May you live in interesting times is supposedly an “ancient Chinese curse” but the saying is apocryphal. But, oh yeah, we live in interesting times. Post-WW2, the United States of America was the dominant economy in the world. And that held true for several decades. But all empires die. Some with a whimper (the British Empire for instance), some with a bang (the Japanese and Austrian-Hungarian Empires).
”The life-expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.” - Sir John Glubb
Jerry Robinson of FollowTheMoney.com points out in a SilverDoctors interview that when GDP is measured by Purchasing Power Parity, China’s GDP is already larger than America’s:
Wikipedia has articles about the two ways of measuring GDP:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
Are Americans psychologically prepared for the decline (and fall?) of Empire? How will Americans deal with decline and loss of dominance? Semi-gracefully as the British Empire did? Stumbling into kleptocracy à la the Soviet Union? Or does the rise of a decentralized crypto-economy raise the possibility that it really will be different this time?
In other news,
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