Hacker Cinema
Logan's Run
1976 · Film · 118 min
Directed by Michael Anderson
In the 23rd century, inhabitants of a domed city freely experience all of life's pleasures — but no one is allowed to live past 30. Citizens can try for a chance at being "renewed" in a civic ceremony on their 30th birthday. Escape is the only other option.
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57 comments on Hacker News
See the documentary Logan's Run.
logan's run is too bad of a movie to be anything else, sadly.
Yeah, Star Wars more or less killed sci-fi as we had known it. I liked the weird Logan's Run, the depiction of class stratification in "Soylent Green", the banality of corporate control of "Rollerball".
The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)
"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…
A Golden Age for sure.
Has to be #1, as the blog makes no mention of age restrictions. Ejecting people for being over 30 would be unheard of outside of Logan's Run! (vintage scifi movie)
This is just rose tinted nostalgia. You are remembering the things you loved which are much simpler and forgetting all the lemon shots and limitations of the day.
The movies and TV that can be made now without the limitations of the past are significantly different, from period movies to super hero movies and everything in between. Watch the 1970s superman or logan's run and see how they hold up.
The vast majority of CG you don't notice.
I don't think history shows that the young are harder to corrupt. I'll grant you idealism but might that be a consequence of naivete and inexperience?
At any rate ISTM that "Wild in the Streets" and "Logan's Run" weren't instruction films.
A shout to Damnation Alley (1997) with George Peppard. The missile launch sequence is first rate IMO and creeped me out something fierce, for its oddly realistic banter and simple but vivid displays. From first (Soviet) launch indication to the sequence of nuclear detonations, ~10 minutes of horror that was more intense for its lack of background music and the chatter of tense men doing their job.
Bizarre at times and cheesy scorpion aside, the dialogue was well written and Jerry Goldsmith's electronically augmented score gave it a vibe that recalled the wonder of watching Logan's Run for the first time. Its simple quest led to a series of episodes in a long journey that were each good cinema. The cockroaches! My favorite film of 1977 besting Star Wars.
>There must be some movie with a plot of growing kids on a farm upstate until they're ready for societal life ?
In Logan's Run the people live in a bubble-dome city, a portion of which is essentially an unmaintained ruin that feral children run around until they're old enough to be civilized.
How would Logan's Run help with this?
Killing people at 21 years old (or 30 if you prefer the movie) would lose close to 100% of working years while keeping 50% or more of the non-working years.
There's no real consistency in any of it. Sometimes breasts are PG-13 (Titanic) but usually any breasts are an automatic R (most other modern movies, except for those with sufficient "art cred"). In movies from the 1980s or earlier, breasts could be in a PG movie (Airplane, Logan's Run.)
The PG-13 rating was created in response to violence in PG movies (somebody getting their heart ripped out in Temple of Doom), not nudity.
Relatedly, I feel like "Soylent Green", "Logan's Run", and more in the 1970s all had climate change related concerns/worries and/or messages. A lot of it got lost in the action/thriller genres, especially in the film adaptations, and a lot of it still inherited mistakes and traps from the Malthusians of previous sci-fi generations (50s/60s sci-fi especially was prone to believing in the since-disproven Malthusian trap), but even in the 1970s you can read a lot of early climate change anxiety from the more intended-to-be empathetic parts of pop culture. (The 70s is where I generally draw the boundary line in sci-fi between Malthusianism and Climate Change concerns.)
Climate change fears have been in the pop culture air for longer than a lot of people realize.
Too much Charlton Heston in the author's list. He's a dreadful, wooden actor.
I love Silent Running.
Does The Stepford Wives count as sci-fi?
Logan's Run was a fabulous film, full of memorable moments and lines.
The Sutherland remake of Body Snatchers is brilliant; Sutherland's alien persona is genuinely scary, and despite his versatility I can't think of anything else he's done that's quite so out-there.
(Kids those days). Logan's run
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0074812
Oh, Alpha-Centauri. Didn't think of that.
Thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run instead.
