I will be pleased to see the current version of the U.S. fail spectacularly. Greatest blueprint ever, but we let the contractors become corrupt.

Quality of the prOn

Socially: We are nearing our peak. I think as we keep angling toward more inclusion in most discussions, many of the issues of bigotry and rancor for the sake of rancor will diminish. It will never completely disappear, and there will be high and low tides, but I think we are inching toward a plateau.

Technologically/ intelligence: We are nowhere near our peak, and we aren't even really at a place where we can imagine what that peak is going to look like. Education is ever-changing, and many of the changes are just running in place, but there have been, even over the past 10 years, some monumental advances in how we educate, and I think we will continue to do better, which means better products to make the tomorrows more advanced.

Governmentally: There is no such thing as a perfect economic/governing system. There will always be flaws. I don't know if we are ascending our descending, but we will keep experimenting and trying and wiping the slate clean and starting over, IMO, for the rest of human existence.

What about the decline of manufacturing jobs..... Will they ever come back to the United States?

The results of this poll will speak more to the average age of planeteers than anything else.

Do they have to?

If we hit the point where robots can do the manufacturing, there won't be manufacturing jobs anywhere. But goods will be so cheap that we'll replace those jobs with poetry jobs and skateboarding jobs.

This ties in to my radical theory that I proposed a while back. We dream of a Jetsons world where machines do all the work and people live lives of leisure. There's going to be an order in which society moves down that path, and perhaps the order is not what we think.

An easy initial assumption is that the upper classes would enter the life of leisure first. They have more income or wealth to do so.

The truly rich have always lived lives of leisure, but perhaps the second group to enter that world is the unskilled. The skilled are needed to design the robots and machines (including the robots and machines that make robots and machines). The unskilled don't have a role. So they enter a life of leisure made possible by high incomes of the skilled and the cheap goods made by the robots. Their life of leisure may be at a lower standard than the skilled, but it's still a high standard of living by objective standards. They have big-screen TVs and smart phones and stuff.

Over time, as the required skill level increases and the need for even skilled labor decreases, the remaining workers make more and more money, and more people enter the leisure class. Those who don't work have a reasonable standard of living that improves over time as technology continues to develop, and they essentially become the new middle class. Those who still work have a very high standard of living.

In the end game, the technology becomes completely self-sufficient and no one works. They all just watch robo-TV and eat at robo-Chilis and play in bands on the weekends.

This is most certainly true.

I'd guess our peak was somewhere in the 60's as far as "empires" go...

That means we will all get fat like in that movie Wall-E. Omaha is going to hate that.

Historically, the US ranked in the top 15 of all nations in math and science scores of its youth. The year before NCLB the US ranked 18.

Today, 31st...and dropping.

Don't talk to me about my age if you cannot add.

Yeah, we're descending.

The math of the young folk these days is just fine.

They know exactly what the cost of a dime bag is.

:spock:

Do you enjoy paying your income taxes and health insurance premiums?

Something I say when I'm feeling like complaining about my lot in life:

"Well, I don't have it that bad. I shit in clean water."