7 ms·

Closing The Collapse Gap: The USSR was better prepared than the US (2006)

71 points by krutulis 6y ago

cpr 6y ago
Orlov is a very interesting character who's written a lot about societal collapse, having lived through the Soviet version. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer)) I've read some of his books (The Five Stages of Collapse, e.g.) and there's a lot of food for thought. He's now spending his time designing and building "unsinkable" houseboats. His thinkpieces, which in the past were quite worthwhile, are now behind a paywall at
vasilipupkin 6y ago
yeah, except it's nonsense, Soviet Union was completely unprepared for collapse. It couldn't even survive Chernobyl.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  East German here, so I don't know all that much of the details of Soviet society before the collapse (but my guess is that the situation wasn't all that different in all former socialist countries). I would agree that the (East German) state and government was entirely unprepared for its own collapse. But maybe the people were better prepared because they've been living at the brink of collapse for most of their lives. Shortages of one sort or the other were a normal occurance, you learned quickly to not depend too much on the state, but on family and other people. So when the state "disappeared" people more or less just went on with their business. And at least in the GDR there was definitely a growing feeling that this couldn't go on for much longer during the 80's, which may have created a "subconscious preparedness". And of course the "collapse of the GDR" wasn't an "apocalypse-style collapse", but in typical German fashion it was happening very orderly and predictable once the ball was rolling. And (here's a controversial opinion) even though many people had their lives turned upside down in the 90's, lost their job, had to emigrate into the "Golden West", even with all that... being poor in the reunited Germany still was a better life than being "rich" in East Germany (whatever that meant, because there was not much to buy for money anyway). I'm not sure how people in "the West" would have dealt with its own collapse if the sides had been reversed. Maybe we'll learn in the near future though.
  - jotm 6y ago
    This "life always on the brink" preparedness is a major part of what's keeping poor European countries poor. Everybody distrusts the government, they rely on each other, learn to do things themselves so they don't rely on others. So, money doesn't exchange hands, taxes don't get paid, GDP doesn't grow, more money doesn't get printed. This is all in a very interconnected world with a mostly free economy, so outsiders just come and buy up everything because at the end of the day, money matters. Instead of preparing for collapse, how about preparing for being united in work and life and start trusting and depending on each other more.
    - flohofwoe 6y ago
      I agree, but at least looking back that was pretty much the only way to keep going. The government wasn't able to solve (or even recognize) the problems of the "ordinary people", so the people had to deal with solving the problems themselves. Of course this will never be as effective as having an actually functional government, and it will lead to corruption in all levels of society.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      It's hard to trust thieves who demonstrably ignore laws when it suits them.
    - dickjocke 6y ago
      The average American didn't (and probably doesn't) distrust their government on anywhere near the same visceral level as someone living in the soviet union.
  - userulluipeste 6y ago
    "there was definitely a growing feeling that this couldn't go on for much longer during the 80's" I heard stories and I'm inclined to believe that it may as well have been just the feeling of later generations. As I understood, people expected things to relapse to previous order since before the WW2, a sentiment shared both by former rich hoping, and by former poor afraid of loosing their benefits. As time passed, all of them gradually accepted things as normal, and the expectation for change was carried on only by following younger generations. I also think that people in North Korea may have had the same feeling for an impending change, especially hearing of USSR collapse, yet that didn't count for much.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Chernobyl wasn't the cause of Soviet Union collapse. Arguably, the over-reach in Afghanistan was more important.
  - vasilipupkin 6y ago
    Chernobyl cost enormous amounts of money and Soviet Union collapsed shortly after, in part because it simply ran out of money dealing with Chernobyl
    - throw1234651234 6y ago
      Had very little to do with Chernobyl and Afghanistan, which were minor interventions. Had everything to do with Gorbachev's policies and underlying LONG-TERM economic problems.
      - vasilipupkin 6y ago
        this is false. Long term economic problems were there for years and it could have continued to hobble along with those problems for many more years. But cleaning up Chernobyl specifically cost so much money, that dealing with those problems became practically impossible. Soviet Union couldn't just print dollars like US can.
        throw1234651234 6y ago
        "Soviet Union couldn't just print dollars like US can." Any country can print more currency according to Modern Monetary Theory. Also, from Wikipedia: "The production of Soviet rubles was the responsibility of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise, or Goznak, which was in charge of the printing of and materials production for banknotes and the minting of coins in Moscow and Leningrad. " If you are trying to draw some sort of conclusion from the idea that the US is an international reserve currency - that has nothing to do with printing money. You can further read the "Economic role" section to understand that the USSR currency was not pegged to PMs or baskets of securities, making it easier to "just print".