And maybe a bit of 'Soylent Green' ;-)
Edit: I meant the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) , the book(s) I've read much later only.
Hello, fellow old!
I immediately thought of Logan's Run as well. In the movie it was 30(?) years old and in the book 21(?). I would have died some time ago in that world...
"2010: The Year We Make Contact" is a much more accessible movie that holds up pretty well. It also feels like a payoff after investing so much time being confused/bored by 2001.
I was 11 when "Logan's Run" came out. Yes it's kinda loaded with 70's sex tropes for the first act, but it's also equal parts goofy and a really good film.
The original "The Day The Earth Stood Still" holds up.
"A Boy and His Dog" is a bit crude here and there, but might resonate with a 12yo.
"Quatermass and the Pit" (aka "Five Million Years to Earth") is both intense and fairly tame.
A lot of old TV series hold up - Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, UFO, Space 1999, Star Trek TOS, etc all have some excellent episodes.
I absolutely love "Dark City" and "12 Monkeys" but I'm not sure they'd have held my interest at 12.
Doctor Who, both old and new are excellent. Though I'm partial to the Tom Baker era.
The Stargate franchise is pretty good.
"Moon" (2009) is a bit cerebral but a good SF story.
because it's not cool and it's more than 5 years old. Which in current time and space is a terrible sin, everything must be new, stable and reliable have become authoritarian concepts.
and BTW if you are > 35 you should not program anymore because you're old, probably your code is full if bugs because your programming style it's old as well and you fail to understand that the future is an implementation of Logan's Run, which is a very old movie, that nobody should watch, because it was made before 4K resolution and 144hz sceeens.
Not directly. It made me think of it, because of the premise of the movie ( utopian society based on killing off undesirable society members ).
Bill Burr's running joke is that there is too many people in the world and if he was a dictator, he would be quietly depopulating the earth by sinking cruise ships ( and help economy by building more cruise ships ), because people who use cruise ships are likely low value individuals ( paraphrasing for brevity ).
The connection is there, but it is not apparent ( and not that many people these days are familiar with Logan's Run ).
Not that I can see. A couple of unglowing ones on ebay though.
Had a Logan's Run themed birthday party for my wife's 30th. Party favors included ankh necklaces (ankhs from some party supply for $1/each or something). I'm a year younger, so I wore a red life clock, and made her a flashing one... But I'm no movie magician, the timer kit and battery and wires to go with it were waaaaaay too cumbersome. If only she had rollerskates on her hand, we could make it work ;)
Also, I was powering with a 9V battery... It was important to keep some with varying states or charge, because with a fresh battery, the light was too red.
If you email me to remind me (in profile), I can try to find the ebay receipts from several years ago and see if there's anyway to contact the seller. I may also be willing to part with mine. Gotta find it first, but I'm past renewal age now, gotta move on to reciting cat poems.
Logan's Run sets the limit at 30, and is less particular about informed consent to the procedure. Maybe this film is the prequel, before regulatory capture, scope creep and empire building.
Nature: living every day like you're in a slasher horror movie. Really, really bad. It only seems fun and wholesome to us because we're on top and almost none of us spend much time genuinely engaging with nature in even the way that an apex predator has to, let alone prey animals. And jeez, why would we? It's terrible.
Factory farm: living every day (and probably not very many of them) like you're in Saw or Cube or something. Far worse than even the pretty bad situation that is life in nature. Like, a lot worse. And that was already pretty bad.
Ethical farms, keeping backyard chickens, et c: Like living in a relatively good dystopia. Brave New World, maybe, in the best case. Logan's Run, in the worst.
Movies (non-documentary) can moot and champion whole ideologies, psychologies, and philosophies, for example Fight Club (nihilism), Logan's Run (progressivism, anti-establishmentism), Lost in Translation (existentialism, contemporary anomie), Magnolia (existentialism, fugue) etc. I suggest you broaden your viewing.
> Logan's Run
Oh god. I can't imagine anyone ever thought Box (the robot) didn't look completely awful.
It may lack good practical effects, but some of the matte paintings in that movie are gorgeous. I love when they get to the overgrown Washington D.C.
