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What if the US collapses? Lessons every American needs to know.
Summary: the Soviet Union, by luck more than planning, was much better prepared for economic collapse than the US is currently. They lived in dense cities, well-served by public transport, in rent-free government apartments, close to their families; all their technology was designed to run forever and be user-maintained; they were all used to foraging for food and relying on an informal barter economy*. After the economic collapse, most of these conditions continued to hold: people mostly stayed where they were, and the trains and trams continued to run. The excess stock held by inefficient government monopolies was taken home by employees and bartered; this helped to soften the collapse. Most of the problems that led to the Soviet collapse are evident in the USA today.
For "American", one could easily substitute "Westerner": here in the UK, we're much less vulnerable to the collapse of our transportation infrastructure (given that one could walk from one end of the country to the other in a month), but we're equally exposed to the vagaries of the financial sector and the mortgage market. I know I could easily be accused of being a Chicken Little, always convinced that the sky is falling (I've been predicting that house prices would crash since at least 1998) but I found this piece genuinely chilling.
I'm particularly interested to know what my Russian readers think of this article. How does it reflect your experience of the Soviet collapse?
* When I lived in the Czech Republic in 1998-9, mushrooming was a widespread activity; even though we have no shortage of edible fungi in the UK, I know precisely two people who go out collecting wild mushrooms.
Summary: the Soviet Union, by luck more than planning, was much better prepared for economic collapse than the US is currently. They lived in dense cities, well-served by public transport, in rent-free government apartments, close to their families; all their technology was designed to run forever and be user-maintained; they were all used to foraging for food and relying on an informal barter economy*. After the economic collapse, most of these conditions continued to hold: people mostly stayed where they were, and the trains and trams continued to run. The excess stock held by inefficient government monopolies was taken home by employees and bartered; this helped to soften the collapse. Most of the problems that led to the Soviet collapse are evident in the USA today.
For "American", one could easily substitute "Westerner": here in the UK, we're much less vulnerable to the collapse of our transportation infrastructure (given that one could walk from one end of the country to the other in a month), but we're equally exposed to the vagaries of the financial sector and the mortgage market. I know I could easily be accused of being a Chicken Little, always convinced that the sky is falling (I've been predicting that house prices would crash since at least 1998) but I found this piece genuinely chilling.
I'm particularly interested to know what my Russian readers think of this article. How does it reflect your experience of the Soviet collapse?
* When I lived in the Czech Republic in 1998-9, mushrooming was a widespread activity; even though we have no shortage of edible fungi in the UK, I know precisely two people who go out collecting wild mushrooms.
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My mother once bought a new car - a model that was not terribly common in Oklahoma. She said after she bought it she started seeing them all over the place, where before New Car she didn't recall seeing a single one.
Perception is interesting - we don't see what our eyeballs take in, only what the brain processes and presents for our attention.