I always enjoy Noah Smith's articles. Great read.

> With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S. will be a less appealing place for high-skilled workers to live

The above is a "concern" but it's not quite an "urgent issue" within the tech world. Cries to bring our public transportation into the 21st century go unheard (we can all afford to drive a nice car to work, so no need for urgent change), along with cries to improve educational standards for those who aren't upper-middle class (just pay for better schooling or simply move to a nicer neighborhood, no need for urgent change). Racial disparities and police brutality generally go ignored until there is overwhelming proof (well it looks like the only ones getting it bad are people who seem to deserve it, no need for urgent change). And then there's health care, which is tied to your employment (but if you have a nice gig compared to the masses, why would you want anything to upset the status quo?).

Perhaps the threat of industry moving away for good will be an incentive to take notice.

"The US is a 3rd world country with a Gucci belt."

the professional opinion columnist is a rare breed. I am torn on their practical utility but I also admire them and secretly wish I could be one.

If people think that America is a 3rd world country, or anywhere near a 3rd world country, then they haven't been to a 3rd world country. The US has major problems, undoubtedly, but we have a long way to fall till we hit the position of 3rd world. We are even leagues better than developing nations. I can say this as I have spent a long time living in both.

America is not literally a third world country. The expression "The US is a 3rd world with a Gucci belt" means that it is an extreme outlier for a 1st world country. The opposite is true in that China is an extreme outlier for a developing country.

Per 100,000 people, the US has 655 of them in prisons. The UK, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan have 140, 114, 100, 98, 75, and 41 respectively.

Can you provide some hard examples to compare the two?

Sure:

Healthcare: - In the US it is expensive but you get decent care. If you are not making enough you get medicaid or subsidized healthcare that actually works (even in most rural areas). - In for example Ukraine, technically there is socialized healthcare, but you still have to pay due to corruption. For the average Ukrainian, it's not an unsubstantial amount. They don't have the newest drugs, technology, or that sorts. I'm using Ukraine as an example but also applies to other developing countries generally.

Infrastructure: - US has bad infrastructure compared to Japan. But the roads are generally paved (even in most rural areas), there is normally some sort of government that fixes the infrastructure. Sure there are cases of the dam breaking, but there are many, many examples of the government building parks, dams, paving new roads, fixing things, etc. - In developing or even worse in an ldc, the rural roads are not normally paved except for 'main' roads. Outside major cities the road quality, building construction rapidly deteriorates. China is an exception to this, but I could talk a bit about China and how it is unique.

Water: - In the US water is generally safe. You are able to point to Flint, Michigan which has a population of less than 100k, and a few others. - In developing countries the water is bad. For instance when I first went to Moldova I got a very itchy and weird rash. When I started drinking bottled water, it went away. In other countries you can get parasites or diarrhea from drinking the water. This is not normally an issue in the US.

Corruption: - In the US you can go to the government and not worry about bribing or corruption in general. The police will not stop you and ask for money. The opposite is true in many developing nations.

Internet: - In the US, even in rural America, you can get Internet that is somewhat acceptable. Most Americans can visit Google and watch YouTube without major connection issues or that sort. Many places in rural areas of developing countries have bad connections at best.

Banking: - In the US you have FDIC, many banking regulations, solid legal framework, trusted institutions. It's a bit sketchy in other countries, though might be because I'm a foreigner. Banking fees are much higher from what I have seen, especially in Argentina+Chile. I was blown away when I was there.

These are just some of the things I could think of from the top of my head. There are many more things and experience I could talk about, but this is a good start. There is a reason why millions of people try and immigrate to the US each year, that's not just random. I'm sure you could point of exceptions to what I laid out, but those are just exceptions.

You made a lot of good points.

Pavements. You can learn everything you want to know about a country from its pavements.

