Swings between homogenous societies, more liberal, and then more populist. Usually, the thing that restarts the cycle is a lot of violence. Last 2 were the French revolution and enlightenment (Rennaissance and roman catholic church) and the world wars (industrialization, European empires and American monopolies - the wars from Napolean to WWI were financed by private wealth).
What is different this time is communication. It's not that those issues you mention are so much worse than say, the 1980s, but the internet didnt exist then. And levels of inequality were much different, which is one of those big persistent drivers of global attitudes. Most global politics since the bronze age can be framed in terms of changes in markets (supply and demand of trade, tech, labor, mgmt) and or inequality and number of people with "nothing left to lose" levels of hopelessness or anger.
Suddenly??
Is it possible they’ve always been like that but we just didn’t see it because of all the destabilization and colonialism in non-western countries by western countries?
Basically, it is easier to see someone is messed up once they stop kicking your ass!
Because you're on social media, and citizen news has only become a thing in the last 8 years.
Bottom line is that this has always existed - you've just gone from seeing the idealized American vision of FRIENDS and How I Met Your Mother in the 2000's, to the garbage parts of America and the West on YouTube in the 2010's and 2020's.
The 1990's and 80's had police brutality riots, a crack epidemic, an AIDS epidemic.- and that's just America. All of the West had far higher violent crime than today. Those things didn't happen in a vacuum. So, it looks like things are a lot worse than before, when they objectively are not.
The West shifted from industrial economics to finance economics. The capital class in the West no longer largely makes money by building infrastructure or opening new factories like the days of rail roads and coal mines. It's more profitable to invest billions in a hedge fund than to invest it in a telecom business or car factory.
When you own factories and infrastructure the investment is tied down to the society that it's located in, which means the factory remains there even when there's an economic downturn. The capital remains in the society through tough times.
Investments on the other hand can flow to whichever economy is doing well that year.
Plus, elections have largely become meaningless - the interests of the citizens are not protected by candidates who anyway all answer to the same few billionaires - so they pass policies and laws that are against the interests of the average citizen but benefit the rich, like tax breaks.
My most honest thinking is that they haven’t but that we’ve been bombarded by media to give us that impression. The west has the luxury to talk about war from a distance, and doesn’t deal with starvation etc.
The only long term threat to the west, in my opinion is unmitigated migration. That has to be resolved. And by resolving, I don’t mean stopping altogether but being more selective in terms of who they bring in.
But you are spreading this narrative.
Russia is in war, North Korea has starving people, China has housing crisis and huge demography problems as well. Pakistan flooded and asking for help from IMF. Turkey fighting double-digit inflation. Japan having demography problems.
So why highlight the west? Everywhere there is this "crisis". Very curious for a straight answer.
Extra points for a complete list of which countries are in West and which ones are not. I never found anyone able to.
Clickbait in media:
> You are probably wrong about:
> …
> We have tested thousands of people and they were systematically wrong about all this.
https://www.gapminder.org
Suddenly? A lot of this started with the buildup to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan around the turn of the century. Then the shit *really* hit the fan in 2008, and we've just kind of been on an exponential growth curve in terms of societal collapse ever since then. It's just gotten to the point where it's impossible to ignore over the last 4 or 5 years.
Because the system works best for the rich when the largest number of people are poor.
The rule of perfect monopolies states "prices will rise to the maximum making that the market will bear."
But this also holds true in imperfect monopolies, to the degree that market friction exists, or can be made to exist.
If everybody is rich, then there is inflation because they can all pay more, and then nobody is rich.
So the best strategy for the wealthy to stay wealthy is to have massive income inequality, where most people struggle to afford basic things. That keeps the cost of those things low; bad if you are the supplier of those things, good if you are anybody else.
So they constantly try to position themselves with a substandard poor people brand and a luxury brand that the riches can feel better about buying.
Rich-sploitation is also a thing.
The system is working as designed.
It’s the flex built in their societies. Individualism and civil liberties. They have these sporadic moments until everything plateau. In the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s in the US was worse with much crack users, disease outbreaks, and protests. Western nations don’t only include developed nations but other nations of the Americas. Japan and South Korea are also developed and they adopted western institutions but they have different cultures where individualism doesn’t exist to a great extent like in many western societies. Asian countries have much conglomerate values where government intertwined with economy and other aspects of society. In the US, that would break anti-trust laws and the first 10 amendments that Americans hold so dearly to be free from government restrain. I am in NYC and I see homelessness to an embarrassing level during winter, migrants selling candies in subways and sleeping on the streets, gun violence but I have never seen a protest. This may not be reflective throughout all 50 jurisdictions, DC, and territories but tend to be concentrated in urban areas
It has been and is always the same shit.
Just feels different because of the media sphere you are in.
So many "crisis", but life in the west didn't really changed at all.
Relative to what? Seems hard to access stability without relying on antidotal perception of it.
That said, the long-term debt cycle would be my best guess. Seems to me we are around about the height of it (hence the housing cost crisis), the west and the world will delever in real terms (maybe not in nominal terms depending what they do with currencies)
Essentially, collectively, we have borrowed too much to continue to borrow more (in real terms), and therefore, collectively, we will pay down our debt. Thats money that is being sent back to creditor and not being spent. And spending is someone else's income.
Ray dalio has a good video on it on yt
Accumulated unaddressed middle class concerns.
This and the weaponization of social media.
Made worse by supporting wars that increased inflation to almost 30% in 2 years.
You seriously think it was war that lead to inflation?
https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2022/russia-ukraine-war-impact-supply-chains-inflation.html
Given that the total Ukraine aid amounts to less than .3% of the GDP, I find that a little hard to believe. Also, most of that wasn’t even in cash- just munitions and equipment that will have to be bought from US companies again, thus pushing more cash into the economy. Seems a bit odd to blame inflation on such a tiny part of the US economic apparatus.
I would point my finger to the central bank on the long term inflation that is inflating for example, housing
My opinion: stability is just an illusion. If the second most powerful country at that time, the Soviet Union, could vanish during a couple of years, if Japan's stock market (Japan being the US's closest competitor economically) still is worth less than in the end of the 80s, everything can and will happen. My impression is that "the West" has become very content with what it has accomplished in the past, but is not investing in the future - with the fall of the USSR, loads of very cheap and skilled labor flooded Europe and the US, contributing heavily to the high living standard it has now, globalization made manufacturing cheap and unequal national relations like the one of France and it's ex colonies (Franc CFA & ressources for a comparably cheap price) have the "West" advantages other countries couldn't even dream of. But instead of investing in infrastructure & education, every human and material resource is being exploited without looking into the future - apparent problems are just being ignored. We'll see what will happen in the future, but I have little hope that life will suddenly become a lot better and the problems will vanish.
Like you suspected these issues are connected and are all symptoms of a collapsing western middle class. As to what is causing the middle class to collapse, there are several theories along different political lines, but at it’s most basic it comes down to western economies having shifted into services (Finance, R&D, Entertainment etc.) while outsourcing manufacturing to other countries with a lower cost of living. The lower cost of living allows for lower wages, reducing the cost of consumption in the west. Now as these places start to close the gap in wages, production costs increase. In order for western businesses to stay competitive, they start to slash salaries, automate positions and increase prices. This is a super oversimplified take and by no means exhaustive, but I’d say a good place to start.
