A civilization is what it trains its young to do. China is training engineers, scientists, builders, and city-makers by the million. The United States is training a generation to scroll, wager, perform for strangers, and call the resulting emptiness a lifestyle.
That is not a metaphor. It is a labor-market fact, a courtroom fact, and a public-health fact. China graduates on the order of 1.3 million engineers a year. America graduates about 130,000. China fuses megaregions, pours rail, and staffs labs. American youth, in rising numbers, live inside OnlyFans, sportsbooks, dating apps, and a documented collapse in mood and attention—while Meta has now lost in court over what it knew and did to children. Inequality in the United States has become a spectator sport with billionaire protagonists. Beijing, whatever else one thinks of it, treated unaccountable oligarchs as a threat to the country’s direction and put them back in their place.
The American arrangement is not an accident of taste. It is a commercial system that discovered a young nervous system is more profitable than a young apprentice. A society that dissociates its youth from work, family, and the physical world should not be surprised when those youth cannot staff an industrial republic—and will not fight to preserve one they no longer inhabit.
The talent factory versus the talent leak
Industrial power still begins with people who can design, machine, wire, simulate, and maintain physical systems. On that measure the gap is no longer subtle.
China now graduates roughly 1.3 million engineers a year against about 130,000 in the United States—a ten-to-one advantage that industrial executives cite when they talk about turbines, aircraft, grids, chips, and factories. Broader STEM output follows the same pattern. In 2020 China produced about 3.6 million STEM graduates; the United States produced about 820,000. Beijing has spent recent years rewriting a large share of university programs to push students toward artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics, and advanced manufacturing. That is not a slogan on a billboard. It is a state deciding what the next cohort is for.
Doctorates make the same point at higher resolution. China overtook the United States in STEM PhD production in the mid-2000s. Georgetown’s CSET projected more than 77,000 Chinese STEM doctorates a year by 2025 against about 40,000 in the United States. NSF data show China awarding more science and engineering doctorates, with a much heavier concentration in engineering and computing—on the order of 30,000 engineering doctorates in a recent Chinese year versus about 15,000 combined U.S. engineering and computer-science doctorates.
America still owns famous campus brands. It also increasingly uses those brands as hotels for foreign talent while the domestic K–12 pipeline decays. U.S. math and science scores have fallen from pre-pandemic levels. Eighth-graders sit at or below international averages in mathematics, science, and computer literacy. The country that put men on the Moon now argues about whether algebra is too hard and whether a phone locker in a classroom is tyranny.
Palmer Luckey’s charge is the shop-floor version of the same indictment: American universities stopped teaching engineers to make things. They produce “architecture astronauts” who assemble design packages and send them overseas. China still produces battery engineers, metallurgists, optical engineers, and robotics students at a scale the United States does not attempt. China has on the order of 580,000 robotics-related majors; American robotics engineering capacity is a fraction of that. Patents in humanoid robotics tell the same story of volume pointed at a national goal.
Stay rates used to hide the American weakness. Chinese students came, earned the PhD, and stayed. That cushion is thinning. More of the people America trained are taking the knowledge home. The United States cannot win a headcount contest with a country four times its population if it also refuses to train its own children in the subjects that build power.
Super cities, raised by the young
Walk through Shenzhen and the argument becomes concrete. A fishing town became a megacity of roughly twenty million, a hardware capital, a skyline that did not exist when many of its current residents were born. Parents arrived as migrants. Their children grew up inside an industrial policy. The city makes phones, drones, electric vehicles, and the components other countries pretend they still know how to fabricate.
That is not one showcase. Beijing’s plan is to fuse cities into nineteen megaregions, linking hundreds of millions of workers by high-speed rail and industrial clustering. The Greater Bay Area around Guangdong, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong already functions as a multi-trillion-dollar production system. Hangzhou pulls AI and platform talent. New trillion-yuan manufacturing cities compete for graduates with housing and trainee posts. Youth are not a marketing demographic in that system. They are the labor and the technical staff of the next map.
America can still build when a subsidy is large enough and a crisis is obvious enough. It does not build as a civilizational habit. Permitting, litigation, local vetoes, and a culture that treats trades as failure all slow the shovel. Housing in the job centers is a lottery. Transit is a museum. The grid is old. The people who would pour a new city are told the future is content creation.
China’s cities are not theme parks. They are the physical form of a decision: the young exist to raise the country’s capacity. America’s cities, for a large share of the same age group, have become a backdrop for short video.
The OF and Grindr generation
Call it what it is. A large slice of American youth has been rerouted from production to performance and from courtship to apps.
