A common tendency among those in our current age was to believe the future rhymes with the near past. Given a reasonably integrated European immigrant population in the United States, it was sensible to believe the same could be done with populations of the Middle East in Europe. Yet this ignored the increase of modern connectivity and transportation on a contiguous rather than ocean-separated continent, creating in some ways a distributed diasporic Islamic society among European nations. A refitting of Cold War analysis applied to modern geopolitical conditions gives no better answers than the immigration question which to this day remains open and unanswered.
Each decision therefore must come from an analysis of the present condition, for if each step in history were to be a mirror of the previous one, there would be no change and history at all. The future depends upon the motives and patterns of the present much more than that of the past, but the lag in information naturally cause people to assume the past is the present.
Let us now attempt to characterize the synergy of the United States in education, research, technology, media, and finance to describe what I call the supranational system as opposed to the national system of the country itself. This supranational system is where the wealth and higher remuneration seems to sit.
Here is my rough sketch. Each tier has a slightly higher chance of going up.
For those in the upper tiers who are unfamiliar with the median college student in the United States:
The Supranational System and its Synergies
Theory
Wealth comes from flows
To have a large amount of wealth, you have to sit upstream of high quality flows. At its most fundamental, all wealth comes from the flow of energy from the sunlight to the Earth. Other flows include the flows of water for agriculture, the flows of people into universities, the flows of money, or the flow of manufactures.
If the flows are bad: say a country invites dependent rather than productive immigrants, then that invites one’s destruction. If one eats flows of unhealthy food, then they will become unhealthy. Thus the present appearance of something (stocks) is merely an accumulated appearance of the flows having gone into it.
Flows in technology and finance are concentrated
The Supranational System works because industries such as technology and finance can vacuum up large amounts of wealth from across the world and distribute it to a much smaller group of people. In this dynamic compared to manufacturing, power law effects are much stronger, so you want the best of the best rather than the pretty good. Thus explaining why there is such strong synergy with the top schools and the education industry as a whole. Because transportation between countries is easy in our current age of aviation, the higher quality human capital comes from other countries rather than the United States itself. Because of the USD exchange rate, working these already wealth-concentrated jobs is a further accelerant to one’s wealth.
Why does education work well with technology and finance? The reason is because this is something that produces a large amount of wealth by offering services all across the world without large investment in capital goods or distributors the way manufacturing is.
In these industries you want the best people possible. The margins are high and you can pay small groups of people very well. Instead of a global network of distributors and a navy to protect shipping lanes, you just have a GTM strategy. However attention on the internet is limited so in-person programs are starting to pop up across a variety of places, such as student ambassador for software.
May be an interesting economics Q: comparing the distribution of wealth in manufacturing versus software. You still have to pay for infrastructure and distribution, but rather than a bunch of local distributors, signs, and advertisements, it all goes to Google instead. We may be at the point currently where too much is there digitally and there are greater returns for in-person distribution.
Something I’ve been asking myself: Is software dist. slightly similar or significantly less cost compared to manufacturing? If you did something with manufacturing, you would have distributed basically the same amount of wealth to more people, which is a tradeoff between more fixed/human capital and community but less mobile capital concentrated in yourself. There is a dichotonomy between those who feel close to a land and people and those who are wanderers, affecting the industries and life paths they so choose.
Growth and alteration of flows
From here we can understand the first stage of American globalization: the US Navy to strongly guard sea lanes and promote free trade and shipping as a manufacturing power. I think the claim that the USN guarding shipping lanes while the Chinese were doing trade allowed freeriding has some merit, though the American and European business owners likely benefitted in equal or greater measure due to them being beneficiaries of the goods sold.
This was the US power at its peak, which involved various flows of commodities, shipping, and trade. The creation of American High Schools was natural to train the local population and generate feelings of affection, which set the stage for our current era. That created the flows of people into schools, then into technology and finance firms, which first restructured companies to alter the flows going toward labor in the United States (which was too expensive) for offshore markets, which I suspect is mostly exhausted. The remaining flows were in technology and finance, which are threatened by digital and national sovereignty because you can only continue to extract flows if you add more than you give (net creditor as opposed to debtor) and keep a soft touch (benevolent hegemony).