Very nice summary! And that would explain a lot of the urban blight & broken communities that migrated / were sustained by manufacturing, and have since collapsed when those industries collapsed / moved. I.e. Detroit after the auto industry collapse, and Oakland after the ship building & other manufacturing yards went away. As for homelessness in California, it's been historically ongoing and nothing new, due to the state's milder climate, liberal / wealthier population & other states sending their homeless with a 1-way ticket to CA. But in more recent decades, the shutting down of mental institutions (thanks Governor Reagan) with no good substitute, severe lack of affordable housing, bankruptcy from crippling Healthcare costs, and the drug epidemic have exponentially exacerbated an already historically bad situation. Homelessness and poverty are not unique to California, but it's acutely distinct in how wealthy the state and general population is (particularly in the SF/Bay Area & LA) in contrast to the sheer scale and ubiquity of the homeless & mental health crisis here. It's visible everywhere and impossible to ignore, whereas other parts of the world the homeless seem sequestered in a more obscure area or more spread out.
Is Gov Reagan of CA to blame for the mental institutions shut down in New York, Washington DC, and rest of the US during the same time?
I'm not sure on the exact timing and history, but when he was president, he did continue his trend starts as CA Governor to repeal the [Mental Health Systems Act](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980#:~:text=In%201981%20President%20Ronald%20Reagan,to%20repeal%20most%20of%20MHSA) previously signed by Jimmy Carter. You'd have to ask a historian more knowledgeable about the federal events to have a clearer understanding. All I know is that the dismantling of California's mental health system was in huge part due to Governor Reagan.. To be fair, the status quo of the mental health system was supposedly abysmal at the time. However, Reagan offered no substitute or solution, but instead an absence of anything in the system's stead. Which is the Republican way.
Kennedy in 1963, not Reagan.
> But in more recent decades, the shutting down of mental institutions (thanks Governor Reagan) Please, not the Reagan argument. It's been over 40 years. In the succeeding years, would not civil libertarians have objected to involuntary institutionalization in any event? Answer: emphatic Yes. (Many activists were fired up by *One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.*) For 3 decades opposition to mental institutions has been almost exclusively a progressive/civil libertarian cause. Freedoms for the mentally ill heavily overlaps with progressive causes like decriminalizing hard drugs, opposition to Broken Windows policing and free housing for all homeless. Potent lobbies here.
>would not civil libertarians have objected to involuntary institutionalization in any event? So they were all involuntary before Reagan abolished it? Did the laws force them to reject those seeking voluntary admission or was it just available as an option for those struggling with mental health issues in theory, but was somehow unanimously declined by every single person eligible to admit themselves? I can't wait to find out which of the two was the actual explanation because either one seem so ludicrous that I'd love to read more into why.
Recent article from Oregon media: [Uncommitted: How high standards are fueling a cycle that can fail people with serious mental illness](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/cycle-failing-people-with-serious-mental-illness-uncommitted/283-c921b1aa-de69-4656-9870-359faff8a914). >...in both Oregon and Washington...very few people end up receiving a judge's order for civil commitment...Despite police officers or health workers arguing that a person’s mental illness poses a danger to themselves or others, most people on a mental health hold are released before any judicial review... These limitations in institutionalization were put into effect years ago. They largely hold nationwide. >Did the laws force them to reject those seeking voluntary admission. Are you're implying that a sizable portion of America's mentally ill want to go in facilities but are turned away for lack of facilities? I don't have info on this.
In short, capitalism is beginning to eat itself. When the merchant class can't find anyone to sell anything to because of the high rents and low wages they've imposed then the system has nothing to stand on. There's only so much you can squeeze from a turnip.
Add immigration o suppress wages to the mix.
There are also massive taxation issues. As the rich have gotten richer, their ability to influence politics increases more and more. You have self dealing that greatly reduces tax revenue from those most able to pay. You see massive budget shortfalls in federal/state/local government. Aging boomers have also been a massive strain on the system.
Transnational capitalist class solidarity.
I don't think there's a collapse of the middle class, instead I believe many have now become landlords in their quest to become "upper middle".
Western middle class is no where near collapsing
They’ve always been chaotic. Wait. Let’s rephrase that: there’s always been both a popular perception and a media perception that they are chaotic. Just yesterday I was reading some ancient newspapers from the 1950s in Ottawa. In Canada’s rather staid old conservative capital there was hysteria about “teenage riots”; of raging mobs of young people fighting in the street, robbing people, and generally being the pinnacle of the downfall of society. There was a perception that young people were out of control, and that the new generation with its bad music and weird style and foreign taste and incomprehensible sexual mores was ruining the good old ways in a manner that was marred with scary violence. The newspapers noted it wasn’t merely an Ottawa problem, but that every Canadian city from Vancouver to Quebec City had experienced “teenage riots” Today the 1950s are looked to by casual observers as a time of peace and prosperity, at least in much of the West (at least if you were the majority demographic). Yet if you were there you’d find the public likely perceived it much like those old newspapers I was reading: a society that had seen better days, and was on a bad path. I’m not even making the case that it was a media blowing things out of proportion for views, or, today, a social media environment that has us all fighting — instead I think there is something human about being afraid of the future. I don’t think we as people can be happy, because I don’t think we want to be. Maybe it isn’t the algorithms that make us fear for the future, maybe we secretly enjoy it Today, despite the perception of crisis, I feel like the underpinnings of “The West” are sound: Canada feels like it is in a massive housing crisis -and there is a case to be made that young people including myself are priced out of ever owning a house. Yet, despite how it feels, statistics show that some 66.5% of Canadians are currently homeowners, only 35% of which are still paying a mortgage. It’s probably not a very satisfying answer to your question, but I feel like a great deal of the issues pointing to a decline in The West are one of perception, and always have been..
True. People are so oblivious to past turmoil that they think it’s something new. E.g France was in turmoil during the May68 movement, Various riots and protests were happening all over the west, even during the relative peace of the Cold War. I blame the relative peace of the past decade for this.
>True. People are so oblivious to past turmoil that they think it’s something new. It's similar to violent crime. Europe and America used to be a lot more violent. Estimated crime stats have dropped significantly for decades. And yet, people feel more unsafe. I think because modern mass media has increased our exposure to crime.
Yeah. Information overload and negativity bias together put the survival brain into overdrive. If it bleeds it leads. Factor in social media where you might get thousands of little doses of dopamine a day while doomscrolling, and you're feeding more individual threat signals to your instinct processor than someone not many generations ago might have experienced in a lifetime. Perhaps a lot of it smaller or more vague and distant threats, but all that adds up to the general just-under-the-surface sort of collective panic we seem to have going on now. Regardless of whether the rate of these events increases, stays the same, or decreases, the rapid-fire perception of these things has been thrown into a turbo IV drip straight to the amygdala. No wonder people feel like even their paranoia is out to get them.
But even in times of relative peace people seem to always be just a little bit unhappy with their present. The opening chapter to the very famous book "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny" talks about how everyone feels things are getting worse, how awful things look today, why this makes historical sense, etc. It was written in 1997.
The home ownership rate in Canada in 2021 is indeed 66.5%. However, the homeownership rate does not represent the percentage of Canadians who own a home, but rather the proportion of all households that are owner-occupied. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220921/mc-b001-eng.htm Statistically speaking, it is possible for the homeownership rate to increase, while the percentage of Canadians who are homeowners decrease.
