Thought this was an interesting analysis, though I think it needs to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt (I think it’s power is what is qualitatively describes rather than precise numbers, and I think the author might even agree with me).

I’m always on the lookout to see it quantified how much the average American benefits from imperialism. My guy says if the US was unable to exert hegemony, the US would experience at least what Russia experienced in the 90s. These numbers align with that; and this is only talking about dollar hegemony and not, for example, the US using military pressure, sanctions, or other methods for extracting cheaper resources and goods from the global south.

That said, I’m not sure you can just run a regression and get your answer. I don’t see how you can isolate the US losing dollar hegemony without it then creating an uncountable number of secondary effects. All this stuff is deeply interconnected. But that said, I think this does a good job of highlighted at least in a qualitative sense just how much Americans benefit from dollar hegemony, and how losing that would be huge problem for the US economy.

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and the other person telling me baristas are the labor aristocracy.

I’m sorry, what?

I don’t know why you stop at homeless people

I don’t.

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Okay well you told me it was an absurd statement to depict homelessness in the imperial core as being easier than in the periphery using this logic, so feel free to tell me how I led myself astray or idk just write me off as a loon

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Because you’re talking about homeless people. The discussion there isn’t about how much a worker is being exploited or the purchasing power of currency. It’s about wether the country has safety nets at all and how brutal the police is. Not to mention weather conditions.

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At the risk of pissing you off by stating the obvious, you can have a job, exert the purchasing power of USD, and still be homeless in the USA

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