The same guy who predicted collapse of USSR, is predicting the collapse of U.S.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

by vaksel • 18 years ago

28 58 18 years ago

online.wsj.com

vaksel• 18 years ago

Although based on his "map"....I have no idea how anyone is taking him seriously.

jackowayed2• 18 years ago

I think that was just like a shock tactic to really get people's attention at the presentation. It might be more of good presenting (start with a bang so people will be interested) than actually taking delight in America dying to that extent.

(That said, some of his comments make it seem that maybe that is why he made the map.)

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Yeah, it looks pretty dumb.

On a somewhat related note, if we folded the federal government and signed a free-trade and migration pact between the 50 states, would we miss anything?

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

Well there are economies of scale when you only have to maintain one standing army rather than 50 separate ones.

lliiffee• 18 years ago

Illinois would miss the existence of feds to investigate corruption like Blagojevich the state is incapable of self-policing.

davidw• 18 years ago

Looks like silly reddit-bait to me, and if you didn't take it seriously, why'd you post it? Who are the bozos who voted this up, anyway?:-)

angstrom• 18 years ago

Dumb? It looks like a 4th grader's homework assignment to identify the 5 regions of the US and he clearly got an F.

biohacker42• 18 years ago

Based on his anything I don't know why anyone is taking him seriously... but I suspect it's because people love to be entertained.

kwamenum86• 18 years ago

The guy seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of "how stuff works" and seems to have predicted a future similar to the fate suffered by the USSR although the circumstances under which each was forged are completely different.

I also like how he tries to deliver this theory as completely devoid of anti-American sentiment.

larryfreeman• 18 years ago

Actually, your title is not correct. Igor Panarin predicts the collapse of the US. Emmanuel Todd predicted the collapse of the USSR in 1976. They are two different people.

nikils• 18 years ago

Interview of Emmanuel Todd (2005) http://www.truthout.org/article/emmanuel-todd-the-specter-a-...

palish2• 18 years ago

This is why I love Hacker News. Bullshit is made known.

stcredzero• 18 years ago

I had to decide if this was a pro-HN comment or not. One could argue that reddit, Fark, and Digg make bullshit known -- known to the world on the front page.

In the end I decided that you mean: People call out the bullshit on HN.

peakok• 18 years ago

I'm French and I know Todd, the title sounds correct to me. Todd predicted the collapse of USSR (when it was a minority position among intellectuals), and it has been several years he is "predicting" the collapse of the U.S (way before the current crisis). His main prediction is the collapse of the U.S dollar.

A very important thing to note is that he believes the U.S is gone as the sole superpower. What he really means by collapse is about the same fate that endured the British Empire.

jerf2• 18 years ago

Is anybody actually predicting the US will remain the sole superpower for... crud, I can't even come up with a decent time specification for this question... 100 years?

Even assuming the US doesn't have anything called a "collapse", it's obvious to anybody with eyes that there are a number of countries that will inevitably grow to superpower status over time. This is normal, and arguably good, since the alternative ("everybody stays poor") is probably bad. Singulatarians would argue that tech is moving such that people, or at least small collections of people (on the order of tens of people), may become "superpowers" by modern standards.

Even the most optimistic predictions of continued US success don't have it coming at the expense of other success, and the economic phenomenon that less developed countries have much more low-hanging fruit, allowing them to grow to modern standards much faster than the leaders, will not stop anytime soon.

Seems to me the question of whether the US will "collapse" is distinct from the question of whether it will be the "sole superpower" across any timespan past 10 or 20 years. (Slightly later edit: And the collapse of the US won't make China a superpower, it will mean there simply isn't one for a while. Superpower is ill-defined, but it definitely has something to do with being able to project force around the world, and China can't do that yet, except with nukes, and if that makes a superpower, than they are already there, along with numerous others.)

jcl2• 18 years ago

Regardless of whether the title is factually correct on its own, it is not a good description of the article -- which mentions Panarin exclusively as the US-collapse predictor and Todd exclusively as the USSR-collapse predictor.

jackowayed2• 18 years ago

I predicted that a tower I made out of toothpicks would collapse a few years ago. And it did.

