America Ain’t in Decline; It’s Broken

22 Comments

1. 

   jwb on July 24, 2012 at 11:36 pm

   I don’t think Rich said what you think he said.

   • 

     BooMan on July 24, 2012 at 11:56 pm

     I just want you to read his piece.  I know what he said.  

     • 

       Phil Perspective on July 25, 2012 at 1:03 am

       I do like how Rich takes a rip at his old op-ed mate.

     • 

       jwb on July 25, 2012 at 1:59 am

       He doesn’t say America is in decline; he says that America is in thrall to the idea that it is in decline.

       • 

         BooMan on July 25, 2012 at 8:32 am

         and what did I say?  That a certain slice of our elite is in decline and is panicked about it.  Your snark-o-meter may need adjustment.  

         • 

           JeffL on July 25, 2012 at 12:38 pm

           I picked up on the snark, but I think the Rich piece deserves a more direct recommendation.  I don’t think the brief link will encourage anyone to read it.

           I read it a few days ago and encourage everyone to read it.  I don’t agree with all of it but he has a really valuable perspective and this is a must read IMHO.  The discussion of “American exceptionalism” is terrific.

           It seems to me, as Rich quotes another, “decline is in the eye of the beholder”.  I can remember times in the early seventies with the war dragging on, social evolution and tensions WRT African American civil rights and feminism, and all the time nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads.  We even had the ultimate acronym for catastrophic decline – MAD:  mutually assured destruction.

2. 

   Marie2 on July 24, 2012 at 11:43 pm

   Groton alum not on the ballot this year.

   The choice is Punahou>Occidental>Columbia or Cranbrook>Stanford>BYU.  One that smoked pot in high and one that bullied and attacked a gay classmate in high school.

   • 

     BooMan on July 24, 2012 at 11:57 pm

     You excised Harvard out of both of their resumes.

     • 

       Marie2 on July 25, 2012 at 2:31 pm

       Technically, shouldn’t have listed more than the prep school attendance of the two candidates since the subject was Groton.  But what those schools prepared them for seemed relevant.  Plus it is interesting that both continued their educations at private colleges and both attended two each to complete their undergrad degrees.        

3. 

   mainsailset on July 25, 2012 at 12:01 am

   Regarding the concept of pedigreed. In my neck of the woods we refer to it as ‘line breeding’ when it works and ‘incest’ when it doesn’t.

4. 

   Oscar In Dallas on July 25, 2012 at 12:18 am

   There are only two ways out. Either the parties will become more fluid, or one party must be crushed underfoot.

   There’s a third option – kill the filibuster – but it’s as unlikely as the other two.

5. 

   sherifffruitfly on July 25, 2012 at 12:42 am

   contrary to the hillary-loving anti-Obama white “progressive” lie, it was NOT just as bad when slick willy was in office.

   • 

     Phil Perspective on July 25, 2012 at 12:52 am

     Do you enjoy playing the idiot?  You need to read up on the Clinton years.  Boo gave you just one example.  There are plenty more.  Trumped up scandals.  Rusty Limpballs attacking Chelsea Clinton.  I could go on and on.

   • 

     Bazooka Joe on July 25, 2012 at 1:15 am

     There were absolutely, totally no forced government shutdowns or impeachment proceedings. Those DID NOT happen.

     Also, too, they absolutely, totally didn’t accuse the Clintons of murdering their lawyer and dumping his corpse in Fort Marcy Park. That DID NOT happen.

     You are under no obligation to like the Clinton administration, or even to be particularly sympathetic towards them, but that stuff did happen.

6. 

   barath on July 25, 2012 at 12:51 am

   Well, one way of somewhat accurately describing it is that it is in decline, but not for the reasons that are usually cited, and not on the timeframe either.  That is, we’ve been in a very slow decline for many decades, and it’s probably not going to let up for several more to come.  (With brief respites, of course.)

   Let’s start with some basics, for the sake of those of my readers who haven’t waded their way through the fine print of the paper. The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. What we are pleased to call “primitive societies” – that is, societies that are well enough adapted to their environments that they get by comfortably without huge masses of cumbersome and expensive infrastructure – usually do so in a fairly small way, and very often evolve traditional ways of getting rid of excess goods at regular intervals so that the cost of maintaining it doesn’t become a burden. As societies expand and start to depend on complex infrastructure to support the daily activities of their inhabitants, though, it becomes harder and less popular to do this, and so the maintenance needs of the infrastructure and the rest of the society’s stuff gradually build up until they reach a level that can’t be covered by the resources on hand.

