Well, I happen to think that the US is finished with its Greatest Power stage, just like every other nation in History that was once the Greatest Power for a while eventually fell of that pedestal, hence you could say you’re totally fucked in aggregate. However given the massive disparity in wealth distribution over there and how the gains and the costs of Imperial America are distributed - a few people get most of the gains whilst most people get to pay for the costs such as the Military - it’s quite possible that as the US becomes Just Another Big Nation and thus less rich in aggregate, the majority of people are still better off than before because they never really got the benefits of Imperial America whilst having to pay the costs.
Ultimatelly it depends on how much the elites destroy on their way down, which in turn depends on how much people in general fight against or cooperate with their desperate clinging to their elite position in an elite nation.
(By the way, your efficiency point is interesting: you see, one of those ideas of efficiency is long term - specifically the diversification for robustness one - and the other one is short-term. Short term efficiency yield more results moment by moment but does so at the risk of collapse from even relativelly mild external shocks, by which point that system stops operating and has to be rebuilt and if you count those downtimes and the cost of rebuilding, it actually adds up to less in the long run. Long term efficiency as you described it add robustness to shocks hence makes something unlikely to collapse when faced with one, but does so at the cost of less efficiency when things are going fine and there are no shocks. Ultimatelly what is the best efficiency depends of your time-frame: for example a Nation State, which aims to exist ideally forever, should be aiming for long-term efficiency, whilst a speculative investor in the Stock Market naturally only cares about short-term efficiency as they’re in-today-out-tomorrow - the former has an outlook measured in decades or centuries, the latter in days or months)
As for your second point, I agree that we don’t have enough data and probably never will: the world changes and no two situations are the same so we’ll never be sure.
So anything you chose to do is a risk.
However doing nothing is just as much a risk.
Usually change happens when people’s judgement of those risks (which is generally flawed) is heavilly tilted to seeing “do nothing” as the greatest risk.
Well, I happen to think that the US is finished with its Greatest Power stage, just like every other nation in History that was once the Greatest Power for a while eventually fell of that pedestal, hence you could say you’re totally fucked in aggregate. However given the massive disparity in wealth distribution over there and how the gains and the costs of Imperial America are distributed - a few people get most of the gains whilst most people get to pay for the costs such as the Military - it’s quite possible that as the US becomes Just Another Big Nation and thus less rich in aggregate, the majority of people are still better off than before because they never really got the benefits of Imperial America whilst having to pay the costs.
Ultimatelly it depends on how much the elites destroy on their way down, which in turn depends on how much people in general fight against or cooperate with their desperate clinging to their elite position in an elite nation.
(By the way, your efficiency point is interesting: you see, one of those ideas of efficiency is long term - specifically the diversification for robustness one - and the other one is short-term. Short term efficiency yield more results moment by moment but does so at the risk of collapse from even relativelly mild external shocks, by which point that system stops operating and has to be rebuilt and if you count those downtimes and the cost of rebuilding, it actually adds up to less in the long run. Long term efficiency as you described it add robustness to shocks hence makes something unlikely to collapse when faced with one, but does so at the cost of less efficiency when things are going fine and there are no shocks. Ultimatelly what is the best efficiency depends of your time-frame: for example a Nation State, which aims to exist ideally forever, should be aiming for long-term efficiency, whilst a speculative investor in the Stock Market naturally only cares about short-term efficiency as they’re in-today-out-tomorrow - the former has an outlook measured in decades or centuries, the latter in days or months)
As for your second point, I agree that we don’t have enough data and probably never will: the world changes and no two situations are the same so we’ll never be sure.
So anything you chose to do is a risk.
However doing nothing is just as much a risk.
Usually change happens when people’s judgement of those risks (which is generally flawed) is heavilly tilted to seeing “do nothing” as the greatest risk.