Now I'm predicting that the Empire State Building will collapse. I must be right, I've done it before.

Even if he is the guy who predicted the USSR's collapse, that's meaningless now.

Also, Mexico is nowhere near powerful enough to control/influence that much of the US, so that part is clearly wrong.

The other parts are at least theoretically possible but still pretty unlikely.

siong1987• 18 years ago

Bullshit.

I don't think I need any reason to support my claim. Anyone who read the article will know why.

jmtame2• 18 years ago

I like that he's asking you to accept a theory of his, but I want to hear both sides. Preferably, with evidence that makes sense, not just preconceived notions.

Nations have fallen to civil wars and dissolution before. I'm a little skeptic to just think that we're vulnerable to that, but at the same time, we're not invincible either. It would be silly to think that nothing bad could happen to the US.

Right now, it's just speculation based on classified information that may or may not be true.

baguasquirrel• 18 years ago

We've been through a Great Depression before. Economic and social lines were at least as strong then as they are now. At least we don't have Jim Crow laws now. Now, we have two coasts that are considered urban, not one, so it's actually somewhat less of an urban vs. rural divide (remember that whole Manifest Destiny thing?).

As a nation, the U.S. is more uniform than it is then so any such theory would have to explain how this is to our detriment, how an increase in similarity can actually provoke serious infighting, because the psychology research shows that people who are more similar tend to get along together in the long run. More than that, we just elected a uniter, who seems to pick good advisors no less.

So in all, I really want to see this classified information, because we've been through pretty bad times before (that's pretty good evidence, yes?) and this country didn't break up then.

petercooper• 18 years ago

The American people are too united by a love of their nation for this to occur.

While Soviets often had a patriotic admiration of their country, it was often framed in the sense of the USSR being better than someone else, rather than on its own merits. Also, people were more locally pariotic: Russians were more Russian and Ukrainians more Ukrainian than Soviet.

Do Americans strongly identify themselves by their home state? In my experience (as an outsider) they do in a somewhat relaxed manner, but nowhere near the extremes of their pride and hope in the United States of America as a country. The strong inter-state migration also appears to support this.

ralph• 18 years ago

Separate from the collective mind of Americans is the status of the US Dollar as a "reserve currency", i.e. one that people are happy to hold in times of trouble. If that goes then, given the USA is bankrupt, it'll be in trouble. It's only because it's a reserve currency that the USA can afford to chuck bills from helicopters; elsewhere, doing that has caused the currency to fall dramatically, e.g. that idiot Gordon Brown in the UK.

China holds quite a few dollars and is wary of the USA's plans on trying to spend its way out of this recession in case their value slumps. There's an argument that all these rescue plans are just prolonging the inevitable, just as the boom was stretched by Greenspan's actions making it a huge bust to mirror the huge boom. What's needed is a hard crash in asset prices, houses, stocks, commodities, etc., until buyers are convinced that a hard bottom has been found. Then they'll be interested in buying again. And companies going to the wall in that time is a good thing; it culls the weak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

There's still worried talk of deflation. I think they're over concerned. There's some things I must buy, even if they're a bit cheaper tomorrow, e.g. food, and if my TV breaks, I'll replace it. By over-compensating for fear of deflation, we're facing high double-digit inflation in a year or so.

Reminds me of that old matra: For deflation, hold cash. For inflation, hold gold. For hyper-inflation, hold guns.

amirnathoo• 18 years ago

"The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right."

I was going to say that this is obviously rubbish and if the professor is spouting it then it reflects very badly on his hypothesis. But then I thought about what I would say if some journalist asked an insightful question like 'this is all rubbish and can't possibly be true, right?'