Hokusai 6y ago
Without agreeing with many points, the main thesis is true but just for one point: XXI century economies are less resilient to isolation than in previous centuries. We live in a more complex society and countries need each other more than before. Communication is cheap, transport is cheap so it makes sense to rely on other for your own need. So, this lack of preparedness is true for USA, but also for many countries in Europe, and Asia. The more complex the society the more fragile it is to disruption. Is it solvable? Yes. Local renewable energy is a good example of reduction on distribution complexity. There is more knowledge involved, but there is less countries participant in the complexity. To stop believing in politics seems worse advice ever, thou. It seems more a receipt for collapse than a solution to be more resilient. > "Took 10 years to recover" Has Russia recovered? That also needs more probe. To be better that you were 10 years ago is not synonym of being recovered. Russia is just less chaotic, maybe.
- twomoretime 6y ago
  >Has Russia recovered? Was there anything to recover? Sure they beat everyone to space but the economy wasn't exactly roaring. My family tells me you didn't really have any kind of choice when you lined up to "shop" for groceries, and you had to know someone from the store to get anything good (better meat, rare sweets like jam) before stocks ran out. That's arguably something else to consider in this comparison. Yes we may have a further distance to go to recover to the US historic norm, but even under a collapse we may be closer to ensuring basic survival and even comfort than immediately post collapse Russia.
  - userulluipeste 6y ago
    "even under a collapse we may be closer to ensuring basic survival and even comfort than immediately post collapse Russia" One of Orlov's points though is that there is a difference in tolerance levels (i.e. Russians were more accustomed to hardships). Thus the question ought to be, even with an assured higher level of comfort compared to the USSR collapse, will people handle well enough a hypothetical US collapse?
- luckylion 6y ago
sacks2k 6y ago
When human life is meaningless and you don't have to make decisions around a pesky constitution and citizen rights, it's really easy to be prepared for anything.
- crankylinuxuser 6y ago
  Are you talking about the US, or the USSR?
- ltbarcly3 6y ago
  This is the opposite of what is true. When you have no rights and no constitution, the people who have control will use that control to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. They'll enforce policies that cause starvation and deprivation, often without even realizing they are doing so - there is no way for information to flow efficiently, and regional authorities only answer to the central authority and not at all to the people in their administrative area so they hide bad news. People use the USSR in WW2 as an example of where central planning led to success, after all they mobilized the entire country for war and eventually won. However, the entire Soviet army was destroyed multiple times. Putting on a Russian army uniform was basically the same as suicide. The rest of the world didn't have the power to force their citizens into certain death, and as a result they thought harder and were able to find ways to fight the war without 90% casualty rates and having entire divisions destroyed to the last man. Having to answer to your citizens leads you to be more prepared and more responsive to problems, not less.
  - sacks2k 6y ago
    "This is the opposite of what is true. When you have no rights and no constitution, the people who have control will use that control to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else." This was my point. The only reason the USSR is better 'prepared' for anything is because they can make choices that countries like the US can't, at the expense of human lives. "People use the USSR in WW2 as an example of where central planning led to success" This is a good example of success in a country that doesn't care about human life. USSR total deaths in WW2: 24 million United States: 418,000 I think we agree.
TomMckenny 6y ago
Another perhaps core issue is whether the party in power gets there by majority will or is there due to legalisms, archaic power distribution and voter suppression. The party that people didn't vote for is not likely to run anything in their interest.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  1. It's disingenuous to suggest that a party that regularly exceeds 45% of the popular vote is the party that people "didn't vote for" 2. The military boondoggles have continued uninterrupted since the collapse of the USSR almost regardless of who is in charge. G.W. Bush ran on a platform of not getting involved in foreign entanglements the way Clinton did, then Obama ran on a platform of not getting out of the entanglements that Bush got us into!
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Re: military boondoggles, the US has been at war for over 222 years of its existence, at least in the sense that it was involved in at least one war in each of 222 different years since 1776: https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473 https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473
- pmiller2 6y ago
  I know you’re referring to Bush v. Gore and the 2016 electoral / popular vote inversion, both of which benefited Republicans. We’re there any scenarios in recent history of the sort that benefited Democrats? I can’t think of any. That said, the solution to both of these is to abandon the Electoral College. This can be done either by Constitutional amendment, or by the agreement of a certain number of states [0]. What it wouldn’t fix is the huge body of campaign and election law and regulations that make it so there will always be exactly 2 major parties, starting with first past the post voting [1]. While Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem [2] practically guarantees we will have some paradoxical outcomes if we have 3 or more parties, even if we eliminate first past the post, I believe first past the post is one of the most anti-democratic practices we have in this country. Finally, while this isn’t really a hard fact, it seems to me that parliamentary forms of government tend to last longer than presidential governments. Changing this in the US would be near impossible, requiring a Constitutional amendment, but it seems to me it is our best hope of lasting another 200 years. —- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
