[I posted this on the Ran Prieur subreddit a while back. I held off on the cross-post because I didn't want anyone to think I had returned at that time.]
[I also realize this piece has a very small potential audience. If someone is used to thinking about politics morally they probably won't want to think about futurism probabilisticly. None of these ideas give me a warm glow, nor would I stay attached to them if new information came in that showed them to be wrong. See also Crony Beliefs by Kevin Simler]
[And now, the piece I had written.]
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I think projecting future outcomes for Americans is best done in 3 tranches:
top 1%: whose wealth is in run-away imperial mode. I think it's entirely possible this group will be able to hold on to high-tech through all of the long emergency, if not watch the tech improve. That's the weird part, the idea that it seems more people have on [r/ranprieur] than any other sampling of doomer thought I have seen.
next 19%: who are so busy, busy, busy. Much too busy to think, certainly too busy to give any group any slack to any imperfection in themselves or others. I have the hardest time projecting what will happen for this group. I am pretty sure the savings they have so dutifully placed in stock-only index funds will be wiped out in the next crash (or run-away stagflation). They have been primed for this robbery, however, conditioned day in and out to follow orders, and accept lies at all levels of life. Little drones, who have learned to dis-integrate (they say "compartmentalize"), so they have no integrity. Why would anyone else have integrity either? After the great robberies, they will shrug and get back to work (hell, they know someone whose kid got into Harvard -- bet those student loans will be a bugger!) They will work for this system as long as the system has use of them. Again, I don't know how to mentally model how long that will be.
[Not much longer than true general purpose autonomous vehicles, though. That problem is harder than most people think, while automating much of office work is easier than most people think. The status of the various workers creates a bias about the cognitive loads.]
lower 80: who will see third-world results. The long crisis has already begun for them, but the middle 19% allow the counter-revolution to continue grinding (often, hilariously, under the guise of social leftism). Whatever innovations that might be created by altruistic groups trying to help the global poor do more-with-less might (but only might) be imported back to help this population. Two further thoughts: 1) their carbon footprint will be drastically smaller in 50 years than it is now (and I mean *ahem* one way, or another). 2) They will have virtually no economic demand-pull if our political economy stays on its course (or even has the same assumptions).
I think these are the forces at work. They mix and match in a lot of possible ways, from genocide, to wars, to some possible hybrid of extremely low carbon footprints with some need for UBI or guaranteed work.
[Looking back, I now realize this attempt at modeling is really for generation X onward. The Baby Boomer retirement and medical crises will be a political convulsion. I detest the moral vacuity of the groups thought-leaders, but there is a real generational solidarity, so I would never bet against them politically. So . . . The robbery of the gen-X (and onward) 19% might not be directly from the markets as much as taxes. This much would be obvious to someone to the right of me. What isn't obvious to that person is that it is older, white people who played at rugged individualist when it was their turn to pay taxes who will be pushing the redistribution and then attempting to absorb all of it.]
