> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn
This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.
China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully.
There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money.
Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity.
I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.
Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts.
But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility.
Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle?
And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
> China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life....
> major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy
Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else.
It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead.
The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.
I’ve been hearing it’s eminent because China is not a democracy, I hear the western perspective.
I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA.
Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.
The US is not a functioning democracy and therefore effectively not a democracy at all, either.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when an empire will fall, but the signs seem to be around for a long time prior to that moment, and you basically have the people who recognize those signs, the people who don't, and the people who profit from confusion and disorder that pay a lot of money to both overtly and subtlety convince people that everything is fine.
> The US is not a functioning democracy and therefore effectively not a democracy at all, either.
It's a weird statement because you are jumping from a descriptive statement ("not a functioning democracy") to a normative one (if it's not at least 80% democratic then I have decided that it's not a democracy)
I am getting too old not to notice such rhetorical tricks. Do better.
It's not a rhetorical trick, and I would appreciate the benefit of the doubt. I just didn't feel like writing a larger comment.
The US is 100% not a functioning democracy, and whether something is a thing if it does not function as a thing is actually a deep philosophical argument that goes back thousands of years. Is a chair a chair if it functions as a chair, or simply if I call it a chair? Can a chair which one cannot use as a chair still be a chair? As you can see, I have an opinion on this, at least in this context, but I am not trying to convince anyone else to share this view. However, it is my view and I used it to advance my argument.
I don't want to be pedantic or prescriptive, but it's "imminent" not "eminent." (The wrong word got introduced upstream in this thread and was taken up by multiple commenters.)
IMO it's largely ignorant talking heads taking "The Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite" from popculture / memes and just ran with it, because China bad / should bulkanize, not historic credence. If there was actual historic awareness, this argument would also note significant united cycles of Chinese periods last 250-500 years, after shorter balkanization cycle (50-150 years, eastern zhou shitshow aside).
Then the argument would be CCP dynasty is just starting - 70 years into multiple generation spanning 250+ year cycle where they're already cooking, and TBH more geographically and culturally cohesive than any past periods. Or, US is 250 years into cycle, i.e. potentially approaching bulkanization time. But that would defeat / be contrary to the entire is PRC collapsing / bulkanizing meme. It's based on hopium.
This is a biased and narrow take. The reality is that both the US and Chinese empires are threading a needle right now with respect to economics and civil unrest. The Chinese government is bad, and it's already split into China and Taiwan, further erosion of the dynasty is absolutely plausible.
There is zero value in pretending everything is hunky dory up until the moment that it all collapses.
There's nothing biased/narrow to note that if one evaluates Chinese history, CCP/modern PRC is experiencing unprecedented domestic serenity and is likely amidst the rising/reunifying era post chaotic Qing interregnum/collapse. Given timeline, and procedurally, ROC/TW isn't indicator of start of balkanization but last piece to reunify now that frontiers like Tibet/XJ has been thoroughly incorporated. Between eminent rise and eminent collapse, it's pretty obvious to me which way PRC comprehensive power is trending towards.
There's zero value in pretending just because things are burning in US means things are also similarly burning in degree/scale in PRC. That's cope/projection. Of course eventually "China" can break up again, but the way things has/are trending, there's still a lot of rising to do. Like it would be one thing if PRC was stagnant or relatively declining throughout last 30 years of China collapse narrative (i.e. USSR vs US), and one can argue it's a matter of slowly then suddenly. But most lines are going up, in the opposite direction of collapse, sometimes at absurd slopes, despite best effort of hegemonic US trying to contain.
Not everything is hunky dory, but let's not pretend it's threading a needle with collapse. That narrative hasn't/doesn't reconcile with reality and history. And historically, authoritarian Chinese governments can grow very powerful for a very long time. To acknowledge your concern, the state can be strong at the expense of the people, both chinese and outside "barbarians", hegemonically strong. If CCP/PRC is just average performing dynasty, they'll likely still be around and powerful in 100+ years, i.e. all of our life times.
It's a China problem that they are currently projected to lose half of their massive 1.5bil population within a century, potentially putting significant strain on existing social and economic infrastructure.