ltbarcly3 6y ago
"This too will pass" -Captain Obvious The US will eventually suffer a collapse, that seems like a safe bet. Then it will probably recover, become dominant again (at least somewhat), and collapse again. If we look at Rome, that cycle could continue for 500 years or more. Wondering who is 'prepared' for a collapse is a weird way to think about it. If you are capable of taking steps to prepare for a collapse -- you wouldn't suffer a collapse.
huffmsa 6y ago
The US at the federal level, maybe. But it'll likely just fracture into smaller regional Nations made up of the states. Worst case, it's 50 separate nations. Especially now that we'll likely see a shift back towards state level autonomy, with the federal government's bungling of the SARS2 pandemic. The US is decentralized to begin with, the USSR was not. Decentralized systems fare better in collapse situations.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Corollary: Pay attention to elections to state offices, not just to national ones. They can matter.
hash872 6y ago
I dunno, seems a little overly dramatic. Previous world powers didn't collapse, they just faded- Britain, Spain, Portugal, etc. This seems much more likely, especially as budget issues prevent the US from deploying the same overwhelming military power all over the globe. America already spends more of its federal budget on entitlements than the military, contrary to what progressives will tell you- when push comes to shove, we'll always fund Social Security over another aircraft carrier or 30,000 troops in South Korea. So, a slow fadeout seems way, way more likely. Plus, declining birth rates & declining business dynamism. The states that actually collapse are the more rigid, authoritarian ones like the USSR or the Ottoman Empire. Plus the US has one advantage that previous stable empires didn't have- federalism, a decentralized system. Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders. No offense but I have to roll my eyes a bit at these disaster fetishists. Orlov is apparently a foreign-born one, but we have tens of thousands of domestic ones here in the states, this is a very old belief system. (Hell, my parents were back to the land hippies fleeing Nixon & the imminent nuclear apocalypse!)
- traes 6y ago
  > Previous world powers didn't collapse, they just faded- Rome?
  - VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
    The Roman Empire, in its various forms, lasted for 1000 years.
    - blululu 6y ago
      Indeed, and even after the fall of Constantinople there were various Byzantine Rump Staes in places like Trebizond. There is some historical chicanery in the classic Western European telling of the story of the 'Byzantine Empire'. No such country ever existed as such - the name was applied to the Eastern Roman Empire by German historians after the fall of Constantinople. While it still existed, the Eastern Roman Empire was referred to as the Roman Empire (or Roman Kingdom or simply Romania).
  - 6y ago
jrumbut 6y ago
It's so funny how widespread those beliefs about oil were. I would have guessed that by now we would be paying $300/bbl and everyone would know that the end of oil was near. It's hard to predict the future!
knolax 6y ago
The entire thing seems tongue in cheek to me. Not sure if it had any serious message.
yters 6y ago
I wonder if the different economic system had anything to do with USSR's collapse? And perhaps US collapse becomes more likely as we change economic systems? For example, communists killed and imprisoned all the kulaks (land owning farming class) to create their collective farms. Shortly thereafter the USSR was hit with devastating famine. Similar series of events happened in China under Mao. Coincidence or causation? If the latter, is this indicative of the nature of the USSR economy and perhaps provides insight into why it collapsed?
unnouinceput 6y ago
I have a saying in my country, it translates roughly like this: "Horsed don't die when dogs want/wish". Original is "Nu mor caii cand vor cainii"
dnprock 6y ago
The US is a federation of states. It has already fallen apart in some ways in this crisis. Power and decision making are shifting to local states. I think the trend will intensify. The biggest threat to the US is probably secession. That has not happened since the Civil War. Since then, it has become even more unified. It's hard to see how states can leave the Union now. Being able to shift power between local and federal is a strength of the US political system. At international level, the US alliance may fade away. I guess China would fall apart next. It's a country that's stitched together by force and propaganda. It doesn't seem to have the ability to shift its internal borders. So its collapse would be more dramatic than the US.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  In the first 100 years or so, the power in the US was more with states than the federal government. In the past 100 years, there has been an incredible accumulation of federal power. The balance is creeping back the original norm, with a long way to go before secession.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bobmcbobface 6y ago
This idea of US collapse, as framed seems deeply silly, for a number of reasons. 1. This isn't really the US we are talking about, its the Western economic system 2. Things 'collapse' in different ways. A slow collapse looks more like a transition. Most things don't collapse anywhere near as quickly as the USSR for obvious reasons.

