What do you think the USA would look like in 20 years?

[maikele]

What do you think the USA will look like in 20 years?

Well, I'm from Argentina, and I've never been to the USA, but for me, it’s pretty obvious that it is entering a disintegrative phase. Yesterday, I was talking to my girlfriend about what Argentina was like 60 or 70 years ago (I was born in the '90s, so everything I know is from reading a lot). She was surprised to notice that it was a completely different country. It was a period in which scientists, artists like writers, painters, musicians, and political figures emerged. Every time I talk to my grandma, she tells me about things that no longer exist. In fact, Argentina was one of the main economies in the world; healthcare was really good and affordable, there were top scientists in most industries, education was almost completely free, there was almost no unemployment, and profound industrialization had emerged during that period.

The thing is, no one could have imagined what the country would become years later:

Successive coups d'état
Crises followed by deeper ones
IMF interventions (external debt íssues)
Inflation
Hyperinflation
Internal disintegration
War
Loss of territory (Malvinas, Beagle conflict)
Cultural disintegration
A setback in education standards

I wonder if the USA is entering a pretty similar phase. For example, poverty, wealth gap, problems with housing affordability, a decline in educational levels, drug issues, internal conflicts, inflation, etc., are now obvious.
So, what do you think (given the acceleration in time produced by technological changes in recent years), the USA will look like in the years to come? Are you hopeful about the future?

[7Wannabe5]

The three main trends that will likely continue to influence the U.S. over the next 20 years according to the data analysis I find most coherent are technology, adjustment of lifestyle to increased longevity, and increased individualism. All three of these factors will continue to contribute to decrease in fertility rates, which has already dropped precipitously over the last 20 years from roughly replacement rate of 2.1 to currently around 1.6. Gen Z females are even less likely to want to have children than Millennials, this is in part due to pessimism, but "personal freedom" is #1 reason for not wanting kids and climate change is #7. Therefore, barring climate change refugee immigration pressure, and given continued support for options such as working from any location, the housing crisis currently experienced in the U.S. will likely no longer be a top issue.

The generation that is now age 13 or 14 and under, the Alphas or Polars, will be the first U.S. generation that is majority non-white, and given the likely at least moderate increase in U.S. immigration rates as birth rates decline, and the deaths of the remaining Silent Generation and majority of the Baby Boomers (youngest will then be 81), the "complexion" of the U.S. will literally be quite noticeably different in 20 years. And, if I am still alive (will be 80!), I will celebrate spending my final decade(s) in this new multi-ethnic melting pot! Hopefully, if I do something like color my hair purple and arrange it in Viking braids and screen-print a t-shirt that clearly signals "Not a Karen" (although, I guess a standard issue "Kindness Matters" t-shirt like everybody I know who works with disadvantaged kids owns would also serve) , the young people working at my nursing facility will be able to distinguish me from some of the more "grouchy" pale old Gen-X remnant humans who are still alive. Of course, I am already working to improve these odds by directly working with members of the youngest generation and maintaining a diversity of polyamorous partnerships. I wonder what part of the world a new partner I meet when I am 80 might be from? I'm thinking maybe India, because I'll probably be more into meditation at Level Turquoise by then.

OTOH, of the three main trends I mentioned above, increased longevity and increased individualism are fairly dependent on the most important trend of technology, and technology is quite dependent upon energy. So, if energy needs can't be met, collapse is more likely.

[IlliniDave]

20 years is a short time. I'm generally optimistic. Not so much that things will get remarkably better, but the odds of a precipitous decline into third world status are not particularly high. The biggest problem I see is excessive deficit spending by the government (and for the record, I see that as a cultural rather than "political" issue). It's clear to me there is so much entrenched power here and even around the world that benefits from that in the short run, it will probably not be reined in. So as the decades pass by, the US prominence on the world stage will ebb substantially, and relative domestic affluence will decline. I'm hopeful that pressure on resources will prompt an adjustment to the economic Overton window shift that's occurred starting in the 1990s to facilitate a smooth asymptotic approach to a more sustainable economic milieu, but then again I've never been other than disappointed with what passes for strategic thinking here. So it's apt to be a little choppy.

I don't think life expectancy in the US even ranks in the top 50 worldwide (and attempts to rectify that are opposed with surprising vehemence), so demographic-based odds are worse than a coin flip that I'll even be around to witness what's going on in 20 years. But I think reality most likely lies somewhere in the expanse between what the utopians and doomsayers respectively argue for.

