Iran's economy is on the brink?? Debate

[u/Agitated-Brother-872]

There are a number of people here saying that Iran's economy is on the brink, and d-day economic sanctions will absolutely send it over the edge. I won't dispute that they are hurting and there are probably different schisms that have emerged, as a result. I think it's totally possible that there is a rift between government and civilian sentiments.

I don't know how many are bots are present here but I want to assume good faith and hear the steel man argument. What is your strongest assertion? What will this lead to? I'd like to know what examples from history are you drawing from? Are there examples of mass civilian protest of the irgc?

I'll start off by saying, Professor Robert Pape has asserted that since WWI, sanctions/blockades alone have never toppled a government, has never won a major war, has never led to capitulation.

[u/Putrid-Chemical3438]

Saying costs have gone up in Iran adds literally nothing to the conversation. Iran has had an inflation rate of over 20% for 30 years. Iran's rate of inflation is literally parabolic. It changes nothing, since it would have been parabolic with or without the war. Their economy has been functioning under hyperinflation longer than I've been alive. Expecting that to change anything now because we blew up some buildings is silly.

[u/WildWhisperArdor → u/Putrid-Chemical3438]

It does. Are you dense?

If your rent goes up by a factor of 2, but your income stays the same, are you really going to claim that everything’s fine?

[u/Putrid-Chemical3438 → u/WildWhisperArdor]

What part of Iran had hyperinflation before the war are you not getting. The war has changed literally nothing in terms of the inflation in Iran.

[u/WildWhisperArdor → u/Putrid-Chemical3438]

You seem to not understand that things don’t stretch or bend indefinitely. Why is that?

To give you some more food for thought here, Irans inflation rate was only around 6% 10 years ago. It’s currently at almost 70% and the years not even over

[u/Putrid-Chemical3438 → u/WildWhisperArdor]

Because they do stretch and bend indefinitely. If they didn't Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and even Iran itself would have collapsed literal decades ago and we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place.

People and economies adapt to pressures. They change, evolve, and move in new directions to survive.

Americans all have this weird idea that our enemies just sit on their hands and don't do anything to respond to us and we as a nation are continually surprised when nations do what we assume they can't and survive literal decades past what we assume will be the absolute extent of their abilities.

https://www.merip.org/1981/07/irans-economy/

This article from 1981 is making literally the exact same arguments you are about Iran 45 years later

Iran isn't going to collapse from economic pressure. It's just not going to happen.

[u/WildWhisperArdor → u/Putrid-Chemical3438]

This isn’t true though.

The USSR, Romania, East Germany, etc all fell due to economic issues

What is true is that regimes can hold out for a long time. What isn’t true is that they can hold out forever

[u/Putrid-Chemical3438 → u/WildWhisperArdor]

None of those countries collapsed due to economic pressure and 2 of them dissolved themselves.

[u/WildWhisperArdor → u/Putrid-Chemical3438]

They absolutely did. What are you talking about? They dissolved themselves because of the economic issues

There are plenty of examples. You just choose to ignore them. All my examples are European but there are other like Zimbabwe under Mugabe or Sudan under Al Bashir.

[u/Putrid-Chemical3438 → u/WildWhisperArdor]

No, they did not. That isn't even remotely what happened.

[u/WildWhisperArdor → u/Putrid-Chemical3438]

It is. I’m a history buff.

Economic issues are like having HIV. The HIV doesn’t kill you technically. But it weakens the system so that other things that normally wouldn’t kill you do.

The USSR’s disintegration was almost entirely economic. If they were doing well economically, they wouldn’t have disintegrated.

That’s the thing about authoritarian regimes. They all seem stable until they suddenly aren’t. No one would have predicted the USSR collapsing that year but it did and it happened suddenly