71 points by krutulis 6y ago

cpr 6y ago

Orlov is a very interesting character who's written a lot about societal collapse, having lived through the Soviet version. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer)) I've read some of his books (The Five Stages of Collapse, e.g.) and there's a lot of food for thought. He's now spending his time designing and building "unsinkable" houseboats. His thinkpieces, which in the past were quite worthwhile, are now behind a paywall at

vasilipupkin 6y ago

yeah, except it's nonsense, Soviet Union was completely unprepared for collapse. It couldn't even survive Chernobyl.

flohofwoe 6y ago
East German here, so I don't know all that much of the details of Soviet society before the collapse (but my guess is that the situation wasn't all that different in all former socialist countries). I would agree that the (East German) state and government was entirely unprepared for its own collapse. But maybe the people were better prepared because they've been living at the brink of collapse for most of their lives. Shortages of one sort or the other were a normal occurance, you learned quickly to not depend too much on the state, but on family and other people. So when the state "disappeared" people more or less just went on with their business. And at least in the GDR there was definitely a growing feeling that this couldn't go on for much longer during the 80's, which may have created a "subconscious preparedness". And of course the "collapse of the GDR" wasn't an "apocalypse-style collapse", but in typical German fashion it was happening very orderly and predictable once the ball was rolling. And (here's a controversial opinion) even though many people had their lives turned upside down in the 90's, lost their job, had to emigrate into the "Golden West", even with all that... being poor in the reunited Germany still was a better life than being "rich" in East Germany (whatever that meant, because there was not much to buy for money anyway). I'm not sure how people in "the West" would have dealt with its own collapse if the sides had been reversed. Maybe we'll learn in the near future though.
- jotm 6y ago
  This "life always on the brink" preparedness is a major part of what's keeping poor European countries poor. Everybody distrusts the government, they rely on each other, learn to do things themselves so they don't rely on others. So, money doesn't exchange hands, taxes don't get paid, GDP doesn't grow, more money doesn't get printed. This is all in a very interconnected world with a mostly free economy, so outsiders just come and buy up everything because at the end of the day, money matters. Instead of preparing for collapse, how about preparing for being united in work and life and start trusting and depending on each other more.
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    I agree, but at least looking back that was pretty much the only way to keep going. The government wasn't able to solve (or even recognize) the problems of the "ordinary people", so the people had to deal with solving the problems themselves. Of course this will never be as effective as having an actually functional government, and it will lead to corruption in all levels of society.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    It's hard to trust thieves who demonstrably ignore laws when it suits them.
  - dickjocke 6y ago
    The average American didn't (and probably doesn't) distrust their government on anywhere near the same visceral level as someone living in the soviet union.
- userulluipeste 6y ago
  "there was definitely a growing feeling that this couldn't go on for much longer during the 80's" I heard stories and I'm inclined to believe that it may as well have been just the feeling of later generations. As I understood, people expected things to relapse to previous order since before the WW2, a sentiment shared both by former rich hoping, and by former poor afraid of loosing their benefits. As time passed, all of them gradually accepted things as normal, and the expectation for change was carried on only by following younger generations. I also think that people in North Korea may have had the same feeling for an impending change, especially hearing of USSR collapse, yet that didn't count for much.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Chernobyl wasn't the cause of Soviet Union collapse. Arguably, the over-reach in Afghanistan was more important.