[7Wannabe5]

@IlliniDave:

Actually, your odds are just slightly better than a coin flip. According to most recent S.S. actuarial tables, life expectancy for a U.S. male who has already attained age 60 is 80.41. For a U.S. female who has already attained age 60, life expectancy is 83.65. One of the reasons why the U.S. does fairly poorly on general statistics compared to Level Green countries such as Denmark is that each "death of despair" (suicide, drug overdose, homicide, etc.) of those who are young or relatively young and also our relatively high infant mortality rate (6/1000 U.S. vs. 3/1000 Denmark) takes down the average a good deal. Survival to just age 65 for U.S. males (only 77%) is significantly lower than in Denmark (88%.) This accounts for a good deal of the overall difference in life expectancy from birth for males (age 76 U.S. vs. age 80 Denmark.) IOW, it's not necessarily the case that older humans, especially affluent older humans, in the U.S. are much less healthy (at least in terms of longevity) than older humans in other affluent countries. I mean I find it much more sad that twice as many infants die in the U.S. than Denmark vs. the fact that just a slight fraction more 79 year old men die in the U.S. than Denmark.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP ... ions=DK-US

[jacob]

I wonder if the USA is entering a pretty similar phase. For example, poverty, wealth gap, problems with housing affordability, a decline in educational levels, drug issues, internal conflicts, inflation, etc., are now obvious.
So, what do you think (given the acceleration in time produced by technological changes in recent years), the USA will look like in the years to come? Are you hopeful about the future?

Most importantly, something I always try to emphasize when trying to explain the US to those who haven't lived here is that the US has A LOT of internal variation. In my semi-experienced opinion, there's more variation in the US between rich states and poor states, rich people and poor people, this culture or that culture, the overly educated and the functionally illiterate, the unhealthy and the health-obsessed, ... than between individual countries in the EU.

For example, the US tends to score middle of the pack in terms of human development numbers (e.g. happiness, freedom-from, freedom-to, median wealth, education, life expectancy, ... ) when compared to other developed countries. However, these are average numbers. If we look at something like "life expectancy at birth", the average for the US is currently around 76 and it has been declining for several years now. Yet, if we look at individual counties, it ranges from 85+ in the richest counties (IIRC, Marin County in California)---this is better than Japan which usually takes top spot---to under 60 in some of the poorest regions. A life expectancy under 60 is less than Bangladesh(!!)

As such, the US also makes it possible to get to the best of the best that the world has to offer... but only for the individuals who are capable and/or got born under the best circumstances in terms of location/wealth/culture.

In that sense, a functionally realistic projection would be to go with Gibson's (the cyberspace guy) adage that "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed".

I'll note that 20 years is not a long time, so predictions should be easy. I have, for example, lived outside the country I was born in for ~25 years now and so I can contrast and compare a bit. Just to set the scene, we're talking a small city of 5000 with a downtown shopping street (with a few branches) of around 500 meters. I've visited a total of 3 times in that time span so each time there's some change but not much. So ... what's changed. Residential areas are pretty much the same with many of the same people still living there. Inside the houses, change depends on whether those living there could afford a renovation/upgrade or not. No technological breakthroughs. People had computers and TVs 20 years ago with pretty much the same functionality as today. Now there are just more and bigger screens. Shops and businesses have almost all changed. The only constant seems to be the supermarkets; those are still in place. As for the rest what was a paint store is now a thrift store, a hair dresser is a real estate store. The post office is gone---apparently nobody sends mail anymore (it's all email or UPS/DHL delivery...). The police station moved too. People now do most of their shopping in strip malls located 15km away. What's left is therefore novelty stores, e.g. thrift, art, wine, hair, ... not useful ones like e.g. paint, hardware, radio&TV, ... for those you have to drive.

As for the US ...

I'm typing this on a computer from 2015 living in a house from 1948 with natural gas central heating (ditto stove), electric air conditioning (that we installed in 2014), and indoor plumbing. We have a small (Honda Fit) car from 2009. Outside, there are electric wires and broadband suspended in a giant mess from telephone poles in the back alley. While the house is wired for it, we don't have landline telephone. Instead we have a couple of smartphones (donated from a must-have-the-newest-tech friend) from 2018-2020 or so. My (RedPocket) phone plan costs $5/month which is crazy cheap compared to what I paid for a landline to get online 35 years ago when I was a young nerd. We've lived here 10 years which is half the timespan you're looking at. During this time 2 out of the 6 neighbors we know have moved/changed. We have a walkable shopping street a block away of the same size as the one in the previous paragraph. Similarly, the supermarkets seem to stay in place while a few of the other shops rotate and change. Some have closed. Others have opened.