I admit that industries such as medicine, consulting, and law do not easily fit into this framework. What happens is that some people are caught up in the overall zeitgeist of the United States, seeing the top not knowing their own ability yet still coming to compete. This creates competition for the native population at both the bottom and the top of the jobs market.
Beginning of the end
With the recent Trump admin cap of international students to 15% and increasing tech decouupling which may extend to financial sectors such as Brazil’s Pix or Jane Street being limited in India due to irregular options trading, the ability of the Supranational System to consume flows of wealth over the wire is impeded.
Why no domestic upflow?
While one might imagine a country should be dedicated to the welfare of its citizens and seek to raise talented individuals near and far in the land, the wealth-generating mechanisms and inflows of people from abroad of the supranational system ensure the nation itself is underinvested. Furthermore, there are no feelings of affection and group feeling from these newcomers. They see a large swath of uneducated and violent ‘red’ states that they begrudingly have to support through tax and welfare transfers.
Those on the other side see wealthy international foreigners frolicking in light of their misery, creating ever more purported scams to fill their coffers such as ‘climate change’ or ‘forcing people to eat bugs instead of meat.’ Neither of these perspectives are necessarily wrong, but they represent a distortion of complex phenomena and motivations filtered through distance, provocateurs, and lack of common ground to speak upon. My observations of those in the national system are that they are too undedicated to learning and advancement, wholly biased toward humor, while many in the supranational system exhibit arrogance making them unfit for leadership.
Preferences for affirmative action, legacy students, international students: probably all competing factions within the elite system.
What is leadership?
Leadership is about the creation of abstractions, the management of flows, and the arbitration of human wills. Abstractions, as words or new ideas that represent concepts for a population to grasp and direct their energies toward and the creation of manufactures to put these abstractions into reality. The management of flows: water, people, money, trade, all needed to sustain oneself. The arbitration of human wills: another name for politics, of which war is an extension of.
As we see, Trump is renaming bodies of water, changing the flows of people and money in schools (withholding grants), and creating his own private army (ICE) and using the legal system to crush dissidents. It is a perfectly rational decision: the trade-off in this situation is that holding onto power nationally is more important than having greater flows of wealth coming in internationally.
When looking at the historic record, people focus too much on the idea of conquering with armies and not of the other factors. Renaming: Constantinopole to Istanbul. Management of flows: agriculture and logistics, which determine can determine outcomes of war before it is fought. I believe it is not possible for there to be unified names and words for things (hence complete peace and understanding) because the word someone uses is always relative to their own perspective in life.
With regards to Trump: he would like to have the benefits of both sides, but to do that he would’ve had the cultural tendencies of being able to maneuver with a soft touch making him one and the same as the Democratic establishment. His coming to power, however, rested on his direct approach distinguishing him from the rest of the political field. If he had tendencies to then switch narratives after being elected, the public would’ve picked up on it, so there was likely no other way.
When considering the reputation of individuals in a small group, that who can do a lot and be on good terms with the rest of the group receives most of the benefits of leadership. This was the US many decades ago. One able to remain good reputationally, even if they contribute little, who does not threaten or coerce too actively can slip by for quite some time. This was the US up to Trump. Someone who is boisterous will draw quick attention to their shortcomings and cause others to build countermeasures.
Nevertheless, affiliation is often by mutual interest and not by affection. South Korea and Japan may see their export competitiveness decimated by China, and thus would ally (more likely for Japan than South Korea because of proximity, fighting a land war, and Japan being a larger country) with the United States. Even though Trump may change the calculation in European countries, I think it is more likely than not they build countermeasures subtly and in their minds but in the present go with the devil they know than that they know not of. (I do not use ‘devil’ to characterize the United States, Russia, or China, only that it is a common turn of phrase of picking between two poor options.)