- vasilipupkin 6y ago
  Chernobyl cost enormous amounts of money and Soviet Union collapsed shortly after, in part because it simply ran out of money dealing with Chernobyl
  - throw1234651234 6y ago
    Had very little to do with Chernobyl and Afghanistan, which were minor interventions. Had everything to do with Gorbachev's policies and underlying LONG-TERM economic problems.
    - vasilipupkin 6y ago
      this is false. Long term economic problems were there for years and it could have continued to hobble along with those problems for many more years. But cleaning up Chernobyl specifically cost so much money, that dealing with those problems became practically impossible. Soviet Union couldn't just print dollars like US can.
      - throw1234651234 6y ago
        "Soviet Union couldn't just print dollars like US can." Any country can print more currency according to Modern Monetary Theory. Also, from Wikipedia: "The production of Soviet rubles was the responsibility of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise, or Goznak, which was in charge of the printing of and materials production for banknotes and the minting of coins in Moscow and Leningrad. " If you are trying to draw some sort of conclusion from the idea that the US is an international reserve currency - that has nothing to do with printing money. You can further read the "Economic role" section to understand that the USSR currency was not pegged to PMs or baskets of securities, making it easier to "just print".

Hokusai 6y ago

Without agreeing with many points, the main thesis is true but just for one point: XXI century economies are less resilient to isolation than in previous centuries. We live in a more complex society and countries need each other more than before. Communication is cheap, transport is cheap so it makes sense to rely on other for your own need. So, this lack of preparedness is true for USA, but also for many countries in Europe, and Asia. The more complex the society the more fragile it is to disruption. Is it solvable? Yes. Local renewable energy is a good example of reduction on distribution complexity. There is more knowledge involved, but there is less countries participant in the complexity. To stop believing in politics seems worse advice ever, thou. It seems more a receipt for collapse than a solution to be more resilient. > "Took 10 years to recover" Has Russia recovered? That also needs more probe. To be better that you were 10 years ago is not synonym of being recovered. Russia is just less chaotic, maybe.

twomoretime 6y ago
>Has Russia recovered? Was there anything to recover? Sure they beat everyone to space but the economy wasn't exactly roaring. My family tells me you didn't really have any kind of choice when you lined up to "shop" for groceries, and you had to know someone from the store to get anything good (better meat, rare sweets like jam) before stocks ran out. That's arguably something else to consider in this comparison. Yes we may have a further distance to go to recover to the US historic norm, but even under a collapse we may be closer to ensuring basic survival and even comfort than immediately post collapse Russia.
- userulluipeste 6y ago
  "even under a collapse we may be closer to ensuring basic survival and even comfort than immediately post collapse Russia" One of Orlov's points though is that there is a difference in tolerance levels (i.e. Russians were more accustomed to hardships). Thus the question ought to be, even with an assured higher level of comfort compared to the USSR collapse, will people handle well enough a hypothetical US collapse?
luckylion 6y ago

sacks2k 6y ago

When human life is meaningless and you don't have to make decisions around a pesky constitution and citizen rights, it's really easy to be prepared for anything.