I live in an unexciting place and time. A deliberate choice of mine. Much of this "steadiness" depends on where you find yourself on the range. Generalized political discussions are not kosher here anymore, but I'll make an exception for myself . Illinois is solidly blue (left leaning) and so no matter what the election outcomes are, it just stays blue. This means that state and local politics doesn't abruptly change for every election or even every other decade. As such we enjoy a certain political stability that you would also find in a solidly red (right leaning) state. Whereas a purple (50/50ish) could see more drastic changes every election. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that federal elections (the US as a whole) can impose their own laws on the states. This is relevant to things like drugs, abortion, education, social services, pensions, etc. so those who live in a place where the state wants one thing and the feds want another and you actually care about the issue can see the laws of that issue have life changing effects on you every 4 years or so. Such polarization is definitely something that has increased in the US over the past 10 years compared to how it was 20 years ago.

Climate change is another issue. If you already live in a desert, it's gonna stay desert. Ditto if you already live in ice winters. However, if you live in a place---like we do---that's in a crossover zone between two different climates (cold in the winter + hot in the summer), you'll see change over 20 years as the temperature keeps inching upwards. During the 10 years we've lived here, we've already noticed that there's increasingly less snow in the winters. There's practically no point in owning your own set of skis anymore and I'm even considering of getting rid of my snow shovel. Tornado warnings are also becoming a recurring thing I and figure we'll probably have an actual tornado making it into the outer parts of Chicago, possibly right here where I am, within the next 20 years. I've seen cloud rotation from my bedroom window more than once---I can extrapolate a funnel touching down from that. On the other hand, there are areas in the US that's already been subject to this for a lot time and so having the whether get slightly more dangerous compared to what it already is doesn't even get people's attention. ("It's just bad luck. We'll rebuild.") The North American continent is actually a place wherein the weather is actively trying to kill you in many parts of it. In 2045, the global temperature will have exceed +2C and be pushing towards +3Cs. This will be causing destruction at a higher cost rate than it currently is. What the situation will look like on the ground will very much depend on whether the affected people have the cashflow to keep living there (personal wealth, insurance, or federal bailouts). Otherwise, these places will be left in ruins so to speak. This is something that has yet to sink in with the majority of Americans---that natural disasters will be something affecting them and not just other people on the news. In terms of shooting yourself in the foot over the next 20 years ... the majority are still solidly aiming at their own feet.

Economically, the US has enjoyed an unusual position over the past 35 years or so, having enjoyed a state of hegemony (hedge fund-money ;-P ) under the neoliberal global trade paradigm. Much like the Roman Empire, the US has exported "security" and "imperial edicts" (albeit in a much nicer form than times past by developing a reputation of a "force for good") essentially rewiring global behavior to serve itself. It has been able to secure both natural resources (oil, energy) and manufactured products from the rest of the world running large trade deficits while paying in our own currency (dollars) which we can print at-will---so no IMF problems here. The dollars spent buying stuff have in turn not been spent on buying US products back but rather on buying US securities and debt which has led to a booming market and cheap loans leading to a positively great business environment as well as the ability for people to live above their means. Basically, a win-win-win for the US. A something for nothing deal.

There are two problems with that though. The one exemplified by current politics is that Americans haven't been benefiting equally. Americans who earned and invested and/or borrowed have benefited greatly! Americans who did one of those both not both of them have still done better than average compared to the rest of the world. Americans who did neither basically screwed the pooch. Some got ridiculously rich while others "only" got domestically produced trucks, $1 handbags from TEMU, and 62" flatscreen TVs for their single-wide trailer housing. The latter, mostly completely ignorant of the geopolitical foundation of their way of life, have been keen to throw the [wealth] baby out with the bathwater. This conflict originates in what I said about how the US having a much larger range in terms of wealth, income, culture, .... than most other regions of the world. Going into detail here would rip up some contemporary political wounds in the US, so I'm not going to go there even if I probably already did... (but I hope others will refrain...). A bigger problem with the hegemony paradigm is that ...

