So. To summarize many other threads (discuss at length)...it's 2005 - do you think America is seriously in decline?

(Dan Perry very OTM)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm

We could probably use some more riots, though.

He did add, however, that he reserved the right to change his mind if more credible allegations about Bolton came to light.

The response here is haha- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1399245/posts

The 'ongoing experiment' description is one I am extremely fond of. I am patriotic to the extent that I do allow for reinvention; I am committed to the ideal and trying to put that into practice.

The rise of rival economic power centres does not necessarily spell America’s end. The resilience of the US economy through the past four turbulent years — in contrast to Europe and Japan — is a monument to its capacity to recreate itself. But more important even than America’s dynamism and economic resilience is the durability of its central ethos: the power of freedom. The genius of the founding fathers, which was celebrated again yesterday, has created the world ’s most stable, successful, and, for all the current phobias, still the most appealing model of society for humankind. The world may grow and change around it, but I would not bet on America’s eclipse just yet.

Every nation at its height has liked to believe in its invincibility, for whatever differing reasons...whether you want to call yourselves "the Middle Kingdom" or "the great experiment."

But nations are different in the sense that their life spans are of course much longer than humans, but just like individuals they go through many cycles (before ever coming close to their utter extinction)

i'd like to think that America is simply on a downward slop for now, but it's temporary (meaning, say, perhaps a century or two). After all China was in a slump for half a millennium, and yet now is rising again. Rome and Egypt also went through many such up and down cycles in their lifetimes.

No one should think, though that anything about us is "special" in the sense that we're eternal

Corporations are on the incline.

That wacky Neil Stephenson.

that pesky civil rights movement/enormous explosion of wealth affecting all classes/upswing in personal and cultural freedom/exploration of space! not to mention popular music as we know it!

I think America has been seriously in decline since approximately 1973

darn that American-led explosion in scientific (and especially medical) understanding/computing power/information accessibility! (i'll give you, though, that you can characterize most of the positive developments in this era as responses to or efforts to manage contemporaneous problems - we live in the caretaker age now)

that pesky civil rights movement/enormous explosion of wealth affecting all classes/upswing in personal and cultural freedom/exploration of space! not to mention popular music as we know it!

Hey, way to draw them inferences gabbneb, gee...I meant that perhaps our rate of economic growth levelled out a bit after the post-war period, and then since the 70s its been down. Of course, socially things _have_ been improving, so maybe that'd disprove this contention. Unless you believe that economics is the bedrock of everything, which some do after all.

I'd like to know why 1973 some see as being significant? Watergate?

I still this we're the most "inclusive" nation in the world when it comes to immigration, and while we've of course never come close to being the classless society that "social studies" instructors wax idealistic abt when they'd compare the US to Europe in junior high (where _i'm_ from at least har har), I still thnk this is the best place in the world to find a multitude of opportunities, and for anyone to improve one's material station in life based on the merit of hard work and talent (for, ahem he most part - yes there are numerous exceptions). I say this as a first generation American, and the child of 'til-recently-'aliens'-now-current-citizens; I'm proud that, for example it's easier for a Venezualan to move here and be accepted as being an "American" than it is say for a Turk to move to Germany, and be accepted as "German" - and that's not just a minor strength in our system, it's major. But we're relatively behind when it comes to sexual equality, and acceptance of peoples of differing sexual backgrounds, and for some reason for a nation that was founded on the principles of religious freedom, we still (unconsciously) impose on ourselves a shared identity of having a "Judeo-Christian heritage," and conflate it (despite "it" being ill-defined in the first place...when did it really exist?) with some vague concept of moral law, all of which seems antithetical not only to the ideal of separating church and state, but also to letting people practice their "religions" in freedom in the first place. And this has only gotten worse in recent decades, as you all know, since the "backlash" to whatever position the (unsuccessful on some of their own terms - where was that revolution?) 60s social movements left us at.

If culture and "cultural strength" (of retaining our original values of freedom, equaity and inclusiveness, values that one can strongly argue haven't even fully been realized yet) are all dependent on the economy however, then is that all that matters? From this very narrow vantage point, I still can't foresee a US or a UK ever embracing Chinese culture in the next century, despite their supposed approaching world dominance.

The civilizational East/West divide just seems too big to breach going in the other direction. And what would ever conquer, or even rival Hollywood?