I mean, maybe? But I don't really think so. Here's a list from IMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls009003184/
Let's take a look at a few of the entry's from the 1970's that actually had practical effects:
Logan's Run - Here's Logan fighting a robot: https://youtu.be/USADM5Gk9Gs?t=106 Star Wars - : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k Soylent Green - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z2txLk0ybo Invasion of the Body Snatchers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc_0dlmSq7I Alien - here's the chest buster scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQ7om598OM
I don't think these hold up as well as nostalgia would suggest, the exception being the alien chest buster scene, which is amazing. The others are much less ambitious and simply don't look as good as modern movies. Many of the practical effects look small or toy like. Maybe there's a sweet spot in the 90's?
Logan's run was the first thing I thought of as well. Maybe a dutch adaptation of the movie that took some liberties?
Logan's Run: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)
1976 dystopian fiction. It had a look and feel that matches up with this architecture.
Set X to 30, and make the cause of death deceptive euthanasia, and you've got the movie "Logan's Run" [1]. Make X 21 and you've got the book "Logan's Run" [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run
I think you have described Logan's Run. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)
Three movies for freedom lovers:
* Logan's Run ... It really is safe outside
* Demolition Man ... "You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read."
* Gattaca ... "I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science."
The concept art looks eerily reminiscent of the buildings in Logan's Run (1), or perhaps vice versa.
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
This reminds me of the movie Logan´s run all the time. The cites under their bubbles. Our's don't have the bubble over them, but look very similar from afar. All the illuminated haze. Fortunately I'm living right at the edge of one such large bubble, and can flee it within 30 minutes on a bicycle.
I remember a podcast episode [can't remember or quickly find the make or model] where they discuss, in retrospect, why technology or processes may have been designed as shown and demonstrated in film.
One example was The Circuit in 'Logan's Run'. The Circuit is basically a vending machine for companionship with a Star Trek transporter pattern buffer for storage in the back end; you can dial through your options of who is available [as electronically stored in the machine] and pick who you'd like to spend [presumably intimate] time with before that selected person goes back into storage. The order of the availably-stored people appears random, but is it at least for the first option presented?
The main character [a male] appears interested in opposite-sex company [at least at the time of that scene]. The first person that is offered by The Circuit is male. After an exchange of smirks, the main character continues to dial through several more options.
Presuming that The Circuit somehow knows or guesses the main character's preferences, why offer the complete opposite first?
One possible thought offered by the podcast hosts was that The Circuit has some type of logic akin to the following:
"Out of the next 10 people to walk through that door, you must select one. If you do not select any of those 10 people, you must take the 11th person."
... so by doping, seeding, weighting, priming, spoiling, or throwing the first option with a "definitely not what is being sought after by this user", The Circuit nudges the user [the main character here] into thinking harder on the next few presented options.
Logan's Run is such a 70's scifi movie, but hey, Farrah Fawcett. Richard Jordan acted in this film and my favorite role he played was the Secretary of Defense in The Hunt for Red October "When I'm not kissin' babies, I'm stealing their lollipops."
>2008 crash to protect older people
I had no idea they had audited the age of the bankers who caused that mess. Only one I'm aware of was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson who brought down an entire bank at the age of 25.
As for your darwinistic-eugenics as an old person, sure I'm happy with that, but the question is - would you be happy with that when your older and somebody else's kids suggests the same thing. Not that easy to answer.
But whatever age people are, the penchant to begrudge the age groups above them to varying degrees and reasons tends to be strong, at least until they reach their 40's. At least that is what I have observed from many years of experience of many age ranges.
> In an ideal world we would not need to make choices like this, but the choice is real and we can't fumble it.
I suspect the film Logan's Run would be worth a watch if you have not seen it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
Oh I'd also add, we have not seen results of sterility post infection - that data might change your perspective if we end up finding out that the chances of becoming sterile due to infection of this are high. Which is still an unknown and not to be ruled out.