... The rest of the world is catching up. The average education level of the entire world has increased to roughly 11th grade level by now. (There are, for example, more Chinese dollar millionaires than there are American ones by now.) This means that if your job only requires an 11th grade education which roughly corresponds to "following simple instructions and pushing a button at the local nuts&bolts assembly line" (basically screwing in tiny screws making iphones --- hey my mom did work like that in Denmark back in the 1970s... she's also the one who taught me how to solder PCBs... these days such jobs have long gone from post-WWI Europe onto China and now Indonesia and Malaysia), you'll compete at the world average global salary for that kind of work which is ... currently about $1/hour. While this ($2000/year) salary gets you a decent standard of living in many places of the world, it's pretty much unlivable in the US---if you break an ankle, a US hospital will charge you $15,000 w/o even blinking. Supporting this kind of "high school dropout" work can only be done by government subsidy/bailouts by transferring money from Peter to pay Paul.

Successive coups d'état
Crises followed by deeper ones
IMF interventions (external debt íssues)
Inflation
Hyperinflation
Internal disintegration
War
Loss of territory (Malvinas, Beagle conflict)
Cultural disintegration
A setback in education standards

So, yeah, [me] being simultaneously an outsider and an insider to the US, I see where you're coming from [as an outsider?]. My point is that those who are strictly living on the inside (e.g. "rarely bothers to read a foreign newspaper" or indeed read any newspaper all), the next 20 years will look far less exciting than this list. Indeed, adversity may not even be identified as such from this list. (There's a kind of a news-meme-joke concept in certain US media reports to the effect of "how would current US events be reported insofar they were reported in the same way that the US reports the news about what's going on in other parts of the world".)

To summarize:
1) Overall, the next 20 years are going to be much the same as the last 10-20 years (technologically stagnant, low fruit was already picked decades ago, a personal AI agent will make less of a difference cf. getting indoor plumbing or installing electric lighting and appliances)
2) Individual experiences will vary to an extent that those who live outside the US will struggle to appreciate. Crazy Silicon Valley Californians showing off their crib. For example, when it comes to taking a shit, the variation will range from ("Siri, rinse my ass") in Silicon Valley to "third world"-level rural folks from Alabama with all separating them from an endemic infestation of hookworms is a 20ft pipe from their toilet and knowing how they shouldn't step barefoot into the smelly part of the weeds behind their house.
3) More natural disasters overall.
4) Losing hegemony status along with the associated boosts to cheap goods, cheap debt, and high market multiples.

[7Wannabe5]

While this ($2000/year) salary gets you a decent standard of living in many places of the world, it's pretty much unlivable in the US---if you break an ankle, a US hospital will charge you $15,000 w/o even blinking. Supporting this kind of "high school dropout" work can only be done by government subsidy/bailouts by transferring money from Peter to pay Paul.

Since I have lived and taught in some of the least affluent and most affluent neighborhoods in the U.S. in recent years, I heartily agree with your overall analysis. OTOH, not to be nit-picky, I believe that global average wage for the sort of factory work you described is closer to $3/hr ($6000/year) these days. It has been going up fairly rapidly over the last 20 years. So, if you also consider the price of living in the U.S., some of the kids I have taught who have a Dad in jail and a Mom making $14/hour are almost certainly worse off than the child of two factory workers in Malaysia. Luckily, for the poor kids in the U.S., their teachers who not infrequently make a whopping $25/hr. themselves will often provide them with socks, school supplies, winter coats, etc. Some neighborhoods in the U.S. are also so dangerous the kids can't even play outside on their public school playground while other neighborhoods that may be just a bike ride away have afterschool yoga, classes in advanced robotics, and organic salad bar in the lunchrooms of their public school system. (I just looked it up and the difference in average house prices in these two neighborhoods which are approximately 20 miles apart is roughly $80K vs $800k.)

https://reshoringinstitute.org/wp-conte ... risons.pdf

[IlliniDave]

@IlliniDave:

Actually, your odds are just slightly better than a coin flip. According to most recent S.S. actuarial tables, life expectancy for a U.S. male who has already attained age 60 is 80.41.

Yep, and I'm ~60.95 now, so my odds per that table of being alive 20 years from yesterday is slightly under 50/50 demographically speaking (i.e., male of a certain age). Granted I have not reviewed them in 3.5 years, other tables pegged me at 78 and change for life expectancy (and indeed that seemed to be the crossover point for where taking fixed annuity-type payments early versus late seemed to cross over in total dollars received--by the end of the calendar year I turned 78. It's of personal utility to have a sense of my longevity, even if only in a statistical sense. I think it's sad when anyone passes due to preventable circumstances, irrespective of age, immutable characteristics, or geographical location. I don't think that has any bearing on where the US will be in two decades. Just points out that I'm making predictions for a juncture where I'm apt to have little skin left in the game, and none once it gets to the point I think any sort of true collapse is apt to occur. Implicit in that is that I have been bathed in a sea of imminent collapse porn for 50 years now, more than 80% of my life, so much like the neighbors of the boy who cried wolf, I'm possibly too quick to be dismissive of all prophets, which would include any true prophets that happened along; or perhaps in the predicament of the proverbial frog in a pot of water on a stove. Meaning my thoughts plus a $5-bill is worth something between $3 and $5.

