It seems like the world keeps getting crazier and crazier, worse and worse. But if you look back 100, 200, 300 years, things were pretty crazy then too. So I have a theory on this. I think, on a per-domain basis, things do indeed degrade. But I think there are turning points where something has degraded very far and then it rapidly recovers. And because the turning point happens so fast, we don't pay as much attention to this. So we are much more aware of the thing degrading. In our minds things get worse and worse, but in reality there is something like a sawtooth wave where a thing slowly get worse for a long time and then suddenly gets better again. Examples I'm thinking of are things like universities, wokeness, corruption of science, leniency on crime, etc. I think some of this might be rapidly correcting.
Discussion
Yeah this rings true
Is $5 million in BTC too much to ask for?
I think some of that can/will course correct quickly. Universities, however, I don’t think will. I think that, for lack of a better term, woke ideology is just too ingrained for most of them to recover. I think many students want the coddling/safetyism and I think that the quick and easy access to power that wokeness gives people is very powerful. But I hope I’m wrong. I know there are people put working hard to undo it.
one way for universities to recover: let the worst ones sink. Even the most famous and oldest ones.
I have seen an european Dean say "some pp think that just because we are famous and have been here for 700y, that it means we can do any shit, as much as we want, and still new students will choose us"
less young pp due to demographic changes, poorer pp due to general empoverishment, and dumber pp due to generally worse woke education, all will make life harder for the univs.
many pp are already waking up to the fact that 300K debt for a shit soft course dumber than your grandpa high school is not a good choice.
https://www.eugyppius.com/ and https://boriquagato.substack.com/ see a turning point for 'wokeness' and some political issues, in USA and Europe.
Covid fraudemics increased awareness about the corruption of science. It may get worse, but there are efforts and hope. Leniency on crime may correct itself - no hiding for this shit - or it may lead to narcostates if pp get used to this shit. Again, hope exists.
What is most worrying and new w.r.t previous centuries is the birth rate.
Demography is called "the most cruel science" because if there is no children now there will not be adults in the next generation, and so on.
e.g. What can be expected of South Korea, the most extreme case with 0.6 child/woman, in 2100?
Even if all the problems you cite plus other issues are corrected, how much time until the birth rate recovers? Are they or we, too deep down to recover?
The low birth rate in 1st world nations is being "patched" via immigration. If people don't make enough kids to maintain the Ponzi scheme, then new people have to be brought in. Don't get me wrong: I don't believe in illegal immigration, I think the spys, terrorists, drug runners and rapists need to be weeded out which means there needs to be a process. But legal processed immigration probably needs to be very high to combat the low birth rate problem.
Also, there wouldn't be much of a Ponzi scheme if people stayed healthy and kept working right up until they died. That's the best personal advice anyways. People who don't retire live longer, and people who keep excercising live healthier right up until the end. They don't need younger people's taxes to support them. And having had their entire lives to amass wealth, people should be well off by the time they die, and if they aren't it's their own damn fault and I'm not going to cry about them.
Give it a decade and you'll be hard pressed to find anywhere, even outside the first world, with birthrates high enough to support mass emigration. It's a global Ponzi now, and the collapse will be global too.