We first became powerful because we did the industrial revolution before anyone else, and used more of that capacity to fight the world (and win) than to fight each other.

When we fought each other, after the industrial revolution, that was the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars.

> and ever since the creation of the EU it's been becoming less and less important on the world stage.

I wouldn't say it was "ever since the creation of the EU", but rather "roughly between WW1 and decolonisation". Post-Cold-War the EU has taken over from the former global importance of the member states, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

That said, east and South Asia are regaining their multi-millennia history of being the world's dominant power by virtue of having roughly half the total world population.

And to agree up-thread, there's plenty going that can rapidly turn the EU's economy into a disaster if not handled expertly.

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mwigdahl 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There were a lot of European wars between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. I agree with your point overall but there was a lot of fighting each other during that timeframe.

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klipt 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the world's dominant power by virtue of having roughly half the total world population

If human+ level AI takes off one would expect to see a great decoupling of power from population.

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ben_w 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, but until then, proportional to each of [population, education/educated workers, capital, instantaneous industrial base, energy supply].

Asia's diverse, but I'd say they seem to be doing pretty well with rapid improvements across all fronts.

In comparison, the US's weaker (not weak-weak, just weaker) areas currently seem to be educated workers, instantaneous industrial base, and energy supply (relative to rapidly growing demand from compute); while the EU's weaker areas currently seem to be capital and energy supply (from supply shock, as it doesn't have the compute). The US and EU both have coming demographic issues, but not as soon as the other stuff becomes more important. People talk about China having demographic issues too, but they're a dictatorship, they can make it shift if they care to.

(And Russia's losing a lot of people, more educated people, capital markets, industrial base, and energy supply).

	▲	myrmidon 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> People talk about China having demographic issues too, but they're a dictatorship, they can make it shift if they care to. China has a significantly bigger problem with demographics than the EU does, it is just on a slightly longer fuse, compare: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?f... The big drop in Chinese fertility is going to be very disruptive in the near future, because it is much less gradual than European trends and the retiree/workers ratio is going to spike much harder because of that. Having full authoritarian control is not gonna change anything now because it is already much too late (action would have been required like 35 years ago). Best they can do is get through it somewhat smoothly. edit: This is an even better visualization (projected working age population fraction) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-young-working-...

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13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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