Could the U. S. collapse “like Venezuela”, as the article suggests? Mmm, I think that has very low odds. But the fact that I’m willing to lay odds at all is a huge shift from if you had asked me 20 years ago when I might have laughed at the mere suggestion.

people, who have lived elsewhere, especially in the usual 3rd world countries and have also experienced some 1st world ones. will know the US is a rich 3rd world country, and has been since Reagan. the pain isn't felt yet much by the middle class due to them swallowing the america is great, propaganda. but step outside the us, and see a proper 1st world country, with fast transit, clean cities, less police presence. and then you realize you've been living a lie. hell, Westworld, had to shoot scenes in Singapore for a futuristic city

While I believe the USA and most of the western world is indeed declining, there is another side to this: Corona might be a wake up call.

Could anyone believe an article like this would be published in a major news org before Corona? It was unthinkable.

But now we all see the governements blundering from one incompetent stupidity to the next. All western governements, not only the USA.

Before Corona, people knew but didn't care much. Apathy and cynicism everywhere. But now, reaction is building. Slowly, but at last something is moving.

I think we need a rude wake up call. I just hope this is rude enough.

> Could anyone believe an article like this would be published in a major news org before Corona? It was unthinkable.

Yes it could. It wasn't unthinkable at all. In fact the entire campaign of the current president was based on the fact that the USA is not as great as it once was, that it is in need to be made great again. So yes, this sentiment was very much spread all around before the pandemic, with widely different ideas on how to correct the trajectory but that's beside the point.

Yes and no. The current US president has a completely different communication style than the 'serious'-tone mainstream media. You're correct that he's become president because of it.

And people were aware and complaining, but not doing much themselves. That's what changing now.

> With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S.

At least the first five of these seem to mostly be a problem in New York, where the author is based, and similar cities, not “America” writ large. For example, the author complains about the housing costs, but the national home ownership rate in the US is about the same as the UK or France, and substantially higher than Germany. (And the median American home is twice as big as in those countries.) The author complains about the lack of transit, but the median American commute is among the shortest in the OECD. The homicide rate in my Maryland county isn’t great (about 2 per 100,000) but it’s closer to say Canada or Belgium (1.7-1.8 per 100,000) than those countries are to Sweden (1.1 per 100,000). Racial divisions are a challenge throughout America, of course, but that’s true all over the world. France’s Macron is talking about a government takeover of Islam: https://www.ft.com/content/88c1e898-5269-11ea-90ad-25e377c0e.... And Macron is the liberal! Le Pen, a far right candidate, is polling dangerously close to him at 45-55. As a brown person, I’d much rather be in America right now even with Trump than in France.

What the recent situations are bringing out is not that “America” is in decline, but that “American cities” are in decline. The mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, recently said that cutting police funding was impossible, because given the union contracts the city would have to lay off mostly black and Hispanic officers! This is a police force that was running Abu Ghraib-style interrogation centers. For what New York is spending extending one subway line a few miles, cities like Copenhagen have built entire new, fully automated, lines. New York City spends $25,000 per student, or about 44% of the city’s median income. London spends just 15% of the city’s median household per student.

You can’t fix a problem unless you can properly identify the problem. Articles like this are willfully blind to the problem.

You are making several false comparisons. Home ownership rate is not the same as housing costs. A lack of transit options is not the same thing as the length of commute. In both these cases they are likely barely correlated. Also why would you assume that other countries don't also have an unequally distributed patterns between their major metropolitan and more rural/suburban areas? You compare statistics of your county with entire other countries as if it provides some kind of useful data point.

> Home ownership rate is not the same as housing costs.

No, but it’s a strong indicator that housing costs are not unaffordable nationwide, but merely in some high cost cities where most people don’t live.

> A lack of transit options is not the same thing as the length of commute.

Talking about “transit options” presupposes a solution to a problem. The problem is getting people to places, not transit per se. The US has chosen to prioritize direct car travel over potentially indirect transit, and the result is that Americans spend less time commuting than almost anyone else in the OECD. Put differently, for most Americans, the fact they have a 25 minute auto commute instead of a 45 minute train commute is not a sign of America being “in decline” but rather an advantage.

As to homicides, other countries do not have the same massive differences in homicide rate between cities and suburbs as the US. My county includes a small city (the state capital). The homicide rate in the nearest big city, 30 minutes away, is almost 15 times higher. By contrast, the homicide rate in London is only 50% higher than in the UK as a whole. Toronto’s homicide rate is actually lower than Canada as a whole. The differences are small enough to ignore for purposes of the point I’m making, which is that many parts of America are quite safe. Large cities have stratospheric levels of violence, but most of the population doesn’t live there.

