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.
In general peripheral countries experience official homelessness rates at least ten times higher than the United States.
I’m not trying to distort the actual situation, it is just that the aforementioned divide between workers who passively benefit from being in the US to reap the benefits of cheaper treats from the same people who make them indentured wage slaves, and those who are working at industries which can still collect on being at the top of the global value chain -that’s what helps determine where organizing is actually going to be effective. This is for instance why the tech or cybersecurity union isn’t going to do anything even if they took off but the service worker unions have been exploding.
Upper percentile workers in these industries have benefits coming directly from their employer (making them blase about universal healthcare), have enough money to be comfortable and can still drown everything out with consumption and isolation for them and any family they want, a retirement package that gives them the imaginary class position of being an investor, and their mortage gives them the imaginary class position of being a real estate magnate. I think it’s pretty easy to notice how people like this treat those in a real precarious positon more shittily even though they should have solidarity with their issues and they often have this hostile pride about working in labor aristocracy industries especially military that makes them take out all workplace issues on other people to avoid blaming the job. Buy into weird management cults like Amazon, that’s really stuff you’ve go to have a reason to buy into. Nobody doing catering there believes that shit. But get onto the higher end of tech workers and all kinds of marketing and other indecipherable positions, they start to. Company liquor cabinet is too open.