Scientists and science-fiction has been dealing with/talking about climate crisis since the 50s/60s. A lot of the early stuff is tied in with some wrong (since disproven) Malthusian beliefs, but a since of post-fossil fuel-related climate change is an undercurrent through a lot of sci-fi. Even just looking at well known pop culture artifacts, climate crisis is a component of the films Logan's Run and Soylent Green in the 70s.
One of my favorite graphs on the subject remains xkcd's: https://xkcd.com/1732/
You can't read an exact "degree increase" around the 70s on that chart, but you can clearly see the seventies is in a notable slope/gradient as is everything post-world wars.
I don't think there's an official origin for Siri's name. Someone said it was named after a child. I suspect (without evidence) it was named after the female robot in the pilot episode of the Logan's Run who ran Mountain City, a paradise city.
In the underrated movie "Logan's Run" Carousel was also a ritual where people would willingly and enthusiastically be killed in the expectation of being reincarnated. [0][1]
[0] http://logans-run.wikia.com/wiki/Carousel
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnLU9nyFSA
A play on the cult classic "Logan's Run".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)
Or Logan's Run.
(Ritual suicide embedded in culture, age 21 in the novel and 30 in the film)
That feature reminds me of what they had in Logan's Run. A lot of stuff feels like people trying to implement an idea from one of their fav sci-fi books or movies.
Logan's Run [0] (still a great movie even watching it today - especially the cats [1] :-) ) - that society sure had the lowest health care expenses on the entire planet in its fictional universe of a future earth (a statement even more true since it probably was the only one, haha).
By the way, if we want to "cut costs" we could just blow up the planet and be done with it. No more "costs". What bizarre discussions we are having these days. "Cost cutting" makes sense in narrow(er) contexts, when the goal is clear and various paths to get there are explored, but for societal meaning-of-everything goal setting? If we didn't have health care we would not need to pay for it. That's true for everything ever made by humans. On this planet one person's cost is another persons's income, until we find aliens to trade with.
People already exist (and in huge numbers!) - what do we do with them? They may as well work as doctors and nurses and in the many industries supplying the health care sector. Or they could just hang around and play games, produce meme videos for Youtube, or become insurance agents or financial advisers (but of course, without "costs" somewhere there is not much to invest in... unless we become more of a "virtual society" and just have "money" building and feeding on itself without actual real-world connection).
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
[1] https://youtu.be/sax6J8n1AiE
.
PS: Completely unrelated issue, just for fun search for "Logan's run" on Youtube, filter by "length > 20 minutes", and check out a few of the many results. You can do that for lots of movies, especially popular older ones. Does it seem like Youtube is overrun by millions (must be millions overall, for all kinds of movies) of fake "movies", hours-long fake movies? Doesn't that waste huge amounts of Youtube storage? Why does Google not do anything about it, ML algorithms should have an easy time finding most of those uploads?
Oddly enough, I was thinking about that on a bus ride today. How it's both normalized to value non-degreeholders less and for compensation to plateau at a lower rate. While I do think there's a skills gap that exists, having at least one degree seems entry-level for a lot of people nowadays.
And Logan's Run looks like a neat movie, in my city we have a monthly mash-up of old films that play at an independent theater, so I'll check it out sometime.
I'm picturing several classic movies remade from the cows' perspective. Logan's Run would be the obvious choice, but I could also see a bovine Charlton Heston shouting You've gotta tell 'em! BEEF IS COW! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me… MOOOOOO!!
I think it's a reference to a movie called Logan's Run where life ends at 30.
The entire moral quandary behind minority report could be avoided simply by having police monitor people, and if they are actually about to commit murder---prevent it and arrest them for attempted murder.
The reason they didn't do that was simply because it's a movie, and movies work better if instead of picking a compromise point between our society and some future ideal---you just pick the future ideal that will seem crazy to people.
It's like Logan's Run (movie) where the issue isn't just that you kill everyone over 30 to save resources, but that you lie and pretend no one can physically live past 30 and everyone gets reincarnated. They inserted the moral quandary to make the story interesting.