The answer is still yes, though. The amount of power we've had since WWII has been pretty ridiculous, anyway.

http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/ath/library/teachers/philp/child%20labor%20in%20factory.jpg
1905

http://www.nielsenmedia.com/ethnicmeasure/images/photos/african-americans/african-american%20family%20watching%20TV-2.jpg
2005

I think America's looking pretty good, all things considered.

...but werent stories like this all over the news in the '80s, when it was "Japan is overtaking the US in manufacturing, Japan is beating the US hands down when it comes to technology and tech exports, Japanese students are eclipsing the Americans in science and engineering" ...Japan this, Japan that. And now Japan's economy has cooled, and you don't hear this anymore

Yes, maybe. But we've been largely a country of labor and industry so it's never really been about intellectuals or academic pursuits. I blame the Protestants.

yes...they were EUROPEANS

It's the year I was born. The subtext behind that post is my personal philosophy that the more you see and the longer you live, the more of life's warts you encounter.

Things are demonstrably better now than they were before the 60s but, seeing as I didn't live through those times, I have no frame of reference for comparison; my baseline is in a completely different spot and I'm having the same level of negative reaction to "less serious" issues. Furthermore, anyone who is predisposed to seeing the negative rather than the positive is going to see any situation as something that needs improvement before it implodes, making every era an overarching period of decline in the midterm.

Sorry.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/06/AR2005060601717.html

I still remember the fear that came with holding a loaded rifle on that range, fear that I might spontaneously swing the rifle around on my classmates and end up dead or going to jail for the rest of my life. In that gun was something very real, and the adults' willingness to let us shoot was not lost on us--a willingness to take the risk that none of us were disillusioned enough with life or "the system" to do anything foolish. An initiation or invitation into the system itself, even.

After Columbine etc., I don't see that kind of willingness to take risks or to invite young adults into sharing real power anymore. I don't know what I'll do if I have kids and the time comes to send them to school. Schools are becoming more and more like prisons, and initiations that involve a transfer of real power, like a shooting range (any other examples?), are being driven out because they're too risky.

I think young people's poor regard for free speech rights (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6888837/) comes from their lack of a sense of participation in anything real. And I think the best kids, the smartest, most spirited ones, may just be getting more and more alienated. I'm not sure I'd trust a group of 14 year olds on a shooting range these days.

The lack of privacy or unstructured free time among adolescents today (which seems to be a widely accepted perception) doesn't contradict this. In a way, allowing young people to fill their own free time and to escape parental oversight now and then is also a transfer of real power and an initiation of trust.

Overall, there seems to be less trust and more control of young adults through their adolescent years. That's what I worry about when I think of our society's decline. It's already found political expression in a lack of regard for free speech. I don't necessarily think it'll end in fascism, but I'm worried in a sort of old, curmudgeonly way.

Maybe it's just me, but I think mathematics and the broad category of science are pretty high on the list of intellectual pursuits.

I'm just saying that it's intellectualism has done nothing to make it a world superpower.

Au contraire, mon cher Hurting, the technocratic elite of France, well versed in the study of diplomacy and statecraft, have been able to keep a country of 60 million people at a very high level of prestige and influence. Greater than Germany, Japan, Italy, Nigeria, or Indonesia for example. Though Douste-Blazy, who yesterday became Foreign Affairs Minister in Villepin's cabinet has admitted that France is now a mid-level power.

Spencer to thread! (The original film is his lodestone; he's been talking about the sequel forever now.)

thank god the american electorate would never be so gauche.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/07/news/india.php

TO FURTHER CONSOLIDATE THE AMERICAN EMPIRE.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/07/news/india.php

-- M. White (deir...), June 7th, 2005.

I do think part of the success of the United States has been its relative tolerance -- the diversity results in new ideas. So much of America's contribution to world commerce and culture has come from Italians, Jews, Irish, African-Americans, etc.

didn't this happen in about 1918?

decline is a very vague concept, which no-one's really interrogated. if you mean decline in political/military power, that's one thing, and it's happened to france, and it isn;t happeneing to the states just yet. if you mean culturally (as if you can distinguish this from political/military power), france is 'punching above its weight'. if you're talking about basic liberties, the US is in a pretty parlous state.

Is this true? Compared to whom?

xpost

I don't understand this point at all. Any ideas that come from the US are going to come from a diverse group of people by default because the founders of this country came from everywhere. Where is the ruling hegemony supposed to come from, Europe? That's a pretty large and internally-diverse hegemony.

