If there another certainty other than death, it is that the US will make a complete mess over it's foreign affairs. Thrashing about bombing people isn't really the right course of action, is it ? Wake up guys. Your politicians have blown it. Trillions wasted in the ME. Makes even the bad guys look moderate.
Malthus would cheer your opinion, Sig, but ol' Julian Simon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource would simply chuckle his happy chuckle, and then show you the facts.
I actually don't disagree with Simon, although I admit that like Ehrlich I've had to come around to his point of view (I'm not sure if Ehrlich did come around or was just a good sport paying off his bet). His assertion is that as demand goes up, the price goes up, and that leads to innovation and increased effort at finding more of a commodity so there's never really a shortage, which has generally played out since he wrote the original book. It's especially applicable to pollution and things like renewable energy and efficiency. My assertion is much different, I'm simply saying that if the whole world, operating under "Simon's Law" we'll call it, has a steady state growth rate of around 2%, then it's not possible for a China or India to have an average of 6% growth rate forever. The factors Simon lists, as I recall from admittedly a while ago read, apply equally to a China as a U.S. If "Simon's Law" is allowing for 2% growth, and if anything China and India are under-innovating the rest of the world, there's no reason to think they could somehow take advantage of the factors Simon iterates at 3X the rate of the rest of the world. At the point things like pollution and underfunded pension liability, and the rest of the factors the rest of us deal with catch up to them, their grown goes to 2% like everyone else's. And I'd submit we're rapidly approaching that point, although I'll be the first to admit that I'm not expert enough to know exactly when that will be.
Who of us disagrees with *that*?!? The USA had been such squeakers for so long, but had built up such physical and intellectual capital, that T.Roosevelt lobbied successfully (I think he was SecNav at the time??) to have the U.S. fleet circumnavigate the globe, just 'showing the flag' over a Great White Fleet. That didn't mean we could grow like that forever, and we didn't. We had a Great Depression from which only the build-up for WWII extricated us. (I mean, Sheeesh! IBM, White-Westinghouse, International Harvester, Singer ("Singer!!!") were all recruited to do triple shifts making M1 Garands for us/allies, and Mosin-Nagants for the Ruskies. THAT's a jobs program for ya.) But yeah, the most sigmoidal of growth curves will eventually turn. "No doubt."
Overall Best Countries Ranking The overall ranking of Best Countries measures global performance on a variety of metrics. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/overall-full-list https://media.beam.usnews.com/ce/e7...1110-best-countries-overall-rankings-2018.pdf USA top in Power, Entrepreneurship, and Cultural Influence.