This collapse snowballs until the whole system disappears entirely, or the empire collapses down to its heartland. That core territory, the one that originally expanded outward to conquer a vast empire, can then stabilize and remain as normal nation.
I was trying to figure out how to tackle your comment, and I'm going to start here. Where is the USA's core these days? What strategic savepoint is there to go back to to keep going? All of the people in the country aren't going to converge in the cities because the food/water would be strained far too much, they're not going out into the woods because most people don't have those skills anymore and there aren't enough woods anyway, so where do we all go? Company towns? Sharecropping what used to be your great grandfather's land for some corporation? Where?
People who got tired of living under the low pay and high rents of the industrial cities back East could vote with their feet and go start a farm out West. [...] An empire built on growth is only stable while it’s growing. You cannot just stop growth at some point, level off, and stabilize. When growth hits its inevitable limits, the growth process starts working in reverse.
We didn't stop growth. When real estate in congested parts of the country was all spoken for businesses started building up and high rise apartments became a thing and created a place for the economy to expand. The adoption of the internet created a place for the economy to expand. Even this latest LLM boom is creating a space for the economy to expand. Pretty soon all the data that can be gathered about people will have been gathered, and the expansion of the economy will occur in new ways of interpreting it.
The US will come back for whatever it's setting itself up for. We haven't even really tried voting in a new set of politicians. I do agree that our current policy of alienating ourselves, pissing off allies, not just ignoring or denying climate change but willfully accelerating it will cause it to take generations to stabilize, and that part is already baked in.
I don't want to see it fail or people to go through strife, but there's a significant enough subset of older people that raised families to act like families, but treated their own works like a business. Take note old people: nobody wants to buy your overpriced McMansion only to have to pay to have it torn down and rebuilt as something affordable to heat/cool any more than they want your collection of Franklin plates.
So what to do about the situation? It's pretty clear regulations and legislation to help aren't coming down the pipe. People aren't voting for change with any meaningful results, and the Democrat party isn't moving with the kind of speed necessary to stop the worst of it.
One thing I've noted is that when I think I have a good idea about something that might help is to do a little research; fairly often I discover that the idea was blocked by legislation years ago like I was in a chess match against a grandmaster that I didn't realize I was playing. Does that describe a little what you're talking about? I personally think we've all been maneuvered into these positions.