[daylen]

Probably what Jacob said to the best of my estimation. Extreme trajectories leaning utopic or dystopic are possible though. Runaway positive feedbacks could always be around the corner given all the room at the bottom (concerning small scale biological and technological interactions).

[chenda]

Argentina is usually considered sui generis as its the only country which has regressed from first word to at best second world status. Which seems to be a surprisingly hard thing to do.

People now do most of their shopping in strip malls located 15km away. What's left is therefore novelty stores, e.g. thrift, art, wine, hair, ... not useful ones like e.g. paint, hardware, radio&TV, ... for those you have to drive.

Well that's depressing to hear, I expected better of Denmark.

[ducknald_don]

According to most recent S.S. actuarial tables, life expectancy for a U.S. male who has already attained age 60 is 80.41.

It's 84 in the UK. My understanding is the figures are quite dire in the US even for the wealthy.

[Henry]

Now that Elon has returned from his four month foray into rawdoging Washington DC, the template for his technological vision has been established. The change in the next 20 years will be equivalent to what 100 years used to be. A transportation revolution coinciding with a work force revolution will be like experiencing the innovation of the railroad and the automobile simultaneously. I'm not sure exactly when the inflection point will be, but I'm thinking around 10 years. And I think the majority of the country will be blindsided. I think it's inside baseball at this point. It already has a name "The Age of Abundance." The issue is it can also be called "The Age of Nothing to Fucking Do" which someone around these parts accused me of already living in it. Maybe it's true. This AI shit hasn't begun but its goal is to extinguish work. I'm still waiting for people smarter than me to explain what this will look like.

[7Wannabe5]

My understanding is the figures are quite dire in the US even for the wealthy.

Nope. If corrected for wealth, IlliniDave and his cohort is likely to make it much nearer to 90. My fate is much more uncertain since more dependent on my ability to substitute other forms of capital for financial wealth. For example, I developed a social relationship with my last primary care physician and even helped her find a good math tutor for her daughter, and I am currently taking a course in Human Immunology, and there is some possibility that worst-case scenario I could enter into a marriage of convenience for health insurance benefits (although there may be some co-dependency here on overall outcome corrected for BMI, but the high degree of variability and further integration of sapiosexual tendencies may compensate.) Hopefully, this additional randomness will make it more exciting for those of you following and/or wagering on the 60-plus competition on other thread.

One large difference between the United States and other developed countries is the effect of wealth on life expectancy. The wealthiest Americans compare well with the European counterparts; poorer Americans do not. Americans in the top one percent of income distribution have much longer life expectancies than those in bottom one percent, 88.9 years for women as compared to 78.8 years and 87.3 years for high-income men as compared 72.7 years low-income men. Interestingly, the 10-year differential for women is not as large as the whopping 15-year differential for men. As a result, the life expectancy differential between men and women is much lower for those who are wealthy, just 2.5 years, than for those who are poor, 6.1 years.

https://margolisbloom.com/planning-for- ... t-planning


***************************************************************************************************************

[IlliniDave]

Nope. If corrected for wealth, IlliniDave and his cohort is likely to make it much nearer to 90...

All the data I have seen relative to longevity is income-based. Mine is now sub median.

[Hristo Botev]

The only thing I saw missing from @Jacob's pretty convincing forecast for 'Merica is that I suspect we'll see the internal variation @Jacob mentions become more and more geographically dispersed (remote work, online schooling for kiddos, etc.)--so much less State X v. State Y or County A v. County B, and much more this street/neighborhood v. that street/neighborhood.

To illustrate with an anecdote (as I do) . . .

2) Individual experiences will vary to an extent that those who live outside the US will struggle to appreciate. Crazy Silicon Valley Californians showing off their crib. For example, when it comes to taking a shit, the variation will range from ("Siri, rinse my ass") in Silicon Valley to "third world"-level rural folks from Alabama with all separating them from an endemic infestation of hookworms is a 20ft pipe from their toilet and knowing how they shouldn't step barefoot into the smelly part of the weeds behind their house.