Lifestyle Differences between the Two Tiers
Whole Foods for the top, and Walmart for the masses. A common sight in much of the country are subsistence operational roles: rideshare, grocery delivery, or other gig app works. A town may mainly be composed of a Walmart, a post office, and a dollar store. Interspersed among these few sources of sustenance are strip malls and what are increasingly suburban slums. Though materially poor, the trope of being spiritually rich such as Amish or Mennonites apply in no ways to them. The ills and degradation of social culture enabled by mass proliferation of mobile devices continues their spiral. It can only be said such livings give little dignity to the masses; but, devoid of social organization, material wealth, and even claims on wealth, they cannot resist the shifting sands outside of at times voting for the oddball candidate and at worst causing random bursts of violence.
Though the dreary landscape devoid of people yet swarming of cars is keenly felt to anyone from abroad, many of the stores do at times harbor a lively yet warm inner life that gives some hope to the future of the country.
There is no mass-scale proletarian revolution because such a 1900s and prior phenomenon is due to the most powerful weapon (a gun) being widely accessible to the citizens. From that it stands that mass revolutions are capable of overthrowing the government only in a time of relative force parity. In an age where the State has the powers of communication, a moral and legal pretext to justify its actions, and advanced military equipment, it is no surprise such protestations are ineffective.
Local forts scattered around the country are as much to prevent domestic rebellion as domestic defense. That being said, the maximization of power by second-tier organizations by taking responsibility away from the federal government so that they might supplant it is not to be underestimated. Does SpaceX not gain from the weakness of NASA or the factory polluter from the weakness of the EPA? Since the federal government aims to provide high quality services to all citizens already deriving their patronage from taxes, this is in contradiction with the goal of companies to charge rents on previously free services. If tap water were higher quality, Nestle would not be able to sell its bottled water as easily.
Instead of serfs being exploited for grain or city newcomers being exploited for factory labor, we arrive at the third stage of people existing in an unfulfilling fake world devoid of independent action. This, I believe, is the either unintended or true purpose of student loans. To keep people living in this fake world of Marshalls and Old Navy, strip malls, social media, expensive car payments, and exorbitant rents. They will not have enough money to go around and do things in the actual world, they are like cattle in a fake world. Of course, they do not realize it themselves because they have limited mobility, but they have the sense something is wrong.
Then, at some point, the media appartus will shift gear, money will be allocated, places to work will be created, and money/food may magically start flowing.
Example run-through of someone’s decision making
Education
A fairly wealthy person in their home country has kids. They know the national system of memorizing for tests is gruelling, so they send kids to a private school. John F Kennedy High School in Germany, Robert College in Turkey, Taipei American School, Shanghai American School, etc. I was surprised to see SAS on the State.gov website, maybe some of these are even officially funded. Sometimes they’ll be sent to a boarding school abroad, which you’ll see in the Niche Private High Schools list. Costs a lot of money, but they can afford it.
Then they come to the USA for university: mostly to privates, but sometimes to large public schools as well. A lot of people also come along even though their family isn’t that good. They see the people at the top and imagine they might be like them as well. Some compete and succeed, some don’t.
So that’s how we have this contradiction of things in the USA. It’s really really good at some things but also really shitty. Because when you are trying to attract the wealthiest people in the world, you can’t just have standard bare necessities. You need the newest facilities. You need interesting features. You need a certain ambience to things that they can’t achieve in their home country. It’s really shitty because the other stuff is to keep people living in a fake world, you don’t really need to invest in them for talent.
So obviously because these people coming in are wealthy they don’t interact with the normal people of this country so they don’t really take a car drive to Walmart. They probably DoorDash all their food. They can just rent an off-campus apartment for $1000 $2000 a month they basically take planes so just travel between different cities and visit their friends.
There is also domestic upflow to the system. There are well known public high schools across the country like Thomas Jefferson High School, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, Boston Latin, etc. and many competitive schools that I’m sure I haven’t listed. Unfortunately I lived in a small town and already studied at one of the better high schools in the area (which was still not high quality enough) and there was no concept of boarding schools for me, so even though I had the capability I could not move up.