Young men 18 to 24 are about three times as likely as the average adult to pay for creator pornography such as OnlyFans, and three times as likely to use AI-generated porn. They over-index on online sports betting, crypto speculation, and prediction markets. The stereotype of the young man in a bedroom with a screen is no longer a cheap joke. It is a consumption profile.
Family researchers have put numbers on the male half of the crisis. Among men 18 to 29, about 27 percent watch pornography daily and about 23 percent gamble daily. A smaller share do porn, gambling, and gaming every single day. Daily users are far more likely to call themselves failures. Frequent porn use among young adults is associated with roughly double the risk of depression and loneliness after ordinary controls. The apps that replaced dating—Tinder, Grindr, and the rest—did not invent appetite. They turned other people into inventory and then sold loneliness back as a premium feature.
Women in the same cohort live inside a parallel machine: social comparison, NSFW content, and a dating market that simultaneously demands performance and withholds attachment. The share of young women reporting no sex in a year has climbed. Persistent sadness among teen girls became the majority condition in CDC surveys. This is not liberation in any sense that produces families, skills, or a country. It is a market that found female attention as easy to harvest as male.
Gambling is the solvent that finishes the job. U.S. commercial gaming revenue hit a record near $79 billion in 2025. Sports betting approached $17 billion. Mobile books turned every phone into a casino. Research has linked the arrival of online sports betting to higher bankruptcy risk among young adults. Gen Z already describes daily life as “survival mode.” A parlay is not an investment. It is the last story that still promises a jump in status without an apprenticeship.
A country can survive vice. It cannot survive vice as the main developmental environment of its median 22-year-old. China restricted online gaming hours for minors and treated tutoring, celebrity culture, and platform addiction as strategic problems. America legalized the sportsbook, celebrated the influencer, and called the wreckage “choice.”
Depression was not a mystery. The courts said so.
Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge dated the teen mental-illness epidemic to about 2012—the years the smartphone and social media became childhood. Depression and anxiety among adolescents rose more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. Girls were hit first. Self-harm hospitalizations among teen girls nearly tripled in some series. Anxiety among 18-to-25-year-olds rose on the order of 140 percent across the decade. Haidt’s later conclusion is colder than nostalgia. The deepest loss is attention. “If you imagine humanity with 10 to 50 percent of its attentional ability sucked out of it, there’s not much left.” Fifty years of educational progress, he has said, went “up in smoke.”
Then the filings caught up with the sociology.
In 2026 Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and accept child-safety limits to end a multistate trial over teen addiction to Facebook and Instagram. A New Mexico court ordered another $567 million for treatment after finding that the company helped fuel a youth mental-health crisis through endless scroll, autoplay, notifications, and recommendation systems. Jurors had already found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about exploitation on its platforms. Internal documents described Instagram as “a drug.” Research was allegedly killed after a pilot showed that a week off Facebook reduced depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison. Safety tools were built weak because strong tools threatened growth. Harm and engagement traveled together, and engagement paid.
That is the “Facebook loss in court” the public was told would never arrive. It arrived. The check is large in a headline and small against tens of billions in annual profit. The product remains in the pocket.
This dissociation is the business model
Critics who say the wreckage is “by design” are not required to produce a smoke-filled room. They are required to follow the incentive.
A young person who can concentrate can organize, train, strike, vote with judgment, build a firm, or refuse a bad bargain. A young person captured by the feed is easier. He is tired. She is ashamed. Both are available as inventory for ads, porn, and bets. They are less available as citizens. The platforms did not need a ministry to write that memo. They A/B tested it.
The documented design is compulsion. Infinite scroll, variable rewards, notifications at 1 a.m., recommendation engines that learn what makes a teenager stay. The secondary design is substitution. Porn instead of a partner. Grindr instead of a household. Sportsbooks instead of a raise. Influencer income instead of a trade. Each product offers a simulation of the thing a functioning adult used to seek in the real world.
Call it bread and circuses with a better conversion rate. Rome at least had to stage the circus. America put the circus in every backpack and then blamed the child for looking.
Schools surrendered the phone. Parents were told resistance was authoritarian. Universities sold credentials that no longer guaranteed a foothold. Employers discovered they could import scarce skills rather than train them. The remaining domestic surplus was not directed into shipyards and fabs. It was directed into the attention market, where a young body is a studio and a young male is a bettor.
China looked at the same technologies and asked a different question: does this make the country stronger? When the answer was no, the state moved. Gaming time for children was cut. Celebrity worship was attacked as a social solvent. Platform billionaires who thought they had become a second government were shown they had not. The American elite asked a different question: does this clear?