There aren't many countries going from 1.5bil to 750mil in 75 years. That's a loss of 10 million a year, with an increasingly aged population. It's a problem at a much different scale.
> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100.
75 years is a long time. At lot can change.
75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement
Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy".
> increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted.
Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
True, but population collapse specifically is a tough headwind. You can't make more 2055 30-year-olds unless they've already been conceived today, and those will be the parents of the 2100 45-year-olds. While a lot can change, it's unrealistic to assume a birth rate will skyrocket all of a sudden (China's at 1.18 per woman and US is only at 1.6). The painful part, the bad worker:retiree ratio, is already set in stone, by the tininess of the millennial and Z generations, especially in China.
That said, I hedge my bet by saying that if AGI arrives and happens to have a wildly positive impact on human lifestyles, I can grudgingly accept the possibility of an unprecedented baby-boom in a decade, fueled by a complete end of scarcity. Wouldn't bet on that catalyst though.
I think any boom would be the result of the average amount and, relatedly, price of energy and land and stability available to a member of a given population sharply increasing.
Millennials are having less kids because they proportionally have less access to energy and resources. I am 30 and we just bought our first home at 200x its original value in the early 20th century, and 4x what its previous owners payed 25 years ago. And the ratio of wage to housing costs in the US is the worst its ever been.
I notice how many less things I and my friends have compared to our parents and grandparents at my age. I know I'm significantly less of a materialist than the post-WWII generations, but the discrepancy is massive.
I want kids, but currently my significant other does not, nor does her sister. My significant other cites concerns about economic and mental stability in our rapidly evolving political climate. I cite concerns about the need for fostering resilient communities through effective child rearing. The majority of my similar aged friends today are childless. Comparatively, my mother birthed me at 21.
In the late 90's and early 00's, you could be a full-time meth head and still afford property in the suburbs and some cities. Now, sober post-graduates are living in their cars working an impenetrable gig economy at the behest of big tech, the new oil industry. In this sense too, we could also measure an individual or community's health by how much influence an individual can exert on their increasingly digital lives. The app economy has eroded our rights and turned us into cattle. Even if they can't articulate it, my peers feel this and are continuing to put off kids, at risk of becoming infertile from waiting too long.
Even if later generations pick up the slack, there are still unavoidable bumps in the road ahead due to what is happening right now with my generation. If things do not improve, birth rates will only continue to go down and possibly even nosedive, given some catastrophic global event that leads to an extended reduction in supply chain resiliency.
If I understand correctly, you're proposing sex-selection (terminating males?) as a hack to theoretically produce more child-bearing women in the next generation, who would, I assume, just reproduce promiscuously or form polygamous relationships?
I have to admit, it's an outside-the-box idea, but it would still take 25 years to start bearing fruit (no pun intended).
> culturally
Yeah, honestly, especially in Asia where they de facto did the opposite for so long, all those "extra" males seem to mostly just be alone. I'd worry that the generation with way too many women would reproduce at a disappointing per-woman rate, with the women choosing to roll the dice and either land a monogamous husband to maybe have kids with, or to just pursue their career, rather than be a 'side-piece mom.'
> If I understand correctly, you're proposing sex-selection (terminating males?) as a hack to theoretically produce more child-bearing women in the next generation,
Yes. Both my belief in the the technical possibility and my reason to doubt the cultural acceptability are on the grounds that it looks like the people were already doing so in the opposite (more male births) direction due to the one-child policy.
> who would, I assume, just reproduce promiscuously or form polygamous relationships?
Why do you have the maximalist outlook that population must grow. All developed nations are looking at population crunches. All of them, and China and Russia as well. Reducing it to a Chinese problem is reductive. It’s a collective choice, and how is China doing better or worse than its peers?
It's probably good for the planet if we depopulate. But the problem which comes with that is that socioeconomic policy and infrastructure has massively evolved over the course of the industrial and digital revolutions, boosted in the US by WWII, etc. A sudden decline of population makes things that were touted as viable or stable suddenly less viable or stable.