   It’s what happens next that’s crucial to the theory. The only reliable way to solve a crisis that’s caused by rising maintenance costs is to cut those costs, and the most effective way of cutting maintenance needs is to tip some fraction of the stuff that would otherwise have to be maintained into the nearest available dumpster. That’s rarely popular, and many complex societies resist it as long as they possibly can, but once it happens the usual result is at least a temporary resolution of the crisis. Now of course the normal human response to the end of a crisis is the resumption of business as usual, which in the case of a complex society generally amounts to amassing more stuff. Thus the normal rhythm of history in complex societies cycles back and forth between building up, or anabolism, and breaking down, or catabolism. Societies that have been around a while – China comes to mind – have cycled up and down through this process dozens of times, with periods of prosperity and major infrastructure projects alternating with periods of impoverishment and infrastructure breakdown.

   A more dramatic version of the same process happens when a society is meeting its maintenance costs with nonrenewable resources. If the resource is abundant enough – for example, the income from a global empire, or half a billion years of ancient sunlight stored underground in the form of fossil fuels – and the rate at which it’s extracted can be increased over time, at least for a while, a society can heap up unimaginable amounts of stuff without worrying about the maintenance costs. The problem, of course, is that neither imperial expansion nor fossil fuel drawdown can keep on going indefinitely on a finite planet. Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at that point the costs of keeping wealth flowing in from your empire or your oil fields begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally unstoppable decline; the gap between your maintenance needs and available resources spins out of control, until your society no longer has enough resources on hand even to provide for its own survival, and it goes under.

   …

   That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

   The date in question is 1974.

   That was the year when the industrial heartland of the United States, a band of factories that reached from Pennsylvania and upstate New York straight across to Indiana and Michigan, began its abrupt transformation into the Rust Belt. Hundreds of thousands of factory jobs, the bread and butter of America’s then-prosperous working class, went away forever, and state and local governments went into a fiscal tailspin that saw many basic services cut to the bone and beyond. Meanwhile, wild swings in markets for agricultural commodities and fossil fuels, worsened by government policy, pushed most of rural America into a depression from which it has never recovered. In the terms I’ve suggested in this post, the US catabolized most of its heavy industry, most of its family farms, and a good half or so of its working class, among other things. It also set in motion the process of catabolizing one of the most important resources it had left at that time, the oil reserves of the Alaska North Slope. That oil could have been eked out over decades to cushion the transition to a low-energy future; instead, it was pumped and burnt at a breakneck pace in order to deal with the immediate crisis.

   The United States was not alone in embracing catabolism in the mid-1970s. Britain abandoned most of its own heavy industry at the same time, plunging large parts of the industrial Midlands and Scotland into permanent depression, and set about catabolizing its own North Sea oil reserves with the same misplaced enthusiasm that American politicians lavished on the North Slope. The result was exactly what history would suggest; by embracing catabolism, the US and Britain both staggered through the crisis years of the 1970s and came out the other side into a breathing space of relative stability in the Reagan and Thatcher years,. That breathing space was extended significantly when the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, beginning in 1989, allowed American and British economic interests and their local surrogates to snap up wealth across Eurasia for pennies on the hundred-dollar bill, in the process imposing the same sort of economic collapse on most of a continent that had previously been inflicted on the steelworkers of Pittsburgh and the shipbuilders of Glasgow.

   That breathing space ended in 2008. At this point, I’d suggest, we’re in the early stages of a second and probably more severe round of catabolism here in America, and throughout Europe as well. What happened to the industrial working class in the 1970s is now happening to a very broad swath of the middle class, as jobs evaporate, public services are slashed, and half a dozen states stumble down the slope that will turn them into the Rust Belt equivalents of the early 21st century. Exactly what will happen as that process continues is anybody’s guess, but it’s unlikely to end as soon as the round of catabolism in the 1970s, and it may very well cut deeper; neither we nor Britain nor any other of our close allies has a big new petroleum reserve just waiting to be tapped, after all.

   It’s crucial to remember, though, that catabolism is a response to crisis and at least in the short term, much more often than not, an effective response. The fact that we’re moving into the second stage of our society’s long descent into catabolic collapse doesn’t mean that America will fall apart in the next decade or so; quite the contrary, it strongly suggests that America will not fall apart this time around. As the current round of catabolism picks up speed, a great many jobs will go away, and most of them will never return; a great many people who depend on those jobs will descend into poverty, and most of them will never rise back out of it; much of the familiar fabric of life in America as it’s been lived in recent decades will be shredded beyond repair, and new and far less lavish patterns will emerge instead; outside the narrowing circle of the privileged classes, even those who maintain relative affluence will be making do with much less than they or their equivalents do today. All these are ways that a society in decline successfully adapts to the contraction of its economic base and the mismatch between available resources and maintenance costs.

