[throwaway34241]

I think it's useful to explore historical perspectives, but there are many others. If I look at my parents' generation in the US, people were being forced against their will to fight overseas in a war that didn't achieve anything (and involved mass poisoning the crops of substance farmers). You had double-digit inflation, rationing gas by license plate, and, at points, literal price controls.

Before the baby boomers we had global war, before that the great depression and growing literal communism, before that prohibition and the mob. And of course prohibition was prompted by social problems around alcohol.

So I don't think "problems compound" is always true. For a long time, teen pregnancy and alcohol use were on the rise, but that trend didn't continue indefinitely, and both have relatively recently had dramatic declines.

If you look closely enough at any time period there are often multiple serious political, economic, and/or social problems, so much so that it seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

> Post-stalinist Soviet Union, while not manically murderous, eventually imploded under the weight of a myriad suboptimal policy choices

Even this I'm not so sure. Here is a graph of their GDP [1]. My understanding is it was a political collapse first (a failed coup), and the economic collapse followed. An example that I've read China has been very mindful of (apparently Xi talks about Russia much more in his books than he does the US).

> I do wonder how US/China rivalry will play out in the 2040s and beyond.

Me too, at that point they'll probably be a much larger economy than the US. Will that have a destabilizing effect (especially with a potential military conflict over Taiwan)? Or will (the US) having a shared rival be somewhat unifying? The UK did OK despite declining in (relative) importance, but I could imagine the US struggling with its domestic problems even without any great power rivalry...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP_per_capi...

[angelzen]

Life in the '80s in the Soviet Union space was marred by widespread food shortages. Here is a fairly accurate video of how the usual grocery shop looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8LtQhIQ2AE When the sporadic food supply truck would show up, people would line up for hours, many only to leave empty handed when the load would inevitably run out.

In 1989 Boris Yeltsin visited Texan grocery store and was positively shocked by the choice and availability. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.

But I agree, life in the '90s, post collapse, was even worse. I read it as a warning that embarking on a suboptimal choice course may be hard to steer back until reality forces a very harsh collapse.

[throwaway34241]

> This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.

I agree - I've always liked that story about the grocery store.

I don't think bad policies are something that can be straightforwardly extrapolated into a course to the Soviet Union though. The US has had price controls in the past but backed off. Even large welfare states like Sweden eventually hit a point where they stopped or turned back the expansion of the public sector (reducing marginal rates, eliminating wealth taxes, spending as % of GDP leveling off, etc).

The Soviet Union even collapsed while it was heading in a more positive direction from where they were at (reducing state political and economic control).

So there doesn't seem to me to be a straightforward connection between incremental policy changes and collapse.

I don't see a clear connection between collapse and subsequent "steering back" either. Support for the market economy and multiparty democracy in Russia are both at record lows [1]. Venezuela has undergone an economic collapse but is still very dysfunctional. Neither seems on track to catch up with western countries any time soon.

It's interesting to contrast this with China, which had similar issues to the Soviet Union (of having an inefficient state-run economy) and had heavy debate about how to go about reforming it [2]. At least for their economic prospects the incremental path they chose seems to be working out better.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Escaped-Therapy-Routledge-Studies-Chi...