For example, the dependency ratio changes, especially in an aging population. Look at what Japan's going through. A working married male in Japan might be taking care of both their immediately family and both their parents and their significant other's parents. It's a significant economic load and leads to significant issues around mental health and work-life balance.
We can also look toward Japan as a test bed too, as their GDP and standard of living does continue to rise despite an ongoing population decline. This is not an impossible situation to manage, but it does require strong and thoughtful leadership
There's also the lost of trade skills and workers in general needed to maintain current service-based infrastructure.
In the case of China, their population of nearly 1.5bil is projected to be halving within 75 years. This is a massive difference that will require recalibration of policy and infrastructure, whereas other countries might experience a significantly lower ratio of decline.
I don't, I'd be perfectly happy with a stable population too. Infinite growth is a dumb goal and I don't support it as a goal (at least until someone demonstrates space colonization).
But a society where generations get dramatically smaller is screwed. You need a balanced (or better) ratio of workers to retirees, mainly. If you took the US and teleported a representative (by age) sample of 80 million people by age to another planet, our society here wouldn't collapse, everything would be pretty ok, we would still have the same basic economy, and the fewer kids and elders to take care of, the reduced consumption, would balance out the loss of the workers. But if they took 80 million people between 30 and 65 instead (that's probably most of that age group), things would go really badly for us, because there aren't enough 20-somethings and 65+ workers to do all the things that keep the kids and retirees fed. If we simply wait 30 or 40 years, China (among others) will be in a situation like that. US is not much better and I can certainly imagine it getting much worse in the US. And I can confidently predict a maximum number of 30 year olds we'll have in 30 years because every one of them has already been born. Even extreme measures can at best only make more 2055 29-year-olds.
> how is China doing better or worse than its peers?
As I stated, China has one of the worst birth rates -- numerically it's doing worse. I don't have a beef with China. I hope they and the rest of the West can figure out how to improve the birth rates soon.
I think you're underestimating the scope/magnitude of the problem.
But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally.
For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month.
If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons.
A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.
If you're incapable of recognizing the signs of an empire's collapse, slow as it may be initially, then you're trading a feeling of superiority in the present for being totally blindsided in the future when suddenly things accelerate and the world's governments begin to struggle under increasingly untenable energy and resource demands in the name of meeting quarterly growth quotas.
The fact is that the signs are there, whether you want to learn to recognize them or not. And the signs go way further back than... 2017.
Furthermore, "financial collapse" is a strawman. Who knows what will happen, and if the resulting government at the end is still technically "China". We're talking about increased economic strife and lack of resources for the common man.
I do feel the need to point out that there is in fact a reason that the US media has boldly proclaimed the impending financial collapse of China every month for the last ten years, and it's precisely to give you a feeling of superiority
You don't know what my sources are, or my motivations. I don't have this opinion because of US media, and I always try to get to direct sources and not trust publications blindly. Who gives a fuck about feeling superior, I just want to understand what is happening around me.
So now that we've dispensed with that, we can return to discussing a very real phenomenon and not dismiss it by insinuating it's all propaganda.
I was referring specifically to "reports of bank closures" that were they actually happening with such frequency and scale as has been reported on since 2017 or so, would surely have already caused a financial collapse.
A good measure of where China really stands is the fact that it continues to do business with Israel, even though it would be quite trivial to cut ties.
This was a radical and fantastic idea of Palmerston's, which led to vigorous debate.
But the interest in Palmerston's case going against Portugal and hunting the slave ships with the intent of ending the slave trade. That's what he felt was England's interest.
Other things Palmerston cared about was that no country would end up powerful enough to dominate the entire world-- that's another thing he saw as part of England's interest. How sad to reduce interest to economic concerns or maintaining traditional alliances, when the idea was initially to justify this act of going against Portugal and the traditional alliance.
"Countries" as such do not have interests, no. This is a line the ruling class puts out when it wants to obscure the fact that its own interests are always prioritized, often to the great detriment of the vast majority of the country.
One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
Governments have interests, people have interests, both are interested in the future of their country, which is just land.