The most charitable way of looking at it is: maybe he was trying to remind people how wide the bounds of possibility are and that ruling out the prediction without examining his methods would be premature.

jmtame2• 18 years ago

"He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says."

How credible is his source?

ahoyhere2• 18 years ago

One thought: fap fap fap.

kragen• 18 years ago

Impossible to say, since he doesn't tell us who they are.

sdurkin• 18 years ago

Texas alone would be more powerful than Mexico.

henning• 18 years ago

Eh. The thing with predictions is that all you have to do is have tons of people making predictions about every imaginable frightening, unlikely scenario and some of them will eventually wind up coming true. Predicting that a country in a recession will "collapse" is a pretty reasonable thing to do if you're in the business of making wild predictions no one is going to call you on if they turn out to be incorrect.

mixmax• 18 years ago

Excellent point. This dynamic has also led to doomsday sayers such as Peter Schiff being heralded as the genius that saw what noone else saw, when in reality he might just have been lucky. There are probably 100 Peter Schiff's out there whose predictions didn't hold up, and who we subsequently don't herald as heroes.

ahoyhere2• 18 years ago

Methinks somebody has spent too much time reading Shadowrun novelizations.

joubert• 18 years ago

It would be OK if Russia gets Alaska, as long as they take Palin too.

thomasmallen3• 18 years ago

The WSJ is officially yellow journalism.

This map is a real trip. South Carolina splitting from Georgia? Mexico owning New Mexico but not Arizona? If he's going to prop up ridiculous fantasies, at least he could try harder.

What pains the the Russians to no end is that the very idea of the nation state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America. Only their backward, so-called "democracy" and a handful of nations in east Asia take it very seriously anymore, while the concept is used to pit regions against one another in Africa (see the US interference in Ethiopia and Somalia for a good case study). Make no mistake, "India vs. Pakistan" and "Iran vs. the Middle East" are culture wars with borders providing the necessary tension.

randallsquared2• 18 years ago

"the very idea of the nation state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America."

I'd love for that to be so, but it sounds like wish-fulfillment, to me. Care to provide links to more about that?

thomasmallen3• 18 years ago

MERCOSUR and the EU predictably come to mind. The US, I think, treats Canada and Mexico very differently from other nations (being a neighbor); North America is fairly unified. The US doesn't hold up its non-interventionist/isolationist end of the Monroe Doctrine, but the loose North/South American protectorate set out by that diplomatic philosophy certainly holds true today. MERCOSUR is a good example of nations asserting their sovereignty with a trade bloc rather than via national posturing, weakening this protectorate.

I can't provide links (books are of greater help when synthesizing theories for me) to prove this, but I do recommend reading up on the aforementioned trading blocs, as well as this excellent book: http://www.amazon.com/End-Nation-State-Regional-Economies/dp...

gruseom• 18 years ago

the nation state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America

Where are the ents going?

grouchyOldGuy• 18 years ago

That's exactly the thoughts that I had. The map looked like it was logically partitioned by geography with the map maker unfamiliar with the local cultures in those states. I can't see Arizona siding with California over Texas (or any of the other western states except maybe Oregon and Washington). The same goes for traditionally southern states of South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia all opting to join the EU?

I can see an economic collapse and the fall of the USA as the most dominant super-power, but I don't see the country fracturing along the lines given in this article. One does not necessarily lead to the other.

thomasmallen3• 18 years ago

Not to be petty, but West Virginia isn't really a southern state. It, along with portions of Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Tennessee, is part of what we call Appalachia, a mostly rural rust-belt region.

dilap• 18 years ago

Nah, it's not yellow journalism -- it's from the WSJ's middle column, a place for quirky character profiles (which this story is) and human-interest stories. Previous topics have included truck-driving competitions and the wild-boar infestation of Berlin.

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

"Nah, it's not yellow journalism -- it's from the WSJ's middle column, a place for quirky character profiles (which this story is) and human-interest stories. Previous topics have included truck-driving competitions and the wild-boar infestation of Berlin."

