402
Wages are stagnant and cost of living is ridiculous. Are we headed for a crash?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
402 points (98.3% liked)
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Definitely. We're well and truly overdue for the Republicans and Democrats to go the way of the Whigs and the Bull Moose.
I really don't think we have enough data points to be sure about that. It's basically just Rome and China. (And Egypt, but iirc we don't know enough about their internal politics to know why they fell) The US hasn't reached that kind of peak. But either way, I'm fine with the US never reaching the same heights it once had. If it were to become a regional superpower instead of an international one, but treat its people better, I'd be totally okay with that.
On that last point, Rome, Greece, China, Egypt, Spain & Portugal (from the Discoveries time), several Middle Eastern nations several times (from the Babylonians to the Persians and even the Arabs - back in the 12th Century the most advanced people in the World were Arabs, then known as Moors) and so on (if I remember it correctly the Mayan civilization fell before the Spanish Conquistadores got there, which would make it yet another one that fell to internal problems rather than external factors).
It's a pretty common dynamic.
Greece was only ever united for a grand total of 15 years. When Alexander died, they returned to being a loose collection of city-states.
Totally forgot about that particular empire, I admit; but their peak was in the 1700s and their "fall" was, like, a few years before I was born in the 1970s, so I don't know if they necessarily support your point about a necessary fall and long recovery as such. In fact, lower-class workers in Spanish colonies in the 1800s were eating better than middle-class citizens in France during that time; and far from taking centuries to return to a functional status, it's basically a world economy again.
Did Portugal ever fall? They divested of their colonies, and the monarchy fell, but those two events happened more or less independently of one another. You're right that Portugal lasted for a long time; but my understanding of the revolution is that there wasn't a prolonged period of economic pressure on the citizens of Portugal and that the revolution was mostly ideological.
Those have about the same trouble as Egypt in figuring out the internal reasons for its fall, in the case of both the Old- and the Neo-Babylonian Empire as well as the Persian empire and Achaemenid empire.
Each caliphate only lasted for a few decades, maybe a century or two. I don't know enough about them to be able to speak intelligently on their internal politics at the time of their fall.
That one definitely lasted for about 4,000 years, true, but like Greece they were an interdependent network of city-states rather than a united empire. The Classic Maya civilization declined precipitously due to unknown reasons, and the post-classical civilization was conquered by the Spanish, so there's no real evidence there that would point toward anything here.
So yeah, common-ish dynamic; but we can't really divine any historical information to inform our current situation from any of them, for one reason or another. At least I don't think we can conclude that long-running or wide-ranging empires are or are not regularly destroyed by internal unrest due to economic disparities.
I'm Portuguese.
Portugal fell so far down that in the XX Century until 1974 it was under a Fascist dictatorship and was so poor it got food help from other nations in Europe (but the dictator sure liked to celebrate the "Time of the Discoveries").
In our divergence of opinion, at least specifically when it comes to the timing of the fall of the US from its peak, time will tell.
PS: I don't think the destruction due to internal unrest is merely from economic disparities - that's just one of the symptoms. I think it's mainly social, cultural and structural factors that create downstream problems like said economic disparities and keep on doing it because the problem is structural, not merely economical, and those things sustain themselves (for example, corrupt politicians aren't going to put in place structures to fight corruption, quite the contrary). The fall is not merely from economic disparities, it's because the whole society has grown "fat and lazy" - the spirit of people and, maybe more importantly, of the power elites who control how the country operates, is that they are "winners", but all of that is anchored on the successes of their ancestors (in the US case, one example of that is American Exceptionalism), and that kind of posture doesn't self correct and the nation itself is too big and powerful for it to be corrected by external actors. The whole thing is a bigger version of the very commonly story told all over the World in various variants about how Wealth goes in cycles of 3 generations: the first builds it, the second consolidates it and the third blows it away - having been brought up in wealth the third generation doesn't have the same spirit as the people who built the wealth in the first place.
Anyways, this is just pseudo-Philosophical thinking and, as I said, time will tell.
In that case I stand corrected.
So, about 3-4 generations before people got fed up, then? I think that actually supports my original point: people don't suffer economic injustice for longer than a couple of generations ("couple" in this case used more loosely).
I think we may be in a chicken-and-the-egg problem here, where we disagree about which is the cause and which is the effect, but otherwise we agree.
Yeah, and it seems pretty clear that in any case, it's going to kind of suck for the people who live here.