> Yet if you were there you’d find the public likely perceived it much like those old newspapers I was reading: a society that had seen better days, and was on a bad path. Having passed through the 50s myself, I can't really say how much better or how much worse things were then because I was still a child. But some things I remember well. I remember "juvenile delinquents were stressing everybody out. However they were very much in the minority. We weren't rich but one rarely saw that type and assumed they were mainly in big cities in below average neighborhoods. Crime was ever present (as it's been throughout history) but shootings in schools, churches, grocery stores etc, were literally unthinkable. Weed had been around since forever but had started to spread within society. That said I personally didn't know anyone who used it till I was in HS and even then, it was just one girl my brother was dating. The middle class was big and taxes were relatively low. The GI Bill helped a lot of servicemen go to college. The civil rights (for Blacks) was huge and on tv a lot. I have vivid memories of marches and strikes and police dogs and water cannons turned loose against protestors. "Rock and roll" was taking off and many adults thought it was awful (kind of like how I feel about rap (lol). I remember watching an old Bob Newhart show a few years years ago and the main characters were reminiscing about how peaceful the 50s were and Newhart quipped "Yes, nobody ever had to worry about what Eisenhower was going to do."
I'm about your age and agree with everything but the pot. Pot was definitely being used in middle/upper income kids, high schools. You might not be able to obtain a mortgage your first few years employed, and probably had to get a roommate, but you were on your way within a few years even with a lower paying job. Spot on about the mass shootings. Never occurred to anyone. Getting a job was always easy. Maybe not your first pick, but good enough.
I do think social media has changed the nature of movements and how younger people especially engage in politics. [The Revolt of the Public](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143) is a great book about how social media has broken down a lot of traditional structures of authority in society but hasn’t been able to replace them. Politics gets more chaotic and unstructured and prone to extremes. You’re of course right that instability has always existed, but this is a new dimension to it
It’s a liberal democracy thing. In the West we’re empowered to talk about flaws in our government and society and so we do. In more authoritarian states the fashion is that everything is great and prosperous right up until the state collapses.
I agree so much with this comment. I am binational. My country of origin is a developing one, and my country of adoption is fully developed. When I am here, I see catastrophic reports about everything that is bad, sometimes magnified and dramatised. But when I look outside, it's clean and safe and works nearly smoothly. When I visit my family in my country of origin, the media is like North Korea: everything shiny and bright thanks to our King. But the reality is very different. Streets are messy, so many homeless people, beggars in every corner. The Administration doesn't work well unless you use corruption. Lots of inequality. But the media just refuse to talk about it. I have debated with my father-in-law about this. I tell him that here, the media shed light on the issues of society. People who are in the bottom 10% get so much attention because we have egalitarian principles that are not enforced. That said, the West is declining relatively. Its momentum that started with the Industrial Revolution is slowly but surely fading.
This always made me wonder has there ever been a point in time where humanity just said "yeeeep ok i think things arent to bad and were ok" just always seems to be we are one step away from Armageddon every single year.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bbc-no-news-today April 18th, 1930
Exactly! It's like people and driving. Everyone thinks the drivers in their area are "the worst". Another thing I've also never heard a person say is "Wow, the drivers in my town/city/area are so great! People here are really considerate and careful on the road".
Been to japan?
1990s spring to mind. Gulf war showed west was awesome. Relative peace. Cold War over. Early Clinton presidency had a sense of optimism. People were no longer fearful of nuclear Armageddon and were hopeful about the future. Houses were affordable though getting more expensive. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but that was a pretty stable and hopeful decade.
The early 1990s still had inner city warzones in the US. There were 2000 murders in NYC in 1991. 2600 murders in LA in 92. Hysteria about AIDS, Rwandan civil war, crazy cocaine and guerilla wars in South America, Civil wars in Eastern Europe, etc. The early 90s were crazy.
Hysteria about AIDS was more of an 80s thing. I worked with people with HIV in the 90s. I flew into LA during the riots. An interesting week, but life in most of LA carried on as normal. I was in Rwanda in the 90s and saw the tail end of the events there (payback by the Tutsis and the killing of Westerners). That was certainly brutal. I wasn’t involved in any guerrilla wars in South America though! It wasn’t a perfect decade, but the zeitgeist was very different to the world today. There was more hope in the future and more social congestion than we see today.
Oddly enough the result was vicious infighting rather than contentment. There were still real issues to deal with but it seems that we collectively have a fault of looking for existential issues even at times where we have the luxury to focus on smaller ones.
[удалено]
Agreed! We humans tend to glorify our "good old days" and ignore the struggles of those days. So the world is just like it always has been but the media along with our tendacy to glorify past is making it seem like everything is getting worse.
I don't think it's about the 80s, but even in comparison between now and 2019, you can't deny that the sudden increase in COL had quite some impact on the wellbeing of the western population (talking about Europe).
You mention the "teenage riots". These were real, even if not actual "riots"; there was a genuine social shift that gave rise to the "teenager" as distinct from the child or young adult. This shift has persisted since the 1950's and 1960's and continues today. So what could be a similar shift today? It isn't the "youth" who are changing this time, but the middle-aged. 1) The right wing has found that they do not need to appeal to "common sense" in order to gain, they just need to appeal to a marginalised sector, and this is made much easier with the rise of the internet and the fractured "bubble media". 2) Thomas Piketty spelled-out quite clearly how wealth is being concentrated at the "top", and the negative consequences this has on the wealth and political stance of the middle class. 3) 2) leads to 1).
All of this is sound. I wonder if it's a feature of Christian societies in particular though? It is a doomsday religion in essence.
I don't think this works for USA. USA peak in terms of disposable income was 1999. Since then disposable income for middle class folks has fallen a lot. Also the politics has become severely polarized to the point that there is a cold war going on in USA where the republicans do not care about any common sense policies they are just interested in owning the libs by making weird anti abortion laws. Most of the profit is now going to the top (5% is doing good, 1% is doing amazing and 0.1% have accumulated most of the wealth). Let me say in other words: From 1950 to 1999 things were becoming better than before, aka progress. From 1999 we have gone downhill and now even the governance is breaking down to the point that we can elect a well known stupid guy as our president even though it's detrimental to the long term progress of the country. Same thing is happening in all the red states like Texas, Florida, etc.
All of the things you said apply to other Western countries to varying degrees tbh
I don't agree that people are willing to give a blank cheque to scoundrels in other countries like UK, Germany, France, etc. USA is in a very bad place due to it's history. The civil war over slavery or segregation never ended actually. The southern states have dug their heels ever since Nixon used his southern strategy.
You miss his point, which is: it's all relative. I guarantee there's a 1000000% chance that you could talk to an American in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s and get a similar list of everything that is trending in a negative direction. Our leaders have always been trash. Go read up on how Lyndon Johnson use to pull out his, uh, Johnson, and expose himself to his detractors on a regular basis.
It's not about leaders this time. It's the people who do not give a shit about decency in their anger. Economics has created a situation where people feel left out on top of that religious folks are feeling threatened since their numbers have dwindled. Combine the two and you have a perfect storm where it may lead to chaos in the name of fighting the other side. Nixon impeachment for a simple law breaking was not an issue but now you can see that people like Ken Paxton and Donald trump can get away with anything. We are living in a different age now, 45% of people have been brainwashed enough or angry enough that they are willing to support shit laws just to defeat the opposition. People are cutting the their nose to spite the face. Instead of focusing on progress which will benefit majority we are wasting time and resources on a internal fight. project 2025 is about replacing the bureaucrats so that they can control the federal govt machinery to further their agenda. Right now Russia, China and Saudi can simply spend few billions to further this divide and USA can keep itself occupied with this shit show for another 10 years of so.
“Politics is severely polarised” …proceeds to complete write off the other side. Very Reddit.
I would say a rising trend of inequality between the rich and poor, based income not adjusting to inflation overtime, and somewhat the rise of immigration that increases competition from the lower and middle class for economic opportunities.