Oligarchs: curbed there, worshipped here
After Jack Ma criticized regulators in 2020, Ant Group’s IPO was stopped. His public role was removed. A rectification swept the platform firms. Fines landed. Voting control was rewritten. Private tutoring—an inequality machine that sold panic to parents—was gutted. The political line was “common prosperity.” The practical line was simpler. No private fortune gets to set the country’s course.
That is the fact Americans are not supposed to notice, because noticing it requires admitting that a state can still say no to a billionaire. The United States has built the opposite theater. Founders are treated as a separate species. They buy teams, newspapers, parties, and moral language. Twenty-nine people with fortunes above $50 billion now hold about 27 percent of all billionaire wealth, up from about 7 percent in 2017. America has on the order of 900 billionaires. The culture does not merely tolerate that. It casts it.
Pankaj Mishra’s contrast is the one the American press prefers to skip. China unleashed entrepreneurs and then refused to let them harden into an unaccountable oligarchy—“which is what has happened in many Western European countries, and of course, notoriously, in the United States.” One does not have to adopt Beijing’s constitution to see the American result: capital with a veto, labor with a podcast, and a political class that fundraises in both rooms.
Inequality is the wrecking ball that makes the youth market rational. U.S. disposable-income inequality sits near a Gini of about 41; market income before taxes is far more skewed. Housing in the productive cities is a closed shop. A young worker can do everything the pamphlet recommended and still live like a lodger. In that environment, OnlyFans is not a moral collapse first. It is an income strategy. The sportsbook is not a hobby first. It is a story about escape. The feed is not entertainment first. It is the one arena where status still updates in real time.
China did not abolish rich men. It abolished the idea that rich men are the protagonists of the nation. America made them the protagonists and then wondered why the extras stopped caring about the plot.
Experts, not slogans
Haidt’s verdict is developmental. A phone-based childhood makes young people sick and blocks the passage into adult competence. He does not blame the children. He blames the adults who outsourced childhood to companies that monetize interruption. Twenge’s time-series makes the same point in tables: the break arrives with the device.
CSET and the National Science Board make the industrial point. China already leads in STEM doctorate volume and in several measures of research output. Unless the United States rebuilds its own bench, the gap is arithmetic. Luckey makes the factory point. If you stop teaching people to fabricate, you will import the fabricator’s power.
The courtroom record now sits beside the professors. Meta’s own research culture, as alleged and in material part established in litigation, treated teen harm as a growth input. That is not a conservative lament. It is a finding about how American capitalism actually behaved when the customer was a child.
Conclusion: this ends the empire as it is
Empires do not require an invading army if they cannot reproduce competence.
The American empire, as it currently exists, runs on a stack: scientific talent, industrial depth, social trust, and a youth cohort willing to inhabit real institutions—firms, families, services, yards, labs. That stack is being eaten in public. The talent pipeline is thin and imported. The cities are not being built. The young are being harvested. The platforms that harvested them have been dragged into court and have written checks. The billionaires who own the commanding heights are celebrated as the plot. Inequality makes the escape hatches look rational. The escape hatches make the inequality durable.
China is doing the opposite with the material of a generation. It graduates engineers by the million. It points youth at rails, fabs, robotics, and megaregions. It treated platform oligarchs as subordinates. It treated childhood addiction as a strategic vulnerability rather than a record quarter. The result is not a poem. It is capacity.
That contrast is unsustainable for Washington. A country that cannot form adults will not remain the axis of the system it built. It can stay rich in paper claims for a long time. It can stay loud. It can stay armed. What it cannot stay is the industrial and scientific organizer of the world while its own young are trained to be users.
The end, if this continues, will not look like a flag coming down on a single afternoon. It will look like delayed plants, imported skills, falling scores, falling births, rising bookmaker revenue, and a political class that still talks as if the 1990s were a permanent technology. Rivals do not have to defeat that America in a pitched battle. They have to out-build the parts of it that still work while the rest of it stares at a phone.
Repair would be simple to name and hard to want: phone-free schools, a ban on the most predatory gambling ads aimed at broke young men, housing abundance in the job centers, apprenticeships that confer status, elite institutions that treat engineering as a patriotic craft, and a public culture that stops kneeling to oligarchs. China already made the basic civilizational choice—that the young exist to raise the country’s strength. America made a different choice: that the young exist to be monetized.
That second choice will not support an empire. It will support a market. Markets do not hold alliances, ships, or a standard of living for people who no longer know how to make the world they live in. They hold attention, until even that runs out.