Good point. CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT. The article was published to start interesting conversations like the one in this thread.

raphar• 18 years ago

quote: But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. EOQ

I agree that the article is more 'fun' than 'news', but is the WSJ implying in the sentence above that USA has nothing to see with the mentioned issues?

lampy• 18 years ago

For some reason ex-Sovient Union population still thinks US is out to get them.

I know because I grew up there and still talk to old friends.

Wake up, Cold War ended decades ago and we live in a global economy now. No matter what you see in movies you don't know anything about this country. You need to live here for at least, I would say, 3 years to understand it.

The article is silly.

rgrieselhuber• 18 years ago

Wasn't this a Choose Your Own Adventure novel in the 80s?

zandorg• 18 years ago

Or a Children's Film Foundation film?

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

I think Russia will win the race to the bottom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia

Allocator2008• 18 years ago

Huey Newton predicted the collapse of the nation state long ago, since he correctly foresaw that the global economy would become more important than particular nations. I live in Texas now, but I may well move to California, in light of all this. A China controlled California would be economically better off I would think than a Mexico controlled Texas Republic. Nothing against Mexico, but I am just thinking in which of these new Republics I can get iPods at a reasonable cost.

bprater• 18 years ago

Supposing this happened: what part of the country would you choose to live in?

lionheart• 18 years ago

As an American who was born in the USSR, I can confidently say that this prediction is completely based on the typical Russian misunderstanding of the culture of the United States.

He seems to think that the United States is exactly like the USSR in 1990, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Just look at his map. Its hilarious.

The USSR was a conglomeration of formerly separate countries who were culturally distinct, constantly bickered and fought. This was was mostly because the USSR wasn't around long enough for people to forget what independence for their country was like.

So yes, at the first sign of weakness of the central government each previously independent country eagerly broke away. They even had their old government systems to dredge up and fall back on when they wanted.

The 50 states, on the other hand, have never been separate countries (with one or two minor exceptions).

The Texans, while they might complain about the Californians, do not consider themselves a different ethnicity.

And the map's ideas of what countries will control what parts? Is he kidding me?

How can China possibly control the west coast? Its insane. The language and cultural barrier is insurmountable. And Mexico controlling Texas and the south east? Are you kidding me?

This shows a complete ignorance of the cultural issues of the region.

jon_dahl• 18 years ago

I'm involved with a business that does quite a lot of work in Russia and neighboring countries (or did until credit markets collapsed there this fall). What I've learned is that Russia fundamentally misunderstands the US, and the US fundamentally misunderstands Russia.

Our biggest mistake is that we both project our own experiences on the other. This article is a great example of this, as lionheart points out. In the other direction, we were wrong in thinking that the most likely alternative in 1991 to Soviet communism was US-style democracy.

While this guy's ideas are laughable, I understand how they could spread. I can imagine a similar book being written in the US about the Muslim world - playing on our fears, outlining some crazy scenario for the Middle East with no real basis in reality, and completely misunderstanding the differences between Iran and Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, etc.

qw• 18 years ago

I couldn't agree more. There are lots of Americans who thinks of Europe in the same way as the US. Just because most of western Europe is in the EU and share a continent, doesn't mean that you can say something about one country just because you have visited another. And we're talking about Europe here. I can only imagine the kinds of misconceptions we (both Europeans and Americans) have about the Middle East

lallysingh2• 18 years ago

There's an old joke about economists predicting 11 of the last 3 recessions... Should we do it now for nations failing?

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

The New York Times on the Russian natural gas monopoly, Gazprom:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/business/worldbusiness/30g...

"That Russia’s largest state-run energy company needs a bailout so soon after oil hit record highs last summer is a telling postscript to a turbulent period. Once the emblem of the pride and the menace of a resurgent Russia, Gazprom has become a symbol of this oil state’s rapid economic decline."

The same guy who predicted collapse of USSR, is predicting the collapse of U.S.

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