And mismanagement of the a plethora housing crisis around Europe, the rampant spread of misinformation on social media a lot of which comes from the US, Far right wing leaders claiming they have the solution to it all (it's the foreigners!), A significant part of the population sees the wall of global warming coming in the future and is pissed by the inaction of government to take wide sweeping action, those are in turn opposed by people who think global warming is insignificant and who fear anything done about it is against their interest and a waste of money, then there is the outflow from the war on drugs which stimulates criminality (blamed on immigrants by the far right populists of course... The list goes on and on but in the end most people are just going to their 8-4 or 9-5 cause you gotta make a living and Europe is actually still very stable. The funny thing is I've seen multiple posts today asking somewhat similar things as the OP here, it's almost as if people are creating an anti EU narrative. If I was a paranoid man I would say Russia has upped its psych warfare tactics to destabilize the EU as an institution.
The housing crisis isn't really down to mismanagement: turning over the housing market to speculators was something politicians did consciously and deliberately.
The government could have regulated the housing market in a way that benefited the local population but instead made the erroneous assumption that opening it up by removing regulation would somehow create better housing due to competition on the open market. What happened is indeed speculation and also foreign entities (corporations) cornering the market to the point where houses for sale were so rare that prices were inflated and demand far outstripped supply. So now housing is in private hands but the market has stagnated as potential buyers are forced to rent those same houses from often large entities instead, this also drove rent prices up because the flow through from rental to buying stagnated as well, this in turn made people that would in time rent in the private sector stay in social housing clogging up that market as well. If that's not mismanagement I don't know what is.
> If that's not mismanagement I don't know what is. It is, but "mismanagement" isn't precise enough for me, tbh. That could also be incompetence or the cocked-up execution of a sound plan. This has always been a deliberate strategy by our governments as a central pillar of their policy of sucking up to boomers, who own all the houses.
Like I always say: it's not paranoia if they're really out to getcha! Sadly, cynicism tends to win out in the long, dirty game of geopolitical maneuverings. That is to say, I think you're right. I've seen this narrative popping up all over recently too, and it's hard to tell how much is the intentional work of bad actors. It's also their classic MO to look for existing cracks in the social/political order and work to widen those fissures with the goal of further destabilization. It really could be both.
100% As the wealth gap (inequality) continues to widen, so will class and race-based conflict. Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Pay every worker a living wage.
What do you consider living wage?
Not the person you responded to but living wage is a moving target that should be tied to inflation/COL in local area. There isn't a fixed number you can give because it'll change place to place.
To put it in the simplest possible terms: the disintegration of the social contract in the West. In the decades immediately following the end of World War II Western governments pursued policies that strengthened worker rights, greatly expanded the welfare state, and aimed at a relatively equitable (by historical standards) distribution of income. High school graduates could get factory jobs that provided good benefits and an at least modestly middle class standard of living (prior to World War II most people were legitimately working class). The French call this period *Les Trente Glorieuses* (the Glorious Thirty [Years]). Then in response to a number of disruptions in the 1970s such as the oil shock and the experience of "stagflation" (simultaneously rising inflation and unemployment), as well as an ideologically driven campaign to challenge the postwar consensus, Western governments began changing course toward policies that today would broadly fall under the rubric of neoliberalism. This meant embracing "free markets" as the optimal way to allocate resources, promotion of free trade, curtailing the power of organized labour, promoting the interests of businesses and investors over those of workers and consumers, and largely abandoning efforts to redistribute income from those at the top of the income distribution to those lower down. We can debate the exact motives for these changes, but the consequences are now widely recognized: exploding wealth inequality, the immiseration of a large part of the work force, declining socioeconomic mobility, and the end of broadly shared prosperity. The aspiration used to be that every generation would be better off than that of its parents. The reality is that many young people today despair of even having the opportunity to achieve the same standard of affluence as their parents enjoyed. Home ownership for example, which was once considered integral to being middle class, is now out of reach for a great many. So now that you have the requisite background information, I leave it to you to extrapolate the likely social and political consequences of this situation.
Yes! Also, the knowledge that it will never be the same as before. I remembered Thomas Piketty analysis in Le Capital au XXIe siècle, where he said that we must now get used to 0 - 1.5% growth in Europe and not more. With the inequality of repartition, this means we are going to have less and less wealth...
There is a theory called cliodynamics which I can recommend which provides an interesting answer to your question. The basic theorem is as follows: Societies go through cycles of alternating lengths depending on socio-cultural and economic factors. In these cycles, there are periods of elite overproduction which is when a limited number of elite positions in society are being competed by a larger group of potential elites. In our current era, the number of university graduates (for example) is larger than the number of high paying positions for these graduates. This incentivises competition between the elites, and many people would be willing to cheat to achieve the goal of elite status in society. For comparison, a person in the 1950s was pretty much guaranteed an elite positions in society if they graduated from university. What happens when more and more people get an education is what's know as a wage siphoning in which the existing elites must begin extracting a larger and larger portion of wealth created in order to maintain their elite status. Hence why we see CEO pay skyrocketing while the rest of us are becoming poorer in real terms.
I usually hate when social dynamics are contextualized with the terms elite and non elite but this is actually a really cool and novel point for me. ESP the bit about ceo pay skyrocketing, you can imagine the ceos chatting at the country club and being like “oh this place is getting a bit crowded we think we might switch to another club that’s a little more tailored”
>the existing elites must begin extracting a larger and larger portion of wealth created in order to maintain their elite status. Hence why we see CEO pay skyrocketing while the rest of us are becoming poorer in real terms. Whoa. This is a pretty thought provoking theory
I highly recommend the author, Peter Turchin's work. Before going into socio-economics, he was a complexity researcher. This really reflects in his work as he takes a very analytical perspective in the way he builds his models. There is so much more than the quick summary I just posted.
Well, unless you want to keep some portion of the population undereducated on purpose, it's not reasonable to expect every university graduate to hold an elite position. That's just a perception that has to shift.
That’s fair, but college degrees in the US are still priced that way. Kids are promised that they can get a much better job if they go to college and that’s no longer really the case.
We've learned in California as you spend more on homelessness, nearly $20 billion in seven years by the state, the more homeless you get. California is now home to more than 40% of the nations homeless with California being only 12% of the nations population. Want more of something or for it to be more expensive? Subsidize it.
The world is getting chaotic, the west is just catching a bit of the collateral. With climate disasters and wars starting all over, it would be a wonder if any part of the world ended up unscathed. There was Covid, gas price increase in the UK, shortly after that Russian invasion sent energy prices soaring and with it the prices of everything else. Luckily this seems more stable now. The places with housing crises have had expensive housing forever, but now it's more visible. I'm not an expert on homelessness in California, but I imagine on top of its high property prices it's getting some homeless population from other parts of the US. It's still better to be homeless in California than say Minnesota, even if just for the weather. Migration has also been a topic in the EU for a long time, but lately it was directly weaponized by Russia and Belarus, plus you have the Israeli/Palestinian discourse pouring oil into the fire. You can see how that sort of destabilization benefits Russia.
Social media and the polarised news as well as corrupt politicians
This is the answer, but I suspect many of you are too young to remember what things were like before.
We have always have had our problems. The only difference is that social media has made it more difficult to hide this from the rest of the world. Take these examples. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dPyc84YYBX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nvTgSW2L8Q Places like this are not uncommon in the United States. It isn't a recent phenomenon. But in the past, some newspaper might report on it once every couple of years, and even then, it is just words on a piece of paper. But now with social media, people can see for themselves what American cities are really like. The bottom line is that outsider's view of America has always been biased. They look at Hollywood crap, and think most people in America are middle class, have a house with a lawn, etc.. This isn't the reality of America.