This is why I am careful to delineate my patriotism as to my country, land and people, but specifically not my corporate government, who are greedy, genocidal, parasitic traitors to the Constitution and to humanity. A kangaroo court controlled by organized crime.
Pointedly, I did not make any points about the state of the Chinese economy etc.
Rather, I observe that the Chinese continue to make large investments that will not pay off in the next couple of quarters. As the Chinese economy has expanded over the last 25 years, the average standard of living for Chinese people has increased. They continue to invest in infrastructure as if there will be a future.
This all stands in contrast to the United States, where eating seed corn (the OP reference) is a very good analogy for our policies and actions.
It isn't perfect, but it's also undeniable that China is dumping a ton of money into infrastructure. It also has and has been executing multiple long-term initiatives (for example, high speed rail, renewable build out).
Chinese culture isn't perfect by a long shot, in particular it's both pretty isolationist with a strong slash and burn mentality for resource acquisition.
We can see both the positives and negatives of a country. I think it is a positive that china isn't as focused on short term results as the US political ecosystem is.
> This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.
First, I am glad you are here. Since you mention that you are an immigrant, it's worth noting that the ascendant anti-immigrant fervor is a direct expression of pessimism about our future. It's a statement that there's not enough to go around, that growth is not possible. It says that in order for me to do better, I must shrink the denominator because the numerator cannot get bigger.
The optimistic USA of the 1980s saw better days ahead, and so the presence of immigrants did not have the salience it has today. Ronald Reagan even had the latitude to enact an amnesty on the undocumented.
> I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans
Here I would just ask you to look at our realized policy as the best expression of our characteristics. We don't build, or even really believe that building is possible. When we are asked to choose, we routinely cut education and healthcare. These are not signs of optimism.
The pessimism has only grown; twenty years ago, it was considered possible that Americans could enjoy universal healthcare of the sort that exists in the (generally poorer) countries of Western Europe. Today, in a much wealthier America, even the suggestion has vanished from the realm of the possible and we are headed in the opposite direction.
The place where this perspective is most prevalent is socialized healthcare. It's either slippery slope evil socialism, or it's too impractical to ever be implemented here because America is too big and complicated, or it's never gonna happen due to regulatory capture.
>This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse
My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed.
Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has.
> Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation
More or less, I agree with this part of the thesis.
> Western Europe has proven much better at responding intelligently to the limits of growth than the US has
This is kind of my point -- we don't do the things other countries do to respond because those things would broadly be perceived as improving the lot of most citizens, and Americans do not generally believe that is possible anymore. (Also: "socialism is bad!")
But there is no reason for a country where economic measures of growth of wealth and income are so consistently strong should be so hesitant to invest in the future, and should be actively disinvesting in long-term initiatives.
What's especially painful is that some of the same policy choices we make that result in more distress for citizens are also likely to reduce the long-run growth of the economy. We make choices that hurt us now and also make things worse in the future.
(Generally not going to respond to the political dig because this really isn't a direct outgrowth of the typical left/right political divide in the US or its projections on other countries. For example, right-leaning Hungary has universal healthcare and free college tuition, but nobody is accusing Hungary of being Leftist.)
>we don't do the things other countries do to respond because those things would broadly be perceived as improving the lot of most citizens, and Americans do not generally believe that is possible anymore.
Americans have always had a (healthy IMHO) distrust of radical changes in our system of government while being unusually open to economic changes and technological changes that transform our society. I judge that the average American remains significantly more open to the latter than the average person in the world; do you disagree?
> distrust of radical changes in our system of government
A lot of what people are asking for is not radical in any sense other than that the status quo of USA in the 1970s is painted as "radical" now.
Making public colleges as (inflation-adjusted) inexpensive as they were in 1970. Restoring the ability of builders to build sufficient housing to increase affordability. Restoring the gun control regime endorsed by Ronald Reagan. A return to a workplace culture where it is not normal for companies to continually lay people off, regardless of their performance or the performance of the business. Etc.
Is it really "radical" to return to the enacted policies & norms of 1973 or 1980? (I am realizing I wrote this sentence in a comment thread about a person who has written about "humane" forms of genocide. The dissonance!)