For someone in far-off places, they may do science and math competitions locally and go up to the national level. The may see it is sponsored by some specific organization, they may know of Google from its ubiquity, etc. and it keeps building from there. You might have random women in the Philippines being inspired by pictures of the United Nations and being moved by it, posting online pictures about how wonderful it is. This outreach does in some ways affect how likely people are to work for you.
So we see there is a synergy with the digital systems in making people aware of things in the first place. Moreover, people speaking English ensures they will contribute to the English language idea-space, thus growing it. Youtube and an ecosystem of personal blogs and learners combined with innovation in the frontend ecosystem space such as Astro/Next.js/etc. create this sort of English-Digital Systems-Writing-Education synergy.
This builds the mental abstractions and knowledge needed to create high-quality goods and services which are demanded for in many places due to their scarcity, thus concentrating wealth to the innovators of these products. As knowledge diffuses over time, the ability to charge a premium (think of Coca-Cola when it came out versus numerous Cokes-like brands worldwide now, which built off novel experiments in chemistry and gases) for it diminishes.
The Past National System
When immigration happened to the United States in the mid 1900s, they all became a part of the national system. Scientists fleeing Nazi Germany took up residence in the major universities and defense efforts. The State Department was staffed by immigrants such as Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Albright. The nature of centralized television and publishing technology at that time meant governments were a primary organizing factor: the university, government, and media system was set with gatekeepers who strove to keep the best and brightest.
But no longer, there is now the supranational system: Meta, Nvidia, Google, finance, etc. do not really seem to benefit the country and people itself. The wealth is not shared. It’s too difficult to learn what they do, like how classical music became less popular because the middle class decided to reject the aspirational for mass media such as football and music streaming seeing those interests too obscure and irrelevant to their daily lives.
You don’t see people coming in as much to take part in the national system itself of politics, manufacturing, real estate, supermarkets, local leadership, etc., except on the lower end where they arbitrage the USD exchange rate with their home currency.
Even if these people wanted to do so there’s often a big resistance among the local population who see them as foreigners.
Patterns of development
The State was the major organizing factor, differing from the Communist style where the government was the only organizing factor.
I believe the core of governance is not so much democratic, autocratic, or any other system based on specific ideologies but rather adaptive and responsive governance. Evolutionary success is driven by greater changes in internal state: clams evolve shells but seals evolve shucking tongues.
The State being the only organizing factor is not as effective as the government and some companies, who can create new innovations as they see fit. However, having everyone as individuals is too far-fetched and loses the efficiencies of specialization. Not everyone has the executive function to govern or run their own household and businesses.
Should towns be built into districts rather than a hodgepodge of buildings and roads one would become quite familiar with the homeless in their area and come to care for them like a stray dog. We must remark upon the fact that the unlimited flow of people between cities creates unlimited responsibility for the residents, ultimately leading to no responbility and no action. Despite hundreds of cars passing by homeless on interstate exit ramps, nobody stops to help and even if they did it would be of little benefit in the long term.
This lack of segmented space, where someone carves out an area where one can be held accountable for it, scales to the national level. As companies aided by transportation and communication technologies can expand ever further, such as cheap builds disguised and advertised as luxury popping up near universities to farm students’ money, the sense of responsibility to the communities they serve diminishes. Throw a crappy build here, cut down all the trees to make giant roads, pollute the rivers and lakes, strain the power grid and subsidize all externalities onto the public.
New societies that form and seek to preserve themselves must build walls like the Old World cities, which had city walls to defend against outsiders.
We must also consider at the governmental level the random flow of people between cities is not beneficial to the growth and wellbeing of community values. The hollowing out of American industry was based upon the free flow and interchangability of money as one could come into a business, strip it of assets, and go to spend their money elsewhere. We must consider when selling goods and services to people that the source of money is sound, and to reject currency for one’s labor if the currency is deemed bad.
How the Money System Works
The way that the money system works is as follows:
- Human existence is about being part of a group with its own patterns of life and ideas.