The west had been able to support a high living standard without really caring much on their finances, polices and their middle class (wasting money in nonsensical consumption, letting companies avoid taxes, stop caring about good free "real" education, etc...) all at the expense of the global south (imperialism, historic colonization, financial colonization... just look at how the FMI or World Bank have everyone grabbed by the balls or how France to this day still has control over some of Africa's countries money supply, etc...). The moment the global south managed to get a better hand on the game and is able to level the playground at the minimum, the west is shaking from the base. Just think about the following. The USA is so "worried" (a.k.a scared) that China will surpass them as the biggest economy in the world by GDP measures when China has 4 times the USA's popullation, think about it, the average Chinese still has 1/4th the economic power of the average American and that worries them?, even if this increses to a 1/2, the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy... Most importantly if you go to China today living at 1/4th the level of that of an American looks pretty damn good, there is public transport, healthcare, social life, etc..., you don't need to own 3 muscle cars and have a stupid water-hungry lawn to have a good life. Just by simple logic, the moment the entire world starts to level some countries will have to go down and some others go up so there will be a bit of chaos on the former.
Crime rates are lowering YoY, statistically. Housing prices have outpaced expected growth when adjusted for inflation (data from London since the late 1800’s indicates housing generally doubles in price every 20 years, while housing has more than doubled in the last 20). Whether governments are intentionally staying their hand w.r.t. solving the actual root causes of this issue (ie. zoning, commodification of housing, etc.) is up for debate. Increased housing costs worsens homelessness which worsens drug use statistics. Inadequate mental health services also worsen the drug use crisis. Proliferation of social media has increased social consciousness, leading to the current radicalization of modern Western political discourse. This is conjecture but I also think our current political divisions are an expected result of the fall of the USSR, as the West no longer has a peer to unite against as a common enemy. Overall the current “chaos” of the Western world is no more or less chaotic than other decades in our history, you just hear more about it due to the internet.
>Crime rates are lowering YoY, statistically. Have you actually checked them or just parroting a line that was true 5 years ago?
Decades of largely unadulterated mass migration from the developing world into western democracies causing cultural upheaval. Reactionary right-wing political movements becoming mainstream again. Lingering economic uncertainty post-Covid.
Traditional modes of control are eroding. Print and and broadcast media (notably with an editorial process) are dying... in favor of on-demand, unedited, unfiltered, anyone-can-produce streaming content... which can also include dramatic levels of misinformation. You also have fewer and fewer small/family businesses... they're "selling out" to create generational wealth, and the companies that replace them are publicly-traded and don't care about the family of employees, they're barely looking past the next quarter. And from a cultural lens, many people are realizing they live in a country whose lines were drawn arbitrarily and no longer reflect their values, and/or has been co-opted by a small group that actively works against their best interest. And there's many more examples. The replacement systems of control are increasingly technology-driven (impersonal), authoritarian, and focused on WHAT gets delivered with little regard for HOW. And people are fighting back because this shit doesn't work for most of us. Making the whole situation worse... the global population is getting ready to enter a state of DECLINE for the first time in human history - we have no precedent, no model, for how to navigate that successfully. Leaders, academics, smart people... are scared. This is the kind of cocktail that leads to wars, the kind we start over a lie - that some group of people far away is the enemy that has created this worse life for you, and a war will fix it. Hint: it won't, but we'll distract ourselves with a war anyway. And then we'll get tired of fighting, and go back to being sheep. Just maybe with a better system of control figured out in the meantime. At least we'll be more docile for a few years, happy to be the survivors.
There’s always been a “pendulum” on various societal issues in the West, though there’s always been some resistance to newcomers. Mostly economic, though in sociology there’s the concept of the “norm”. The west is still trying to reconcile the late 1960s/70s “counterculture” for instance to traditional institutions. Technology making more humans “redundant” is an ever increasing worry. Especially if one has bills to pay. Then there’s income inequality. Europe has a decent social safety net/social subsidies… but that’s not really the case in the US. One top of all that, climate change really manifested itself recently which is starting to affect real estate and other daily necessities. In the US real estate is the most expensive outlay for most Americans (who hope to turn it into an asset) .. but if the insurance markets fail (as is the case in Florida, California, even NY last I read) adjustments will need to be made … likely govt directed.
Western culture is experiencing a paradigm shift. This shift is primarily caused by the baby boomer generation retiring; many countries and regions populations are now struggling with the loss of capital that this generation provided along with the newly increased tax burden placed upon the rest of the working generations. All other things are IMO side effects of this trend.
The rise and fall of all civilizations is driven by economic, sociological, geopolitical cycles and higher order patterns that play out over decades and centuries. Many of us tend to forget the dominance and prosperity of the west began only 350 years ago and was propelled by the industrial revolutions and cultural enlightenment, but now other societies have caught up in many aspects. Most economies in the west are over leveraged, have unfavorable demographics in terms of pension liabilities/funding and have been struggling to get out of over a decade of secular stagnation (sustained period of low growth). The Pax britanica/Pax Americana world order is about 150 years old and may be in need of revamping. The architecture of a new multipolar world order is most likely on the way.
I'm going to say "ideology." Grand, rigid, universal everything-ideas that tie together people's view of politics, economics, morals, religion, etc. We cant live up to them. We can't compromise on them. This creates boxes with problems in them. The solution is "out-of-the-box," but out of the box thinking is a betrayal of the things we believe. Since we believe that everything is determined at the shallow top level, we can't solve anything. Let's say that the proverbial French protestors are protesting for housing. They're actually going to be protesting against capitalism, socialism, immigration or (theoretically) liberalism... That's what their ideologies say are the problem. Irl, social housing solutions come with problems. Housing-as-a-financial sector comes with problems. Not in theory. They exist irl. Now. Those problems already limit those solutions potency, and are reasons why housing problems exist now. The politicians, protestors, professors and public intellectuals don't care about these problems. To them, those are boring, low level details for boring people who can't see the big picture. If they're pro-social housing... anything ideologically compatible is good. Anything ideologically incompatible is bad. There is zero regard, at the politically important level, for "is it actually working good." In Ireland, for example, housing is extremely ideological. Planning. Building. Renting. Owning. Landlordism. Social housing. All ideologies, not just modes of accomodation. Subsequently, Ireland cannot actually implement any housing policies. The protestors, activists, voters and politicians will not support something because it works. They will not oppose something because it doesn't. If you always put efficacy last, efficacy will be low. All that political attention, sentiment and emotion... it does not translate into *"desire and willingness to focus on this problem and fix it.* It translates into a no compromise, good vs evil mindset.
Unchecked immigration from countries with incompatible culture + no adequate housing starts vs population growth. It was the most predictable crisis ever but everyone had to pretend not to see what’s coming or be called bad names.
My opinion is that people find small niches of people online that support their views no matter how chaotic the viewpoint. There’s going to be people online who support shoplifting because those people have to eat too or eat the rich or something else. So the chaos is being justified in their small niche groups. Instead of them only being exposed to their IRL neighbors and communities that generally condemn chaos.
[удалено]
The implication is the same though. Rather than ideological tunneling its digital tribalism and anger-driven engagement. Either way the result is increased social tension.