We had a plumber at the house (we're effectively in rural Alabama ourselves) last week who was talking my ear off about some new money that came in from another state and hired him to install a $19,000 toilet, and he thought that was the funniest and most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard of. He then spent some time detailing for me all the stupid-ass things this toilet would do (thankfully he'd already invoiced me so we weren't on the clock), and how many moving parts were involved with the toilet that would certainly break, virtually guaranteeing that this stupid toilet would mean some more money coming his way in the future, even if just in the form of referrals for an electrician.

So, a first-class local plumber in his 60s with decades of experience charging only $150/hour to install a $19,000 toilet for carpetbagging "damn" yankees who just can't believe how cheap land and labor is here.

I don't think this is sustainable.

If we look to Plato for guidance, we've currently got an increasingly more obvious oligarchy, which (if I remember correctly) will eventually "collapse" into democracy and mob rule, until a tyrant takes control to bring order to the chaos.

Will the hoi polloi revolt in the next 20 years? I don't know, but from my vantage point--having recently moved back to my hometown after roughly 20 years away living in big cities and abroad--it certainly seems possible here. Everything is a little shittier (and for some things, a lot shittier). Infrastructure hasn't changed at all really in the past 20 years--the football stadium where my daughter plays flag football and soccer is the same stadium that looked like it was falling down when DW and I played on that field 30 years ago. The bridges are the same and get more and more dangerous by the day. The only new construction you see are those shitty DIY car washes that, I'm told by real estate folks, offer the best short term bang for the buck when you buy up decrepit commercial real estate. Public education is a joke. The "charter" schools (i.e., private schools for cheapskates) aren't much better, you're just less likely to be stabbed and more likely to overdose. Everyone seems to be on some form of public assistance; especially disability of either the social security or military types (the latter being ubiquitous here--lots of support staff/desk jockeys getting carpal tunnel apparently, while the actual trigger pullers are unwilling to seek legitimate disability because it would limit their active and post-retirement employment options). Everyone is either obese, tweaker-skinny, or one Crossfit "WOD" away from a rhabdo injury. In other words, NO ONE (except DW of course) is "normal" when it comes to bodyweight and body composition.

Also, no one can speak coherent English anymore--especially those who were born here and come from English-speaking homes.

Anyways, I could go on, but for my sanity's sake I probably shouldn't.

[7Wannabe5]

@Hristo:

The Northern rust belt county where I taught and lived recently very much matches your description. One additional statistic that would go towards supporting possibility of uprising in next 20 years is that 50% of the kids in the U.S. are currently getting health insurance coverage through Medicaid. IOW, this backs up my impression that due to contributory factor that the affluent are having fewer kids (not to imply that the poor are having huge families these days either), the wealth/income inequality is greatest for the youngest generation. It seems like the kids I teach or tutor are either poor or upper-middle -class with very slim middle-middle-class representation. Your note on charter schools was also on the money. I briefly taught science at a charter school, and even the underpaid staff was on the verge of revolting, mainly due to the fact that middle-class parents who didn't want their extremely behaviorally disordered kids placed in special classroom in public schools dumped them at the charter where they were mainstreamed into classroom with working class church-going black kids. Try teaching 8th grade biology at level of national standards while a student is running around the classroom screaming profanity while wrapping his face tightly with Saran wrap and the administration has deemed classroom management wholly the responsibility of entry-level teachers being paid $40,000. All the younger staff I was working with just started putting the "special" kids out to roam in the hallway.

Everyone is either obese, tweaker-skinny, or one Crossfit "WOD" away from a rhabdo injury. In other words, NO ONE (except DW of course) is "normal" when it comes to bodyweight and body composition.

If you would be willing to humor my curiosity, I would ask for your extended description of the demographic associated with Crossfit, and also whether or not your wife is allowing her gray hair to grow in naturally?

[Hristo Botev]

Your note on charter schools was also on the money.

I know I complained about this on my own journal before, but our "charter" school--which is supposed to be an entirely lottery-based system, with no merit component--has less than 10 percent on free/reduced lunch, whereas our "neighborhood" school (which no one in our neighborhood actually uses, for reasons) has close to 100% on free and reduced lunch. Sure, you have to actually apply for the charter school lottery, and the requirement for some initiative on the part of the parents to apply could explain some of the discrepancy. But, less than 10% in a county where a clear majority of kids meet the threshold for assistance? It's the worst kept secret in the county that the "lottery" selection is a joke--I mean, DW looked at the job posting for someone to be our local hospital director and part of the advertised job package was two slots at the charter school.

