It has always been

A meme on memes?

Highly skilled North Korean hackers / a population of starving and downtrodden farmers who eat dirt for dinner.

It kind of is, because the kind of outcompeting that's happening requires decades of planning and development at scale. If you don't have economic stability, like we don't in the west, then it becomes impossible to run large scale projects like this. Hence why the west is being outcomepeted.

If Aliens showed up to earth to trade cheap stuff and energy from their star trek replicators, I'm pretty sure the US oligarchs would ensure a rulership that goes to war with, or at least install prohibitive tariffs on, the Aliens instead, to protect their profits. China offers a similar role.

We could have full employment if we just get rid of wires and pipes that go to homes. Hire people to go get you firewood and water from the river, and throw your waste into the street. This does result in a subsaharan economy, and cannibalism, but everyone is structurally guaranteed work.

If instead you import from China/Aliens, you are rich in stuff. Still plenty of work available in construction and selling stuff, and UBI is a path to keep the "country" rich, primarily in being a desirable place to live in freedom.

Even in the unlikely event of US reindustrializing to become an uncompetitive economic island to rest of the world, it would result in a relatively declining standard of living, and no exports, compared to those trading with the Aliens.

I mean, the idea is, that the tarriffed stuff becomes less attractive compared to the non-tarriffed stuff due to the higher price, so less people will buy it and instead the nationally produced alternatives thus strengthening the national economy and and weakening the tarriffed ones.

Of course that can only work with stuff that has nationally produced (or at least non-tarriffed) alternatives.

The latest predictions are based on aging population. Not only does China have a much higher birth rate than US, they are ahead in robotics for manufacturing production (lower physical labour need), and US is about to deport 10m relatively young people.

Rags like The Economist have been predicting its collapse for years and years and years. It’s a meme at this point.

Wouldn't most large countries be like that?

And what value/meaning would such a 'is collapsing' statement have outside of clickbaityness?

Yup that totally makes sense. Must be why incomes are rising in the poorest parts of the country.

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html