crankylinuxuser 6y ago
Are you talking about the US, or the USSR?
ltbarcly3 6y ago
This is the opposite of what is true. When you have no rights and no constitution, the people who have control will use that control to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. They'll enforce policies that cause starvation and deprivation, often without even realizing they are doing so - there is no way for information to flow efficiently, and regional authorities only answer to the central authority and not at all to the people in their administrative area so they hide bad news. People use the USSR in WW2 as an example of where central planning led to success, after all they mobilized the entire country for war and eventually won. However, the entire Soviet army was destroyed multiple times. Putting on a Russian army uniform was basically the same as suicide. The rest of the world didn't have the power to force their citizens into certain death, and as a result they thought harder and were able to find ways to fight the war without 90% casualty rates and having entire divisions destroyed to the last man. Having to answer to your citizens leads you to be more prepared and more responsive to problems, not less.
- sacks2k 6y ago
  "This is the opposite of what is true. When you have no rights and no constitution, the people who have control will use that control to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else." This was my point. The only reason the USSR is better 'prepared' for anything is because they can make choices that countries like the US can't, at the expense of human lives. "People use the USSR in WW2 as an example of where central planning led to success" This is a good example of success in a country that doesn't care about human life. USSR total deaths in WW2: 24 million United States: 418,000 I think we agree.

TomMckenny 6y ago

Another perhaps core issue is whether the party in power gets there by majority will or is there due to legalisms, archaic power distribution and voter suppression. The party that people didn't vote for is not likely to run anything in their interest.

aidenn0 6y ago
1. It's disingenuous to suggest that a party that regularly exceeds 45% of the popular vote is the party that people "didn't vote for" 2. The military boondoggles have continued uninterrupted since the collapse of the USSR almost regardless of who is in charge. G.W. Bush ran on a platform of not getting involved in foreign entanglements the way Clinton did, then Obama ran on a platform of not getting out of the entanglements that Bush got us into!
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Re: military boondoggles, the US has been at war for over 222 years of its existence, at least in the sense that it was involved in at least one war in each of 222 different years since 1776: https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473 https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473
pmiller2 6y ago
I know you’re referring to Bush v. Gore and the 2016 electoral / popular vote inversion, both of which benefited Republicans. We’re there any scenarios in recent history of the sort that benefited Democrats? I can’t think of any. That said, the solution to both of these is to abandon the Electoral College. This can be done either by Constitutional amendment, or by the agreement of a certain number of states [0]. What it wouldn’t fix is the huge body of campaign and election law and regulations that make it so there will always be exactly 2 major parties, starting with first past the post voting [1]. While Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem [2] practically guarantees we will have some paradoxical outcomes if we have 3 or more parties, even if we eliminate first past the post, I believe first past the post is one of the most anti-democratic practices we have in this country. Finally, while this isn’t really a hard fact, it seems to me that parliamentary forms of government tend to last longer than presidential governments. Changing this in the US would be near impossible, requiring a Constitutional amendment, but it seems to me it is our best hope of lasting another 200 years. —- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

ltbarcly3 6y ago

"This too will pass" -Captain Obvious The US will eventually suffer a collapse, that seems like a safe bet. Then it will probably recover, become dominant again (at least somewhat), and collapse again. If we look at Rome, that cycle could continue for 500 years or more. Wondering who is 'prepared' for a collapse is a weird way to think about it. If you are capable of taking steps to prepare for a collapse -- you wouldn't suffer a collapse.