If you would be willing to humor my curiosity, I would ask for your extended description of the demographic associated with Crossfit,

Tight-fitting, expensive t-shirts with some sort of patriotic and/or AR-15 imagery; lots of tattoos; whatever they are calling yoga pants now for the ladies, and 1980s-length short shorts for the men; $80K+ full-size pick up trucks for the men and similarly-priced Tahoes or Suburbans for the ladies; high-crowned trucker-style hats for both men and women; overly-groomed beards on the men; the demographic most likely to bring a kids' little league or youth soccer match to a screeching halt for yelling various disturbing things at an ump/ref, the opposing coach or their own kid's coach, the opposing parents or their own team's parents, an opposing team's player or even their own kid.

Basically, Black Rifle Coffee's primary demographic.

and also whether or not your wife is allowing her gray hair to grow in naturally?

Nope. I've brought this up with her a couple of times; but any time I ask her why she still dyes her hair she says something like: "probably for the same reason you [insert male grooming activity here]"--to which I have no real response. She's well aware of how silly her mother and various other "Boomers" look who continue to get the same cheap dye jobs they've always gotten into old age. She's probably starting to get to an age where the dye job is obvious; and I suspect what she'll end up doing is just upping the dye job game and going for one of those rich ladies' dye jobs, where the grey hair is incorporated in as highlights or something.

Not my department, so I've learned.

[ducknald_don]

https://margolisbloom.com/planning-for- ... t-planning

On the other hand: https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/w ... tality-gap

[7Wannabe5]

@ducknald_don:

Yes, both things can be true depending upon where you draw the wealth line. The article/study I linked drew the line at top 1% and the article/study you linked drew the line at top 25%. The top 10% in the U.S. (2024) holds 76% of all wealth, and the top .01% holds around 14% of all wealth, so the lifestyle distribution along the top quartile would be quite extreme. In simple terms, a household at 75th percentile of wealth in the U.S. would likely be unhappy about paying a random $15,000 medical bill, because would represent around 3% of net worth, much of which would be tied up in primary residential real estate. A year in a nursing home can easily run $100,000, so an estate at 25th percentile wealth level of around $600,000 with $300,000 tied up in residence, could use up all liquid funds with a three year stay.

Basically, Black Rifle Coffee's primary demographic.

Not to be political, I was picturing somebody like Kristy Noem and/or more lower-left version would be " Brittle-Hair Ballet-Mom Who Shops at Whole Foods." I haven't let my hair grow in natural gray yet either, but this is somewhat in self-aware defiance of signaling. However, I do wear my $7.99-box-bleach-blonde hair up in a bun rather than hanging down around my (gently aging only-tinted-moisturizer-no-eye-liner just hint of color on lips, so predictable (sigh)) face unlike somebody (wearing thick foundation and black eyeliner and bright/dark lipstick) who might be married to a bounty hunter.

[black_son_of_gray]

Two important concepts worth considering: punctuated equilibrium (generalized application rather than the narrow evolutionary biology context), and systems of systems.

First, punctuated equilibrium, where changes typically happen either 1) rapidly, or 2) gradually. A vivid enough understanding for our purposes is to imagine a graph where time is on the x-axis and change is on the y-axis. If something follows a punctuated equilibrium model, one tends to see a lot of horizontal and vertical (rather than diagonal or curvy) lines.

I would argue that a lot of higher-level processes follow a punctuated equilibrium model. E.g. Landmark legislation/Supreme Court rulings, certain cultural movements, Eureka!-type scientific discoveries, natural disasters, conflict/peacetime... Big, vertical jumps are made in a relatively short amount of time (appropriate understanding of relative time, that is to say the correct scale on the x-axis, kind of crucial here...), and then there are (often long) periods of relative constancy. To give a US legislative example, the creation of Social Security through law was a big vertical movement, and subsequent to that most legislation/implementation has been relatively small, gradual tweaks (i.e. constancy).

Different entities (forgive me, best word I can come up with) can accommodate vertical jumps to varying degrees. Some are rather flexible and some are rather brittle. Another way to phrase this is that some entities by their nature have more "risk of ruin" than other entities. E.g. a scientific breakthrough that radically changes a field's understanding may certainly ruffle a lot of feathers, but it doesn't cripple the overall enterprise. Similarly, a scientific scandal. There is an element of infinite/finite games here. This matters a great deal when considering systemic effects.

Second, systems of systems. Not that anyone on this forum needs a lecture from me on systems...I just phrase it as "systems of systems" to point out how individual nodes in a system may themselves be systems. Which is perhaps just another way of saying "system" in the first place, only I emphasize how complex these things can get ("It's systems all the way down!") Furthermore, some nodes in a system are more vital to the system's structure or functioning than others. Think support pillars or keystone species...