Would it be a radical change to our system of government to extend Medicare to cover people as young as 60? 50? 40? 30? 18? Or to let people opt to buy, at full fare, health insurance from the government? Where is the line at which it becomes radical?
> being unusually open to economic changes and technological changes that transform our society
I agree with you here. Unfortunately, I think part of the reason for that is because we have designed an unusually precarious (among rich countries) economic system. Many people are looking for a solution to that problem, and the next gimmick can get early adoptees if it promises a way out. But that last part, about transforming society, highlights the issue that we all know this system needs radical change, even if we don't want to admit it.
> in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief... that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. But lots of things are and it's best to have your defenses up.
One doesn't even have to look to salespeople knocking to find scams. It's widely accepted that key pillars of the way we choose to organize our society have scam-like elements.
Healthcare. Zero job security. Virtually nonexistent support for parents. Retirement. Education.
Switching to the American form of any single one of these would cause mass civil unrest in most rich countries, but Americans don't believe things can or should be better. Many believe the lie that we (poorest state has a higher GDP per capita than France) cannot afford the things other rich countries have. The pessimism is pervasive.
I have no empirical evidence of this to present, but if you view every transaction as existing on some scale of scam-iness, where one side is you lose your house and wife and kids and the other is an amazing deal for you, the average position on that scale has shifted toward the backside pretty much the entirety of my life. Anything that comes to me first, I pretty much always write off as a scam. Email from someone I don't know? Scam. Car dearlership advertising 0% APR for 5 years on a brand new car? Scam. Even something like my workplace offering a new optional benefit - probably a scam. Did things always feel like this?
My perception is that people always felt like car dealers were scamming them.
BUT people saw opportunity in the big things: education, housing, reward for good work. This is the part that has unraveled. Even public universities are out of reach for much of the middle class (this was not the case as recently as the '70s). We have systematically under built housing for 2 generations, so our job centers are ridiculously expensive. And our business culture has largely de-linked performance and job stability so that well-performing people routinely get laid off for even when their firms are doing well.
It's worth noting here that all of these are enabled by deliberate policy changes that have been enacted since the 1980s.
I wonder about this, too. What were things like in, say, the 1960s? When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence, anti-consumer-repair measures, purchased "warranties" that had tons of fine print so you could never actually benefit, etc?
Even as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I learned that everything was a scam. How many times did child-me watch a TV commercial (on the childrens' channels) that showed a remote-controlled toy car doing extremely cool stunts and riding on rocks and dirt, only to get it for a birthday present and have it not able to move at all unless it was on a totally flat, level, surface? Or, have you ever seen a commercial for a toy like the "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots"? I'm sure they're on YouTube. Then once you see the toy in person it's pathetic.
I've truly been taught my whole life that everything is a scam.
> When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence
I feel like it's way worse now. We bought our first home in 1990. It was built in 1974. The Whirlpool dishwasher was original from when the house was built. It was harvest gold, but we discovered there were almond and avocado green panels inside the door and you could switch them out if your decor changed, meaning that they were planning for this dishwasher to last a while. In the 20 years we lived there we only had trouble with it once and it turned out that replacing a solenoid was quite easy to do. When we moved to another house we rented that house out. That dishwasher lasted until 2014. A dishwasher that lasts 40 years is unheard of now. Our last dishwasher barely made it 7 years.
Thank you for sharing that experience. It certainly meshes with my suspicions. I'm actually currently experiencing almost the same phenomenon in my house. My refrigerator was here when I moved in five years ago. It has a service sticker on it from 1997! I don't know exactly when this model left the factory, but if it's "only" 28 years old that would mean that things have gotten worse even since the 90s.
The only issue the fridge has had is that one of the defroster heater coils died (it has two- I guess because it's a side-by-side style, so the freezer part is tall). It wasn't very hard to replace. In fact, the hardest part was actually finding the part, itself.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. When you believe others are out to take advantage of you, you can justify taking advantage of others, which causes them to believe others are out to take advantage of them. So on and so forth. Those who resist this cycle are labeled "naive".
This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.