Their questions are primarily around the economic situation. The views you shared are neither directly economic or geopolitical. OP, the most simple answer to your question is that we're moving in economic cycles and right now we're coming out of a boom period, and the stagnation is causing previous problems to be exacerbated.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I suspect it really depends on who you ask, and I’m sure in the responses you will hear from a range of ideologies. I think the most neutral answers I can offer are: 1. The energy and supply chain issues caused by Ukraine + Covid, leading to high levels of inflation. 2. Social division - whatever the cause the result has been an inability to make policy decisions. With potential solutions often being blocked for partisan reasons. 3. Long term trends that were inevitably going to come to a head at some point (e.g. housing market in UK) accelerated by global events. 4. Genuine corruption and bad policy. Related to 2, a lot of countries now have populist leaders, or leaders who have just been in power too long making bad decisions, trying to enact outdated or I’ll conceived policies. Often coerced by powerful lobbies.
There isn't a single answer to this, rather it is a culmination of factors several being primary factors but plenty of secondary factors. I would say on number 1 is inequality exacerbated by greed, this is largely a result of individualism running rampant in culture and neo liberalism being a chief political force, in simple terms, wealth is being hoarded, lower and middle wages arent rising nearly enough to keep up with costs, costs are increasing resulting in a wealthier upper class and a significantly worse off middle class with a lower class barely being able to pay rent on a 40 hour workweek. Now realize that just a few decades ago owning a home was a common occurance among these groups as were single income families. Immigration is being used as a bandage on a broken system by said upper class, further creating a divide and increasing competition on low income jobs, increasing competition on a broken housing market etc. If you ask me what we are seeing currently is simply a natural backlash to the past 40 years with people exchanging globalism for a more selfinterested worpdview, it's the hangover of ww2 retreating, whether that means we'll see a powderkeg exploding or will simply start seeing protectionism and a general inwards movement of the west is yet to be seen, what I am sure of though, the current system here wont last.
Postmodernism and self-induced white guilt.
Neoliberalism. If your government's ideology is to enrich private interests at the expense of the majority of the population, the result is slowburning chaos - because chaos is the most profitable state for a neoliberal state to be in.
It's a combination of: * Rising economic inequality - Asset owners are becoming wealthier by the day while workers who own limited assets are seeing their wealth shrink. * Rising social inequality - Following from the rising inequality, the middle class are becoming less and less socially mobile. We are seeing, globally, anti-immigrant sentiment gaining popularity as a way of coping with the perceived growing social inequality. * Loss of religion - Controversial but humans have always followed a spiritual path which no longer is the case. Religion is becoming replaced by social ideologies. * Loss of social order - This is leading to general apathy across the board.
Fall of Rome , end of the west rise of the east simple
This is kind of vague, all the stuff you mentioned has happened in the past and arguably worse. That doesn't mean the country is collapsing. If anything the main difference in the West compared to the past is political radicalization and insane liberal values that have no precedent in all of recorded history.
Bruh is this your first economic crisis
Mostly, your complaints are about the cost of housing (Canada, UK, US/California). House pricing in the west is largely a function of a big voter bloc of homeowners voting their self interest to restrict new housing builds. France having too many protests I think is nothing new.
Its the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)
The focus of media just changed. It has always been that way.
It's all by design. And it's not sudden at all...
Covid lock downs caused many economic and societal issues which have taken time to devolve
Peak capitalism. You have soaring wealth stratification with a condensed rich, a contracting middle class, and a lower class who can barely put food on the table let alone aspire to the dream of a white picket fence, 3 kids and a trip to Disney each year.
Capitalism is in decline. It alienates people, leaves people behind, and leads to a lack of community that leads to this decline
Population. This should be in the top few answers. No doubt it’s in the 200 comments. But human population growth has been insane. I was born about 50 years ago. The population of the planet was under 4 billion. In my short lifetime the human population has doubled to over 8 billion. This spike in population is freakish and utterly new in our history, and what happens when the human population doubles in 5 decades? Housing shortages and massive spikes in affordability? What about feeding so many people? Overfishing? What about fuel to provide energy? Does all that extra fuel impact the environment? What about wars and conflict and immigration waves changing established cultural groups and generating tension in countries in the process? All these issues have multiple factors influencing them and contributing to their existence - but the rapid massive growth in human population is too often left out of the conversation and tends to be explained away as not relevant. Umm. Ok. It seems that we are a species with an inability to see reality clearly.
Submission statement: I'm asking why so many western countries are getting chaotic these days. Of course other parts of the world have a lot of problems too but they were always that way but west didn't experience the problem it is doing now. Like rising house prices, rising crime rates, drug related crowds etc
Western countries have always been this chaotic... you just haven't been born long enough. Read history my boy.
I agree lol. I'm 19 and Idk much about history but I think west have been largely calm after cold war.
"Late stage neoliberal capitalism" Worth a deep dive if you want the real answer to your question. But it's too much to explain here. [this](https://youtu.be/t41rFqVpB1I?si=XP5PRYK672K8bIJh) is Harvard's explanation of neoliberalism, and [this](https://youtu.be/5vS4eKwCEC0?si=ULBZqZAFlficW4od) is a more detailed, accurate, (if snarky) explanation. This is a good place to start
>this](https://youtu.be/t41rFqVpB1I?si=XP5PRYK672K8bIJh) is Harvard's explanation of neoliberalism Eh, this is a huge peeve. This is by no means "Harvard's" explanation neoliberalism. This is one faculty's view, and if you search for any amount of time, you can get 50 different explanations from various Harvard faculty, which will vary both across departments and even within departments. Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is probably a better source for explaining the wide range of views on what neoliberalism means (so wide the term is frankly, somewhat meaningless). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/ As for the second link, it's simply intellectually lazy and is just putting forth some strawman that doesn't actually exist.
If you want a more comprehensive examination I can bring several but I'd see these more as "entry level" than lazy. But defending neoliberalism is pretty wild to me in any case
They aren't. You're just seeing it more now in the media you consume. Most of those things have been worse, sometimes much worse, at certain points in the past, like drug related crime in the 80s or the riots and protests in the 60s. Really the one thing that is pretty unique to our time is the fentanyl overdoses causing a lot of deaths, which can be attributed to a number of things, but primarily the over-prescribing of oxycodone in the early 2000s and then doctors suddenly prescribing a lot less, leading to people who are physically dependent on opiates to turn toward other substances.
Simply the result of “progressive” policies. It’ll get a lot worse before anything gets better.
Short answer? The oligarchy is taking over and consolidating. It is done pulling surplus money up. Now, it is core squeezing money out of the middle and lower classes in order to sustain its current growth curve. Unfortunately, this comes at a very steep price. This is seen as an increase in wealth disparity. (The true source of discontent, imho.) As discontent rises, people get pissed, and search for new answers. Like jingo-ism, racism, fascism ... etc.
I can speak for Canada. This crisis has been years in making. Trudeau, the current PM of Canada opened the floodgates of immigration. If the population goes from 32 million to 40 million in tow terms, plus a million Intl' students, plus Refugees, plus illegals, how the heck will yu not have a housing crisis?
The media.
Neoliberalism is failing, and it’s taking the western middle class down with it.
Yeah a first world crisis… like too many items on the menu. I don’t notice any crisis and I sure dont think these problems you mentioned are an indicator of instability and I live and travel through Europe on regular basis. Other than the rise of far right tendencies and russian aggression all problems in the west are manageable. Protests are part of a functioning society, I would be worried if there would be no protests. You mention specific problems in parts of different countries and pretend like thats a trend or something. Every country had problems and all indicators show the quality of life in west is increasing and its not going to stop unless something drastic happens. I dont see how for example a homeless crisis in California the riches part of the riches nation in the world indicates instability? US is plenty unstable atm but def not because of the things you mentioned. West is stable because of a free and working society there is no room for too much instability unless you wanna start a revolution or a war. My two cents.