huffmsa 6y ago

The US at the federal level, maybe. But it'll likely just fracture into smaller regional Nations made up of the states. Worst case, it's 50 separate nations. Especially now that we'll likely see a shift back towards state level autonomy, with the federal government's bungling of the SARS2 pandemic. The US is decentralized to begin with, the USSR was not. Decentralized systems fare better in collapse situations.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Corollary: Pay attention to elections to state offices, not just to national ones. They can matter.

hash872 6y ago

I dunno, seems a little overly dramatic. Previous world powers didn't collapse, they just faded- Britain, Spain, Portugal, etc. This seems much more likely, especially as budget issues prevent the US from deploying the same overwhelming military power all over the globe. America already spends more of its federal budget on entitlements than the military, contrary to what progressives will tell you- when push comes to shove, we'll always fund Social Security over another aircraft carrier or 30,000 troops in South Korea. So, a slow fadeout seems way, way more likely. Plus, declining birth rates & declining business dynamism. The states that actually collapse are the more rigid, authoritarian ones like the USSR or the Ottoman Empire. Plus the US has one advantage that previous stable empires didn't have- federalism, a decentralized system. Even in an emergency, we'd just see power shift to local state leaders. No offense but I have to roll my eyes a bit at these disaster fetishists. Orlov is apparently a foreign-born one, but we have tens of thousands of domestic ones here in the states, this is a very old belief system. (Hell, my parents were back to the land hippies fleeing Nixon & the imminent nuclear apocalypse!)

traes 6y ago
> Previous world powers didn't collapse, they just faded- Rome?
- VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  The Roman Empire, in its various forms, lasted for 1000 years.
  - blululu 6y ago
    Indeed, and even after the fall of Constantinople there were various Byzantine Rump Staes in places like Trebizond. There is some historical chicanery in the classic Western European telling of the story of the 'Byzantine Empire'. No such country ever existed as such - the name was applied to the Eastern Roman Empire by German historians after the fall of Constantinople. While it still existed, the Eastern Roman Empire was referred to as the Roman Empire (or Roman Kingdom or simply Romania).
- 6y ago

jrumbut 6y ago

It's so funny how widespread those beliefs about oil were. I would have guessed that by now we would be paying $300/bbl and everyone would know that the end of oil was near. It's hard to predict the future!

knolax 6y ago

The entire thing seems tongue in cheek to me. Not sure if it had any serious message.

yters 6y ago

I wonder if the different economic system had anything to do with USSR's collapse? And perhaps US collapse becomes more likely as we change economic systems? For example, communists killed and imprisoned all the kulaks (land owning farming class) to create their collective farms. Shortly thereafter the USSR was hit with devastating famine. Similar series of events happened in China under Mao. Coincidence or causation? If the latter, is this indicative of the nature of the USSR economy and perhaps provides insight into why it collapsed?

unnouinceput 6y ago

I have a saying in my country, it translates roughly like this: "Horsed don't die when dogs want/wish". Original is "Nu mor caii cand vor cainii"

dnprock 6y ago

The US is a federation of states. It has already fallen apart in some ways in this crisis. Power and decision making are shifting to local states. I think the trend will intensify. The biggest threat to the US is probably secession. That has not happened since the Civil War. Since then, it has become even more unified. It's hard to see how states can leave the Union now. Being able to shift power between local and federal is a strength of the US political system. At international level, the US alliance may fade away. I guess China would fall apart next. It's a country that's stitched together by force and propaganda. It doesn't seem to have the ability to shift its internal borders. So its collapse would be more dramatic than the US.

theandrewbailey 6y ago
In the first 100 years or so, the power in the US was more with states than the federal government. In the past 100 years, there has been an incredible accumulation of federal power. The balance is creeping back the original norm, with a long way to go before secession.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bobmcbobface 6y ago

This idea of US collapse, as framed seems deeply silly, for a number of reasons. 1. This isn't really the US we are talking about, its the Western economic system 2. Things 'collapse' in different ways. A slow collapse looks more like a transition. Most things don't collapse anywhere near as quickly as the USSR for obvious reasons.