Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA (“F” is for “Former”). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn’t make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.
… says the guy who is predicting that the US as we know it will collapse. He’s got a book, but most of what you need to know is in this loooooong blogpost (the text of a speech he gave). Many interesting comments, too.
Read it when you have two hours.
He does sort of skim over the hows and whys in his talk (maybe he gets more into it in the book) but his essential point is that the US is going to collapse for the same reasons that the USSR did: “a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt.”
Much of the talk, though, is how to survive — even thrive? — in a post-collapse world.
Not that I think, necessarily that this will happen, but you did hear that California’s going bankrupt, right? Things are not what they used to be.
(PS. This guy is (probably) not a crackpot. His theories were also somewhat shared by prominent Canadian thinker Gwynne Dyer.
Discussion question: Does the election of Obama change theories like these?
(Photo by Flickr user Marxchivist)
Grant Hamilton
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