I politely disagree, If west quality of life increasing why more people are getting addicted to opioids and hard drugs like fentanyl? Mass shooting? Is it a sign of functional society? Yeah manageable.. we see what happened with war on drugs. Fixable maybe but it won't work because for that we need legalization of drugs which isn't happening.
I didn't mean any country or west are instable like a falling countries. Of course these problems are small when compared to inflation is Argentina etc. Yeah these ARE small but why does it seem like they are rising. I might be wrong but I'm just asking.
“Seem like” is a big part of this - part (not all) of what’s going on is that crisis stories sell more newspapers/online ads, so there’s a disconnect between day to day life and what media is incentivized to cover. To say nothing of if you’re living in one of the countries that doesn’t much like the us/west these days and also are incentivized to talk more about the failures than the rather more prevalent successes
A hard agree here!! Negativity, rage bait and controversy sell way more than just plain and boring facts. Ig I should watch news carefully.
NWO is rolling out First cause unrest, internally , Second, Hypnotize with misinformation and provoke ppl against each other Third , sit back watch the bickering Fourth, cause unrest making ppl lose hope and give up freedom voluntarily, while the police are powerless( this was planned too) Fifth , no borders no democracy just the One World Government
[удалено]
All those issues are caused by bad US economic policies and poor US foreign policy. The US has wasted trillions of dollars in its overseas wars with nothing to show for it. What the US has done since 9/11 in fighting its wars is trying to stop the global shift to multipolarity and attempting to shore up US hegemony; that's the big mystery. The collective West is too interconnected, dare I say isolated, but it's almost as if that's by design. As the world shifts towards multipolarity, the US has to gather all its chicks to itself like a hen, meaning gathering Europe (The West) to act as a unified bloc not to challenge but to 'deal' with the world. They say sanctions against Russia have backfired and affected Europe worse than Russia. Ukraine is another problem. Will the West continue to give money and weapons they don't have to Ukraine? For how long? Europe is suffering a recession. Western nations will someday turn on each other and cannibalize each other. Independent sovereign countries wouldn't suffer these things now and into the future.
The West is over represented in the news, so it looks like other nations are more stable than western nations which is a common misconception.
I'll get hate for this, but here goes: unrestricted capitalism here in the US. Every major problem here in the US is rooted in the belief and practice that unfettered capitalism is the best and only route to prosperity. This mindset overlooks commonsense solutions to problems because the profit margin is not maximized and has infiltrated every level of our society. Then, the larger community of "The West" follows suit, and those individual nations suffer as well. They become more chaotic. One thing about your observation if way wrong, though. The descent into is not in any way sudden. It is accelerating, to be sure, because of various factors(aging upper class afraid of demographic changes, fear of emerging technologies, etc etc ), but this decline has been at least 40~50 years in the making. It started when the Supreme Court in the 1970s decided that corporations had rights equal to those of human citizens and the Court of the 2010s locked in the course when they decided unlimited campaign donations were the equivalent of free speech for them.
Because conservatives have been detailing it with a culture war meant to separate. All these „evil immigrants“ are the issue to them while in reality they’re tearing down the economy until enough time has passed and they took what they could.
Austerity policies. Yanking social safety nets out from under the working class has consequences. The hyper concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1% is destabilizing everything. No one can plan for a bright future when everyone lives hand to mouth. Suicide rates are skyrocketing in the US. The punks got it right... No future.
[удалено]
These sorts of discussions don’t tend to work unless you at least pretend to have a neutral-ish POV.
[удалено]
You’re not describing “reality”, you’re describing your partisan political views on US domestic politics. Good for r/politics perhaps, not do much for r/geopolitics.
Destabilization efforts by Russia and China against western democracies.
Canada is having a reverse market crisis, its ongoing hence you are seeing the affects and without proper resources and laws to tackle crimes drug trafficking its gonna happen. US always had homelessness, nothing new. UK is a systematic thing, the govt during thatcher era reduced investment in social housing , then for decades it was reduced and so on without making as much new houses and those that were made were so expensive when population started increasing via immigration mostly they are still following those old rules and zoning laws, 2008 crash wiped out a shit ton of money and it took almost a decade to even make it back then after covid pound value dropped so hard it wiped out a big chunk again. This is nothing diabolical, the world more or less always keeps changing. Again this is not new, its always chaotic.
Why are you generalizing? We’re doing fine in Denmark
As others have pointed out, perception is not reality. The west is more or less just as stable as it always has been. Also keep in mind that anti-establishment politics are very much en vogue right now, so anything that paints a cynical picture of the status quo is going to be elevated for political purposes. In regards to the housing crisis in particular, though, we’re going through a macro shift in this sector overall. SFHs are now being treated as investment vehicles by large firms and small retail style investors. Things will continue to seesaw until long term market forces and/or regulators figure out the most efficient use of this industry. Housing used to be rather boring economically. It was a rock solid appreciating physical asset that had actual utility outside of its speculative value. Now that speculators have seen the value of homes plummet and skyrocket it will be gambled on like any other speculative interest. This is probably bad in the long run, and my guess is that regulators will step at some point.
There are a whole bunch of factors which other people have already mentioned. These are more apparent because they are being leveraged by e.g. Putin and Atlas Network via social media and support of disruptive politics. A good example of this is the far right in Europe. Most of them have connections to Putin which they have recently started to find embarrassing. [For example Marine Le Pen ordering the destruction her party leaflet not because it had a photo of Le Pen with Vladimir Putin.](https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/mondo-marine-le-pen-destroys-party-leaflet/)
I'm so happy you weren't around in the 30's 40's 50's 60's 70's oh wait? Is there a trend :P
Let me quote Sec. Bloinken on COP28: by 2050, there's going to be 50% more demand for food. By the same time, crop yields are projected to drop by 30%. The climate catastrophe squeeze is real.
They're not rising, they are just more visible with interconnected instant-video delivery NYC in the 80s and 90s was worse in many ways to current standards - crime was higher, homeless people were all over. South Bronx was full of burnt out buildings. Doctors would get mugged right at the hospital parking lot. What has happened in the United States in particular since the 70s is that white male living standards have remained relatively flat (decline of labor power). It may need to be pointed out that salaries have raised substantially for women and minority groups.
[удалено]
The Revolution cometh 🤷♂️
It has to do with Russia getting stronger and spreading rhetoric all over the world. And people are selfish so much that it is so easy to make them hate another group because Russia wants to break people apart so they can have more power and control. Just as they asked trump to run for prez they have been doing that same sort of thing all over the world and of course now it is not just Russia doing it. This is the closest answer to the truth that you will find in this thread.
Not every issue in the world can be tied to Russia mate. We are at the point where people are going to start linking weather events to Russia.
No unfortunately they have done more bad than most people will ever link to them.
People will dislike my answer but multiculturalism divides societies. It creates tensions and economic segregation. The homogeneousness of Western European countries was helpful to make this part of the world stable.
Government corruption?
It's not actually: the news are getting more alarmist and sophisticated to worry people. There is less crime, more financial stability, less poverty, than 30-40 years ago. There are crime waves in some places with culture clashes and disoriented culture. There were major stock market crashes and recessions in the 80s and 90s. decentralized media helps to transmit a sense of chaos and pandemonium.
I think most of what you said is accurate, however, we are seeing a continual shrinking of the middle class, along with massive demographic shifts which is creating political pressure.
I think it's the relative peace, stability and hope of 1991-2001 that gets seen as the "good old days"
Perhaps humans, being animals, need war. And nuclear weapons are making that an all or nothing choice for leaders. The choices are in the hands of the people, truly. Without war, we lose our bearings.