Yeah, I empathise with you. Once the crystal embedded in your palm starts flashing red(1), nobody in the industry even wants to acknowledge your existence, let alone your experience. I have a youthful voice and went to university for CompSci long after graduating from a technical high school, so when I show up for the in-person interview, the atmosphere often gets sucked out of the room.
The absolute worst experience was a technical phone interview that was going very well, I thought I connected with the interviewer(2). So I was shocked after being complimented on the breadth and depth of knowledge I had, near the end of a 45 minute conversation, there was a pause and he asked "so, when did you graduate from high school?" Needless to say, the tone changed somewhat and I didn't get the in-person interview for the position that "wasn't really a good fit for me," and he, "wasn't really sure [we're] going to actually fill this position," forgetting that he earlier said he wanted someone as soon as possible.
(1) See Logan's Run -- it's a documentary about the Bay area companies' solution for aging software engineers. /s (2) And I knew him, but only in the sense I knew him from several mailing lists stretching back to the days of USENET as a knowledgeable, respectable guy with a good reputation.
TL;DR ageism is a thing everywhere.
Oh that's interesting! I don't find the special effects in those movies laughable at all. In Dr. Strangelove they play only a minor role in the film, while I think in 2001 he cleverly worked around the technical limitations, and used a set and model design that still largely looks (60s style) futuristic, rather than dated.
Compare it with contemporary or slightly newer movies like Planet of the Apes, Barbarella, Logan's run. It's not a standard space opera with space battles, faster than light travel, alien empires and magic space gravity. Sure, the men in ape suits look a little naff, but then I don't see how else he could have done it. Claymation would have been worse, herding actual gorillas not an option.
The "creepiness factor" of targeted advertising.
I am completely cool with advertising, as well as Real Life targeted advertising such as direct mail.
However I am profoundly offended by targeted online advertising. For example a few days ago I was scouting around for a book on purely conceptual mobile website design. I like APress' books on conceptual iOS App design, so I wandered around APress' site, eventually to come up empty-handed.
Now, when I log into facebook, absolutely the whole fucking time is an ad for APress books.
Look I think APress is a right chap but I don't want him following me home from the WiFi spot late at night!
However I realize now that I have a realistic method to make A Compleat Clusterfuque of Facebook's ad tracking:
I have so far avoided entering any of my favorite books or movies. I also - from time to time - advise my FB friends to avoid it themselves. Few of them were previously aware such tracking was possible.
Here Are A Few Of My Favorite Things:
Movies:
The President's Analyst 2001: A Space Oddyssey Logan's Run (all those comedy flicks that star Leslie Nielsen) Bound For Glory Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb Tora! Tora! Tora! Most but not all the James Bond flicks Very few of the sequels to anything
Books
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance All Quiet On The Western Front The Hobbit (but not Lord of the Rings) 2001: A Space Oddyssey (quite different from the movie) (most but not all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels) Amateur Telescope Making Foundation Trilogy Stranger In A Strange Land Time Enough For Love
I need to catch some ZZZs soon so I'll cut this short.
More or less what I'd do is list a bunch of favorites, as being a whole bunch of completely unrelated books and movies, absolutely none of which I'd actually seen nor read, generally having to do with topics that either do not interest me or even offend me.
Daniel Steel is quite popular. I read a few pages of one of her novels it was well-written but I could not conceive of actually reading the whole book.
While this wouldn't stop FB from showing me ads, it would result in a lot of wasted time and effort showing them to me.
What really gets me down, though, is that the vast majority of ads that I see, are offering me attractive women of my own age.
I am fifty-one years old. The one small comfort I take form my divorce, is that Bonita did not want to have children.
As yet, Facebook has yet to offer me a woman who might bear my child. Figure That One Out: many if not most of my FB friends have kids, they are always posting their photos, singing their praises &c.
I always "Like" their posts, commonly reply, sometimes share yet FB has yet to clue in to flogging a way for me to continue the non-quite Eternal swim in the gene pool.
:-(
Maybe Naomi Klein can clear her mind with some old classic films:
How about Soylent Green (overpopulation, 1973), or Silent Running (climate collapse, 1972)?