So what is the problem exactly? You don’t really say.

I don’t know! But we have a pretty good idea where the problem is. Most of the stuff that the author complains about: housing, infrastructure, education, policing, etc., are local issues. They’re not local just in the US, with our federal system, they’re local in many other developed countries too: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/reg_glance-2016-32-e... (table 3.1). In the US state and local governments are responsible for about half of all spending. That’s on the more “federal” side, but in line with say Germany or Spain. Canada, Denmark, and Sweden delegate even more spending authority to state and local governments, with a remarkable 80% of total government spending being controlled at the provincial level in Canada.

So if New York can’t build transit because it costs ten times as much per mile as in Germany, or New York can’t properly educate its kids even though it spends twice as much per student as other developed nations, or New York has high housing prices—is that a problem with “America” as the article claims? Or is it a problem with New York?

Gonna be honest, I’m taking my family out of the country as soon as we are able to leave. I don’t want my children to grow up here, what are they going to do in 20 years when everything is so much worse than it is now? Anybody can see which way the wind is blowing. Good job baby boomers, you win. You used the whole country as an atm machine and ran it into the ground. Hope that 5% tax cut was worth it.

Where will you go?

I think we always have to be a bit skeptical of articles in this genre. A decline narrative ought to imply different or at least refocused policies, where some important things aren't relevant to the decline and other less important things are. When an author ties every problem in the country to the decline, and their proposed solution is enacting all their preferred policies, it really comes across as more of a manifesto. Will investors really "abandon the U.S. and the dollar in large amounts" because gun violence is high or the subways are poor quality?

No they won't. But only because there is no alternative.

The vast majority of global economic activity now happens in Asia. Tech was one sweet area dominated by the US but even that seems to be sliding (happily being enabled by the administration).

Once these economic activity participants figure out a way to avoid the dollar, they will (there is no goodwill with the dollar). When this happens, its done. We are busted.

That said, nobody is moving away from the dollar soon. However, we need to elect representatives who don't jeopardize this. Being the global reserve means moving in lock step with the world. It doesn't mean reneging or bullying.

The US GDP in 2019 was bigger than the next three countries combined.

I'm not sure your statement is accurate

The article makes the point that America could be seen as undesirable to live in for highly-skilled workers (by extension companies). If that happens, GDP balance could shift dramatically in a short period of time.

Notwithstanding GDP being kind of a BS metric.

That's a fascinating measure. Thanks for sharing that. I didn't even know about that.

It would seem that our currency is overvalued then if our true output is skewed by our currency exchange rates?

How does that reconcile?

Because the demand for dollars is 7 billion people + entities vs demand for say Chinese yuan is 1.4 billion people + chinese entities only.

Basic supply and demand. If demand for US dollar reduces (say all Asian countries band together like EU to form a megacurrency), they will stop keeping too many dollars in reserve and demand will drop, thus currency value will drop and the US will drop in GDP rankings.

That's fascinating. Thank you for the info! Have been digging deeper into this.

Sure, but by the haircut metric, it's inevitable that most economic activity will take place on the continent where most people live. There's no economic policy the US could pursue to prevent that, even if for some amoral reason they wanted to.

Prevention is the wrong approach in the first place. The only thing US can do is maintain a technological lead.

Without technological lead, the US is much like Brazil, which is a middling nation with lots of natural resources.

> The vast majority of global economic activity now happens in Asia

For production, yes. For consumption, no.

Take away American consumption, and lots of countries will fall into decline very quickly.

Sadly I might be proven correct in the next 12-24 months.

I can certainly see why maintaining the dollar's position requires cultivating a reputation as a country that doesn't bully others or renege on its agreements. But again, what does that have to do with gun violence?

It projects the US as an uncivilized country, on par with mismanaged democracies where kids are routinely shot in schools.

Sure, but you could make that argument about any problem in the US. Is there a reason to believe gun violence is particularly problematic to foreign investors? If not it's pretty strange to bring up foreign investment as a reason we should prevent gun violence.