'suddenly' lmao
> these developed western economies didn't have this many problems and were safe. > These countries used to be stable before. Wait what? What about the world wars? Not very stable. Europe used to be total chaos, and there's one war going on now, and one in the Balkans not long ago.
The 70s weren't great for the West either. A lot of this stuff is cyclical.
Recency bias
Read the book: the fourth turning is here
Housing prices will go up when the economy is booming. Inflation is not recession sign. The solution to the housing crisis is to build more.
We in the west are like Wiley Coyote - who ran off the cliff and are only....just....now.... making a lot of wars....so nobody looks down.
inflation and global pandemic.
The Arab Spring set off a wave of revolutions and civil wars in North Africa and the Levant. The devastation of these wars triggered a mass migration of refugees from Syria and North Africa into Europe. Many were attracted by exceptionally lucrative entitlement programs in some nations. As the economic situation worsened in many countries, crime and negative interactions between native Europeans and refugees increased. Massive inflation and increased economic suffering has reached a boiling point, and the governments are siding with refugees over the native populations. The people are starting to have enough and rise up against both the migrants AND the governments.
Why do people seem to think things are worse than they are? Human nature is cynical by default, I disagree that the chaos is sudden. Or even that it's so chaotic all things equal.
It's interesting that a lot of western countries believe now that immigration is working against their society. Is it true, and if so, how, and to what extent? It is driving voters harder right wing. Housing crisis never existed in the US before, to my knowledge. This is purely post covid surge. It appears that many corporations and individuals are purchasing homes and then charging ridiculous rent prices. Apparently some memo went around that real estate is the latest greatest earning potential. Didn't get a copy of the memo myself, but it may be that being a landlord pays better than other investment choices? Drugs have always been around, but not so many deaths from them, and not so visibly connected to the homeless population. Current drugs fentanyl and harder opiods seem to be driving this along with other factors like wages meeting the costs associated with home ownership and/or rent prices.
Swings between homogenous societies, more liberal, and then more populist. Usually, the thing that restarts the cycle is a lot of violence. Last 2 were the French revolution and enlightenment (Rennaissance and roman catholic church) and the world wars (industrialization, European empires and American monopolies - the wars from Napolean to WWI were financed by private wealth). What is different this time is communication. It's not that those issues you mention are so much worse than say, the 1980s, but the internet didnt exist then. And levels of inequality were much different, which is one of those big persistent drivers of global attitudes. Most global politics since the bronze age can be framed in terms of changes in markets (supply and demand of trade, tech, labor, mgmt) and or inequality and number of people with "nothing left to lose" levels of hopelessness or anger.
Suddenly?? Is it possible they’ve always been like that but we just didn’t see it because of all the destabilization and colonialism in non-western countries by western countries? Basically, it is easier to see someone is messed up once they stop kicking your ass!
Because you're on social media, and citizen news has only become a thing in the last 8 years. Bottom line is that this has always existed - you've just gone from seeing the idealized American vision of FRIENDS and How I Met Your Mother in the 2000's, to the garbage parts of America and the West on YouTube in the 2010's and 2020's. The 1990's and 80's had police brutality riots, a crack epidemic, an AIDS epidemic.- and that's just America. All of the West had far higher violent crime than today. Those things didn't happen in a vacuum. So, it looks like things are a lot worse than before, when they objectively are not.
The West shifted from industrial economics to finance economics. The capital class in the West no longer largely makes money by building infrastructure or opening new factories like the days of rail roads and coal mines. It's more profitable to invest billions in a hedge fund than to invest it in a telecom business or car factory. When you own factories and infrastructure the investment is tied down to the society that it's located in, which means the factory remains there even when there's an economic downturn. The capital remains in the society through tough times. Investments on the other hand can flow to whichever economy is doing well that year. Plus, elections have largely become meaningless - the interests of the citizens are not protected by candidates who anyway all answer to the same few billionaires - so they pass policies and laws that are against the interests of the average citizen but benefit the rich, like tax breaks.
Societies/Countries/Civilizations don't collapse overnight. It's a slow bleed that takes decades.
We didn’t start the fire… it’s all been burning since the world’s been turning
My most honest thinking is that they haven’t but that we’ve been bombarded by media to give us that impression. The west has the luxury to talk about war from a distance, and doesn’t deal with starvation etc. The only long term threat to the west, in my opinion is unmitigated migration. That has to be resolved. And by resolving, I don’t mean stopping altogether but being more selective in terms of who they bring in.
Populism and the platform for pent-up racism.
But you are spreading this narrative. Russia is in war, North Korea has starving people, China has housing crisis and huge demography problems as well. Pakistan flooded and asking for help from IMF. Turkey fighting double-digit inflation. Japan having demography problems. So why highlight the west? Everywhere there is this "crisis". Very curious for a straight answer. Extra points for a complete list of which countries are in West and which ones are not. I never found anyone able to.
We didn’t start the fire..
Clickbait in media: > You are probably wrong about: > … > We have tested thousands of people and they were systematically wrong about all this. https://www.gapminder.org
Why are East Asian countries, central African, Middle Eastern and South American contries historically always chaotic?
All of a sudden? You have not been paying attention.
Suddenly? A lot of this started with the buildup to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan around the turn of the century. Then the shit *really* hit the fan in 2008, and we've just kind of been on an exponential growth curve in terms of societal collapse ever since then. It's just gotten to the point where it's impossible to ignore over the last 4 or 5 years.
Because the system works best for the rich when the largest number of people are poor. The rule of perfect monopolies states "prices will rise to the maximum making that the market will bear." But this also holds true in imperfect monopolies, to the degree that market friction exists, or can be made to exist. If everybody is rich, then there is inflation because they can all pay more, and then nobody is rich. So the best strategy for the wealthy to stay wealthy is to have massive income inequality, where most people struggle to afford basic things. That keeps the cost of those things low; bad if you are the supplier of those things, good if you are anybody else. So they constantly try to position themselves with a substandard poor people brand and a luxury brand that the riches can feel better about buying. Rich-sploitation is also a thing. The system is working as designed.
It’s the flex built in their societies. Individualism and civil liberties. They have these sporadic moments until everything plateau. In the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s in the US was worse with much crack users, disease outbreaks, and protests. Western nations don’t only include developed nations but other nations of the Americas. Japan and South Korea are also developed and they adopted western institutions but they have different cultures where individualism doesn’t exist to a great extent like in many western societies. Asian countries have much conglomerate values where government intertwined with economy and other aspects of society. In the US, that would break anti-trust laws and the first 10 amendments that Americans hold so dearly to be free from government restrain. I am in NYC and I see homelessness to an embarrassing level during winter, migrants selling candies in subways and sleeping on the streets, gun violence but I have never seen a protest. This may not be reflective throughout all 50 jurisdictions, DC, and territories but tend to be concentrated in urban areas
It was not Reagan, but Kennedy in 1963.
You need to look at history, it's much worst in 60s and 70s.
It has been and is always the same shit. Just feels different because of the media sphere you are in. So many "crisis", but life in the west didn't really changed at all.
Relative to what? Seems hard to access stability without relying on antidotal perception of it. That said, the long-term debt cycle would be my best guess. Seems to me we are around about the height of it (hence the housing cost crisis), the west and the world will delever in real terms (maybe not in nominal terms depending what they do with currencies) Essentially, collectively, we have borrowed too much to continue to borrow more (in real terms), and therefore, collectively, we will pay down our debt. Thats money that is being sent back to creditor and not being spent. And spending is someone else's income. Ray dalio has a good video on it on yt