- This is a high-level thing above the existence of humans themselves sustained only by pure belief, it is pure reason itself in a way
- That which is swayed by anything is a rock: inert and changes according to whatever flows come in. That which is pure reason only exerts influence outward. These mystical and untouchable beings are everywhere: God and religion, the State, Linux GNU hackers, anarchists, Indie Hackers, 2nd Amendment supporters, ANY PATTERN OF IDEAS is THERE and ALIVE! Only if you are aware enough do you recognize this as the case.
- In some ways this puts you in a space separate from mankind, unable to exist in the world anymore.
- You may argue my belief in the existence of numerous beliefs is its own belief. True, but it is a belief closer to the peak of the pyramid rather than the base.
- There may be some pattern of beliefs I am even yet to understand that is beyond this.
- In a stage of growth, one’s patterns become more predominant. In death, it becomes lesser.
- Because the State has jurisdiction of violence over the people, it can force them to use a currency. Because the acquisition of goods requires disintermediation over the entire country, one’s community is sparse and isolated. Therefore they cannot come together as a people to labor for each other and are dependent upon the money system.
- The money system is controlled by only a few people who see themselves as a people and a group. They can force others to do work for them by creating money, which sort of taxes the rest of the population (but they have no choice and alternative) and then giving it to people as a ‘salary’ to coordinate their labor.
- Before, labor might’ve been coordinated in different ways. Sustaining the belief that the leader is God-like is not tenable in the modern day and age, but previously it likely was an effective way of ruling. Violence is less effective versus the money system because it is too obvious and invites people against you.
- It’s probably easier to affect the money system to make living difficult and then offer people the opportunity to join the military rather than going around rounding up individual people.
- If you have no community or family to count upon (group feeling), then you have to depend upon the money system. If there were theoretically a large enough group within a country with high trust, it could break free of the money system. Unfortunately, it turns out scaling trust is not as easy as money.
Globalization waves
I will speak mainly to the consumer side because these are the goods and options that we see available to us.
In recent memory there have been two waves of globalization coming from the United States. The first is the brand-based multinationals such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, KFC (Yum Brands), manufacturing, television (VOA), radio, etc.
The second is that of digital services through computing (Microsoft, Apple). Lately this has continued with the advances in AI/Large Language Models.
Many of the major inventions of the past century: airplanes to automobile mass manufacturing, nuclear bomb to computing, the discovery of oil—all were originally from the United States.
Remember what I said earlier about needing to be on the leading edge of mental abstractions? If you are not on the leading edge but are rather crude, places of higher complexity will see your location as like sewer water coming out of the toilet. Globally speaking, I think the places of highest complexity corresponding well with State borders are: Switzerland, Nordic countries, Japan. In large countries you merely have pockets of high complexity.
Misc thoughts on Strategy
Below are just some musings.
The current strategy in the United States involves keeping a leading edge in fields, protectionism for the rest of the country, and reindustrializing as needed to catch up. If the Chinese are able to create something at or above quality for a lesser price, such as something as quality as Apple or NVIDIA-equivalent chips, the US would lose market share.
In areas of greater advancement such as EVs, protectionism prevents mass domestic unemployment. Though inefficient, it gives people something to do and fulfills a market need. However, it may create an “alien arrival” phenomenon where people believe their own system is the best, only to one day encounter a much more advanced society. This line of first contact lies with the military. Domestic technological laggards affects the integrated overall structure in negative ways.
The above looks through political analysis from a group lens where long-term sovereignty is more important than short-term gains. In the short term allowing high quality manufactures in creates notable benefits and increases in material quality life but in the long term erodes sovereignty as the economy is oriented toward unproductive services such as tourism or resource extraction because external goods are higher quality and cheaper.
Some in places such as Cuba and North Korea surely know the relative gap between them and the rest. Though military threat makes them an unappealing target for digestion into the global system, their existence is not unlike the North Sentinel Islanders living in a primitive time. I feel this sometimes when seeing this FuelRod thing in airports compared to the Chinese Energy Monster charger. Do they know that there exists a much well designed competitor out there that would eat them if not for legal and distance barriers preventing a true free market?
