Especially in the modern context in the year of our lord 2024. Is it relevant? What do I need to know about it ?
EDIT : Thanks everyone for this really informative thread.
Especially in the modern context in the year of our lord 2024. Is it relevant? What do I need to know about it ?
EDIT : Thanks everyone for this really informative thread.
Roads. Cars. Fuels.
No other nation on the planet lives like we do in the USA. Just imagine gas at $8/gallon. Imagine ALL of the road maintenance, the machines required, the materials required.
Then understand the impact transport has on food distribution in the USA.
Then realize that 46M people in the USA, so about 20%, live with water insecurity. American shoppers spend almost $50Bn on bottled water annually.
Yeah, it’s going to be incredibly ugly. Right now, climate change is the biggest threat to the American Southwest. But if the world shut America out of primary economic dominance, cities in Arizona would be abandoned within a few years as no one would be able to secure sufficient water to live there. The climate refugee crisis is going to crush America even if it remains the global hegemon, but if it doesn’t and the labor of the global south ends the “free ride”, it’s going to be horrible for the average American.
Think about those people in Tuscon. Where are they going to go and how are they going to get there? Vehicles. Roads. Gas.
And that doesn’t even get into cell phones, computers, industrial equipment, medical equipment, plastics, clothing, SHOES.
It’s not that Americans aren’t struggling. It’s that we’re living in an incredibly inefficient setup. And that wording is HILARIOUSLY understating it.
Interesting, I always kind of pictured this hypothetical as a sort of “US workers getting dragged down to the same level of misery of the global proletariat”, but the entire supply chain supporting most human existence in the US collapsing would probably be a more pressing issue.
Yeah that “being dragged down to equal” is sort of a fantasy trope related to the whole “civilized” vs “uncivilized” framing. The reality is that the USA is built on unsustainable imperial largesse at industrial scale.
US road expenditure is estimated to be about $250 billion a year.
Many places have gas at similar prices to the US (largely due to taxes, not imperialism).
While new vehicles are a huge resources suck (15 million new vehicles a year), it’s only about five to ten percent of GDP and would naturally dwindle in response to declining conditions.
On water insecurity, in 2014 Algeria opened a desalination plant for $500 million. It produces about 500 megalitres a day - so you would need three of them to give those 50 million Americans 150 litres (40 gallons) a day, assuming they were all in one place.
Arizona has more than enough water - 8.5 million megalitres in 2017, of which 72 percent went to agriculture.
But let’s say you had to move them because US land use and infrastructure is legitimately the worst - you could stick them in an area the size of Slovenia, assuming the density of the Netherlands, on the west coast here:
I think that’s the real problem for the US - it’s a naturally rich place but the infrastructure and planning is completely broken. Take healthcare, one of the largest single sectors, gobbling up 20 percent of GDP to deliver generally worse outcomes at twice the cost as other western countries.
All basically fixable with a command economy and average resourcing.
Surely even Americans would revolt if the lack of imperial profits heightens contradictions as capitalists intensity domestic profit extraction when the US hegemon is dead.
I like your post but no, they wouldn’t. It is not a matter of simple disillusionment, for USians it’s practically faith. I can’t overstate this. They will kill everyone “lesser” than them before they go after anyone above them, because no one is above them. I don’t believe any revolution will happen here that isn’t purely aimed downward.
Well there’s always