   Twenty or thirty or forty years from now, in turn, it’s a fairly safe bet that the years of crisis will come to a close and a newly optimistic America will reassure itself that everything really is all right again.

7. 

   Geov Parrish on July 25, 2012 at 1:40 am

   As the third most populous country in the world, and in a temperate climate with rich natural resources, the US is always going to be a significant player among the world’s countries. But there’s a lot of evidence for both our decline and the indisputable fact that our political system is broken. The latter is a factor in the former – our leadership can no longer respond to public policy concerns in a timely or effective way, and is heavily weighted to the concerns of a tiny sliver of our population – but it’s not the only one.

   Among other things:

   • Globalization has meant both the rise of other economies, and the decline of national loyalties by the corporate sectors that dominate the world economy.
   • Similarly, national economic empires can no longer rely on cheap extraction of resources from poorer countries, whether the colonial practices up through the mid-20th century or the economic colonialism that followed, because most of the corporations driving that wealth extraction are now globally based.
   • The US devotes so much of its economy to military spending, unnecessary health care costs, and moving around rich peoples’ money that less and less is available either for export or to support what’s left of our shrinking middle class.
   • Our educational system, compared to other countries, has been falling behind for decades. Ditto our infrastructure, on multiple counts.

   I could go on and on. The welfare of most of our citizens is declining compared to the privileged few, Our overall national influence is declining relative to that of other nation-states, and the influence of nation-states is itself declining in the global economy. None of the above-listed trends show signs of reversing. The point is that with better leadership, some of this could be fixed or ameliorated – but not all of it, and many of these trends have been underway for decades, long before the current red/blue chasm.

8. 

   Oui on July 25, 2012 at 3:34 am

   .
   I propose to shut down The Hill for at least 6 months every year as it was in earlier days. This will be more relaxing for everyone and be sure to cut on expenses for Congressmen who can stay in their own state and hometown. Perhaps saves them money on extramarital affairs.

   Build a replica of the Congress in Jerusalem, Kansas which can be used for all the red-states in the Mid-West to come together in the Washington D.C. off-season.
   A 1:1 replica will look really nice next to the Kansas version of the wailing wall.

    « click

   Evangelical Pastors Blasted for Plans to Build a Western Wall Replica

   PS Fair reasoning the scale ought to be 1:100 as Romney & Co. takes care of the 1% in US wealth and power structure.

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

9. 

   rikyrah on July 25, 2012 at 9:18 am

   you speak the truth, BooMan

10. 

    Philo Vaihinger on July 25, 2012 at 12:47 pm

    Trailer-trash, eh?

    They felt the same way about Andrew Jackson and his friends with their dirty boots.

11. 

    TarheelDem on July 25, 2012 at 3:38 pm

    Either the parties will become more fluid, or one party must be crushed underfoot.

    Which party is determined to root the other out root-and-branch and which party is blitely going along as if we are not in a huge crisis?

    Our only hope is the disenthrallment of the American people, who still see the situation the way that the Democratic officeholders do–business as usual.

    Meanwhile my conservative friends are trying to wake me up to the “fact” (it came through a chain e-mail so it must be true) that the faux-Chritian muslim President Barack Obama, who a black self-serving preacher, Rev. David Manning has called a “long-legged mack daddy”, is seeking to expand the ability of young girls to be “breadwinners” for their families by having a succession of illegitimate babies, giving them up to their grandmothers for adoption and state foster care payments, public housing, “Obamaphone” service, Medicaid, and other public benefits costing the state up to $150,000 per family–all while not being willing to work.  (Ignoring the fact of high unemployment and a recession that is continued to be strung out as Republican policy.)

    BTW, unemployment is rationalized away as being persnickety about what job they’ll take and being too demanding of employers.

    These aren’t uneducated people.  Some of them have been second and third line managers in foreign-owned transnational corporations. (With the “divine right of managers” attitude that that entails.)

    But the gullibility is staggering.

    And the independents and about half of the Democrats I know consider the media’s “balance” to be the truth.

    It’s not just broken.  We’re screwed.

    • 

      RT on July 25, 2012 at 5:13 pm

      These aren’t uneducated people.

      “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain

      • 

        TarheelDem on July 25, 2012 at 5:45 pm

        I like that Twain quote. Thanks for the reminder.