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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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24 Nov, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Maintaining anarcho-tyranny requires sufficient organization to sustain the tyranny.

But modern Western ideologies manifest as digital mobs and physical riots. Organized they ain’t.

So others too also see the looming possibility of American anarchy.
freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-witching…
American anarchy is already becoming visible on the borders of empire. Western ideologies of chaos have eroded state capacity.

Not just recently, but for decades. What was neoconservatism after all but chaos? No plan but permanent war in the Middle East.
wisdomofcrowds.live/the-coming-sto…
American anarchy, international edition. wisdomofcrowds.live/the-coming-sto…
American anarchy, domestic edition. freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-witching…
American anarchy, exported to countries based on their proximity to the US social network.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
24 Nov
Common ways to structure articles:

- logical argument (list premises, derive lemmas, show graphs, drive to conclusion)
- listicle (thematically related bullets in any order)
- story (characters, plot, conflict, novelistic suspense)

What other structures do you find helpful?
The style of a piece is often implicit. It’s the kind of thing GPT-3 infers automatically.

But it can be useful to state explicitly. For example, you don’t want to write a research paper like a mystery novel. Put the conclusion in the headline, not after 200 pages of suspense.
Here’s another one that’s useful for academic talks:

- tell them what you are going to tell them
- tell them
- then tell them what you told them

Also, put the basic material up front so everyone gets something out of it, and the advanced material towards the end.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
16 Nov
Already happening. India’s most important export is the CEO. Their next most important is the globally savvy, English-speaking internet user.

Indeed, as more Indians learn English, the Anglosphere may become the Indosphere.
Just as the UK handed things off to the culturally adjacent US, the dark horse scenario is that democratic India and its diaspora need to become the global champion of liberal values, relative to China, if America descends into anarchy.
The UK relied on the US after they fell. This was a relatively friendly handoff between culturally adjacent, democratic parties.

The Indian diaspora is already fairly prominent in the West in tech and media, on left and right; and more bridges will be built as 1B+ come online.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
16 Nov
This is a possible scenario by ~2040: Centralized China vs International India. Surveillance state vs decentralized digital diaspora. Two rising powers, with very different cultures.

The US may be like the declining British Empire, whose dominance in 1913 was gone by 1945.
The naive version of this thesis is the idea that India will ever match, let alone out-execute China in physical infrastructure.

The sophisticated version is that it’s all going digital, decentralized, diasporic — and in that plane India is more naturally suited than China.
The conventional wisdom is that we are gearing up for a multi-decade conflict between the US and China.

But what if the US gets KO’d in the first round, by military defeat abroad and inflation at home, followed by civil conflict and/or a national divorce?
Read 10 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
14 Nov
Ascending class & descending class is a better frame than poor, middle-class, rich.

First, poor Indians in the ascending class are happier than rich people in the descending class.

Second, ascent/descent captures rate of change, shows class isn't static.

Last, all can ascend.
The ascending class and descending class is the microeconomic version of the ascending world and the descending world.

Rather than assume static categories, like developed/developing world or rich/middle-class/poor, it puts the focus on rates of change.
The various versions of the elephant graph show the phenomenon of the ascending and descending class.

Roughly speaking, most of the world along with the global elite has been economically gaining in recent years, while the Western middle class has not.
brookings.edu/research/whats…
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
14 Nov
Sean McMeekin's latest tour-de-force makes a strong case that Stalin should be thought of as the main actor in WW2 — not Hitler or the US.
amazon.com/dp/B08F6Z72Q4
One angle he goes into that I hadn't seen elsewhere is that the Soviets *wanted* the Japanese and Americans to fight.

Makes sense, given the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the 1939 Soviet/Japanese war in Manchuria! But not that widely discussed. thediplomat.com/2012/08/the-fo…
He unearths some amazing quotes, which of course make sense, but are a new angle on things.

Even under Lenin, the Soviets *wanted* the Japanese to fight the Americans, and the Euros to fight each other. Then they'd roll in and install communism. Which is kind of what happened...
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
14 Nov
Almost 75% of billionaires are not American. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c…
This list has many omissions, of course, but it's directionally accurate. And illustrates a few things.

1) You don't need a US visa to make it anymore.
2) Billionaires will exist no matter what the US government does. Millionaires too.
3) Asia isn't the future, it's the present.
Therefore slogans like "billionaires should not exist" or "every billionaire is a policy failure" actually stem from an outdated American chauvinist view of the world.

No US policy can now stop the founders of the world from finally rising. Because wealth is decentralizing.
Read 6 tweets

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