Maybe something more upbeat like Logan's Run (overpopulation AND climate collapse, 1976)?
Yep. It's all been way overdone. Brazil and 12 Monkeys were different because it was all more or less new then. Both also had great arc and reveals, but It's Been Done Now.
I say "new then"; dystopian SciFi was a staple of drive-ins in the '70s - from Silent Running to Planet of the Apes to Logan's Run...
It's not like there isn't a huge backlog of great sci-fi to draw on that isn't dystopian. I'd like to see The Foundation Trilogy as a multi-year "Breaking Bad" style series.
It's basically a massive essay, but Scorcese's "Personal Journey" manages to explain why movies are in terrible shape without being hopeless about it. The reasons are profound.
<tedious_exposition>
This is a reference to a film from 1976, Logan's Run:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)
This reference is aimed at least a decade over the head of a thirty-year-old, which may be part of the joke.
</tedious_exposition>
Just watched In Time, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/, the other day; it looks at financial inequality through a lens of equating money with time. Quite reminiscent of Logan's Run.
Spoiler: they ultimately initiate a collapse of the system by a violent redistribution of wealth [ie time]. The movie ends at this point without considering the fallout.
I think it's something like the plot of the Logan's Run movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(1976_film)
When I read "Brave New World" just last year again. The terms "savage" and "reservation" never once conjured an image of American Indians. Instead I more or less saw the sort of savages one might see in "sanctuary" in the film "logan's run."
Of course in this world it's much easier to be offended than to tolerate. #legalism and #liability is the death of us.
watch the movie Logan's Run
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack
While I agree with some of the points in the article, I want to stress that this is only one possible scenario. (Sorry for this long post. It's my first.)
A couple of times, the article mentions a country's wealth and power. In the long run, national competitiveness determines a nation's wealth. Currency changes are a mechanism that can influence competitiveness in the short term. (As mentioned by others, devaluation can increase competitiveness and wealth.) National competitiveness has been studied exhaustively. While there are still a lot of questions, we seem to agree that a nation needs to produce goods/services that the rest of the human race values and are willing to pay for at an efficient cost. The nation also needs to attact the most able and willing workers, call them the "talent". The nation needs a mechanism to identify and provide opportunities to the talent. Thus far, U.S. is recognized as the nation still most able to provide these conditions. Less universally agreed upon is the need for a rule of law including rights to personal property, the opportunity for the talent to accumulate much more property than the average person, and efficient access to capital. As those on this website know, access to capital and entrepreneurial support is pretty good here :)
There are two additional trends that I think have influenced the Asian Currency Crisis. One is the broad aging of the population in the wealthy contries. There is a net savings effect that is still going on. Younger people have more need of loans and older people have more need to invest. Right now, the need to invest outweights the need for loans. Money has been cheap for several decades. No one know what effect this will have when an equilibrium is reached, sometime in 2030. Another effect is land. The U.S. is said to have about the same livable land as China. You can see what this might mean. China has about 1.5 billion people to U.S.'s 300 million. A lot of Chinese will want to immigrate to US to get away from extreme over-crowding and the destroyed environment. (If you get the chance, watch the documentary "Manufactured Landscapes.") This will cause land values in US to rise, in proportion to the rise in China's per capita income.
National economies have changed drastically over a relative short time period -- a few decades. One of the scenarios discussed by experts is similar to the doomsday scenarios caused by a US dollar devalution versus the Chinese yuan. In most estimates, if this particular scenario does occur, it takes about 30-50 years. Interestingly, if you listen to most Chinese government and financial representatives, they present a doomsday scenario where China is the one going bust. They are very familiar with their own potential dangers, while we are much more aware of our own problems. For example, China has a very serious pension issue. Due to the one child policy, their workers-to-retired ratio is far smaller than in the U.S. They have not begun to create a Social Security program. (Think of Logan's Run. Actually, there are scary stories that I've heard from some of my Chinese friends.) I'm just giving another angle to this whole national competitiveness issue.