Like how billionaires shape the incentives of ambitious college students as they orient around narratives for funding sources, countries with high levels of manufacturing and mental abstraction reconfigure lower-level countries into farms: coffee bean plantations would not exist without upstream demand for coffee, a relatively recent phenomenon.
As a realist one understands it is the capability and existence of such that is threatening. There is room, roughly, for one top-level military power given a certain geographic space of power projection. Given a globalized world but still limited power projection, the splitting of the world into spheres of influence is the likely and reasonable outcome. Should transportation technologies such as supersonic flight advance further, the unification of the globe under one world hegemon is possible. It is, however, stable to have a monopsony where partitioning markets into spheres of influence is a net benefit for all.
As to whether it is possible: I have not looked into it significantly but am aware of companies such as Hermeus and Boom who are investigating supersonic flight.
Addressing the present time
- How to coordinate large amounts of people?
- I think in our present age few people can be counted on to be patriotic (like WW2 victory gardens), where they labored on behalf of exhortation rather than money. Reasons: social, demographic, political, etc.
- Thus you have to use the money system to coerce people to work. If savings will be re-oriented toward manufacturing, where will they come from? Will it be enough? Likely will be corporations, whereas some countries had to coerce peasants for industrialization instead of foreign debt due to no local savings.
- Some similarities to a story I remember about Rome needing foreign mercenaries, where the currency is the last bastion before anarchy while in a community money is merely an accounting device and at times waived.
- What is the fate of the supranational system? What will happen to schools in the future?
- The 15% cap is already suggested. Regardless of whether it goes through, recent events are making people rethink travel plans to the States.
- I feel a kind of melancholy upon seeing recent immigrants to the US, for it was a pretty good choice to make two decades ago but probably much less in recent times.
- Depends upon the rate of change of countries deciding to forego consultants, erecting digital and financial sovereignty, revenue may decrease for major American firms leading to lower hiring. LLMs will automate grunt work at the lower levels.
- I would bank on continuing to expect challenges until the unforeseen day that the general sentiment is that firms are literally scrambling to hire, if that may occur.
- There is one strategy which may somewhat work, which is to use crypto to get around financial controls or Starlink to beam down free internet to get more flows of wealth from across the globe for finance/software. For software this would push the risk onto the user of it in the banned country, which local authorities may be in control of enough to prevent.
- Expect schools in the US to have less internationally talented people but also become easier to get into. This, ironically and in contradiction, makes getting into a better ranked school worth less.
- I am not betting on some unknown magical technical innovation coming out of the blue. Success requires attention to detail and comprehensive integration of such values into one’s life. I do not see present leadership with this attitude nor the people willing to embody it.
- Expect more people will have to choose a place to settle down and pick sides, which will become more clear if conflict intensifies.
- The 15% cap is already suggested. Regardless of whether it goes through, recent events are making people rethink travel plans to the States.
- Where are the flows of growth likely to be in the future?
- We should expect the job market to not be great due to countries likely rediverting resources to prepare for war. In lieu of trying to make more money in a time where such things are limited, try making more friends and pooling resources too.
- Will a small group of elites go to war to protect what they have? Maybe. I’m not close enough to know what they even do have or how the current geopolitical configuration in the world benefits them exactly in a way I can precisely describe. You could repeat some stuff about blah blah petrodollars, but that’s not insightful at this point.
- This is why you should be online. You have to find these people or have them find you, and you need a presentation of your background so that people have an awareness of who you are before meeting you so it is not complete unfamiliarity and guessing out of who someone is.
- There is likely a large “middle bracket” of people who are talented and aware enough yet sort of stuck in the middle but beyond the simple life of people who stay in their small town and have no awareness or ability at all.
- Could countries give these people some sort of land/sovereignty in exchange for fealty to the State?
- If you are close to the national government and can get grants or funding, that may be lucrative for the perceivable future.
- International companies will not be dead, but they will need to adhere to local standards.
- We should expect the job market to not be great due to countries likely rediverting resources to prepare for war. In lieu of trying to make more money in a time where such things are limited, try making more friends and pooling resources too.