Now let's put the two together, considering the US (as a national system within a global system) and an x-axis (time) of 20 years.

I wouldn't go so far as to say 20 years is a short amount of time--it depends whether we are talking about horizontal vs. vertical movements. It is short for horizontal: changes in language, broad economic development/decline, lifestyle changes (education, healthcare). But it is long for vertical: wars/conflict, calamitous disaster (e.g. cascadia fault, hurricane, multi-breadbasket failure, wet-bulb event, pandemic). Most nation-level vertical events I can think of can take place well inside of 20 years, but radically alter the nation going forward. A lot of these aren't necessarily predictable on that time scale (Black Swans), so the OP question is at least partially impossible to answer.

People will disagree about whether any given 'entity' or 'situation' is a vertical or horizontal event (to say nothing of whether it is change for the 'better' or 'worse'), or whether a given node in a system is fundamental or superfluous. If there is a danger in the conversation devolving into political bickering and/or declaration of opinion as Truth...

Suffice it to say, I am probably much more pessimistic in my outlook than those who have posted above. Why? Probably because I think 1) the statistical likelihood of at least one incredibly disruptive vertical event/situation is high for the US, and 2) I think a lot more nodes in the US and global system-of-systems are brittle rather than flexible. The big fear is a chain reaction of vertical events that takes out too many large-scale nodes. I have no idea how likely that would be, but I don't rule it out.

A personal observation during my career as a biomedical scientist: I have seen the US federal bureaucracy (as it relates to HHS) close up. As in, daily interaction for over a decade. I will make no comment here as to whether I think it is good or bad or efficient or wasteful. That's irrelevant. Rather, my observation is that the US federal bureaucracy is more brittle than most unacquainted people understand. A large part of this is by design, by how the system actually works. So much of what happens in federal bureaucracy happens because it has to happen that way by law. These laws and standard procedures have accreted in a looooong, slooooow, gradual process (horizontal), and "institutional expertise" among bureaucrats also accretes in a long, slow process. The concern that I have, therefore, is that the sudden vertical movements being made currently through work-force reduction and budget-slashing may literally 'break' the bureaucracy. An analogy might be something like deleting 10% of the functions in a programming language, then hitting 'compile and run' on your particular script. Which is to say that there ceases to be an 'undo' button, because the 'undo' function itself was deleted. One can reorganize institutional hierarchy quickly. One can downsize workforce quickly. But one cannot quickly rewrite hundred of interrelated laws buried in legislation passed over many decades. (However many laws you think there might be...there are more.) These laws literally have to be followed by federal employees, and vertical changes to the bureaucracy can easily make that impossible. This is what I mean when I say 'breaking'--everything grinds to a halt. Again I make no comment here as to whether that is 'good' or 'bad'...only that such an event would strain the linkages between nodes enormously in the US federal system. Anyway, my point is not to argue any particular policy but simply to say: you'd be surprised how brittle government institutions can be!

But of course, from there we can move up or down a level in the system-of-systems: How important a node is the US with respect to the global geopolitical system? For many things, it certainly is a large node relative to other countries. Systemically vital? It's interesting to speculate whether or not other countries might try to reinforce vs. work around the US as a node in any given geopolitical sphere. I'm not sure. (So I'll shut up).

Lower down, at the state level and local levels, I think @jacob makes good points about sheer variation that exists across the US. Some places are changing rapidly, some almost seem lost to time. I doubt this variation will be substantially flattened over the next 20 years, though some places may rise and some places may fall dramatically. Capital carries with it some degree of economic inertia. The only point I'll raise about the smaller scale is that certain vertical events (e.g. natural disasters) become much more 'systemic' at the smaller scale. The flip-side is that those vertical events might be easier to avoid by simply moving ~100 miles to another state or place (assuming one is able).

[7Wannabe5]

@bsog:

Yeah, that rhymes with the thesis promoted by Michael Axworthy in "A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind." He argued that the reason Persia/Iran's culture continued to carry a thread of consistency for so very long was that through every conquering horde, patricidal princeling, and revolution, the upper-middle-class civil service "gentry" level of society remained reasonably intact. I mean, even if you very much don't like the direction in which your shared culture is heading, you can't fix it by decimating the structure of cultural-maintenance. It's roughly akin to breaking the stereo to get your kid to listen to something other than rock-n-roll or shaving a monkey and dressing it up in a lab coat to perform a ritualized chant of statistics in order to bring them forth as reality.