This is all going to change in a decade. Mark my words! The continent of Asia is going to re-invent the laws of physics and not tell us about it. They'll use TAIWAN to do it.

xpost

Although with the recent stem cell cloning news from South Korea, maybe that's truer than anybody thought..

Um... so what? They'll soon answer all our phones and do all our taxes. Why invent?

Thing is, yes, we control it all. America is still the innovator. But our economy could suffer -- WILL suffer -- from outsourcing. The rich may get richer depending on what they do, but the poor are certainly about to get a whole lot poorer.

At least for a while.

How, precisely? And what kind of outsourcing are we talking about here? The "offshoring" type? That is already a trend in (at least momentary) decline.

You're better than that word.

Besides which you know more than anyone what the Asians have. Enormous fucking robots, that's what!

I think the line of argument, Dan, is that we are more diverse and more comofortable being diverse. One can become a citizen of the French Republic but there are always French people who can define themsleves as French in a tribal, indigenous way. Even a white Protestant (back-ground) with roots going back to pre-revolution days, like myself, the traditional 'American' nativist stock, cannot do that here without exposing himself to the legitimate claim of hypocrisy.

Anything. Name a job that's not creative, managerial, or military, and the odds are real, real good than it can be outsourced in one way or another.

Right, I understand that. What I don't understand is why that is necessarily a bad thing.

Can you say WAL*MART? I would say that this marriage from hell has changed the way business is done - drastically. It's not about being innovative and high-tech that China seems to be banking (and building) on. It's about being cheap and ultra-productive. Few CEOs are running around looking for 'top-notch inventions'.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/secrets/wmchina.html

Can you say WAL*MART?
WAL MART.

1. Get rid of the fucking minimum wage, seriously
2. Right-to-work in every state
3. Figure out a solution to the insurmountable student loan debt that's hanging over half our workforce
4. Quit blowing so much goddamned money on overhead (I know, let's open our offices in... MANHATTAN... no... SAN FRANCISCO) and cost-of-living
5. Resume being competitive in the world labor market!

Optional step 6: watch our domestic automakers wither away feeding the UAW parasite.

This can't go on forever in China, and indeed, if the PBOC allows China's currency to float against the dollar, whether freely or in a set range, it won't. What's to keep them from pegging the yuan at precisely its present value against the dollar forever, you ask? Since the price of China's money is currently set, for all intents and purposes, by the U.S. Federal Reserve, there is a reasonable chance that low U.S. interest rates could cause the super-heated Chinese economy to overheat entirely, in the form of atmospheric levels of inflation. The risk of this is very, very substantial, especially if the U.S. economy cools a little more and the Fed decides to keep short rates where they are for now.

China's economy can't proceed apace its current rate of growth forever, or even that far into the future. Indeed, many economists think that China's growth will correct downward rather sharply in the next 12 months.

This is totally true. It's about us getting with the program, finally. We've been living in the 50's for 50 years now, and it's time that stopped.

The work force has a lot more to fear from a lack of capital spending by employers than it does from foreign outsourcing. Indeed, the closest thing we have to a statistical gauge of outsourcing, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Mass Layoffs Report, suggests most workers in the U.S. have more to fear from their job moving to another state than to another country: http://bls.gov/news.release/pdf/mmls.pdf.

"On Thursday July 24, the Miami Herald and other press reported that the U.S. Coast Guard had intercepted a group of Cubans who had attempted to reach the U.S. on a green 1951 Chevy flatbed truck that they had converted into a boat by mounting it on a pontoon made of 55-gallon drums and attaching a propeller to the truck’s drive shaft. The Cubans, who were interdicted by the Coast Guard on July 16, were returned by the U.S. to Cuba. The Coast Guard destroyed the boat which they described as a “hazard to navigation.” "

WE NEED THESE PEOPLE! the sweat of immigrants. the grad students who stay here instead of going back home.

we've turned into a country club. (no pun intended.) and the free market of ideas rests on diversity and competition, but exclusivity will rob us of the fringe lunatics splitting the beer atom.

if the american dream is over, then our chance at having that underdog that changes our world is significantly diminished. it's the people that have nothing to lose or that have lost it all that take the biggest chances.

i mean... hey, maybe it's good that the american dream is over. it's certainly not without it's Right of Excess.

if watching professional wrestling has taught me anything it's that being on top can't last forever.

let's at least hope that we've got the grace and personality to land ourselves a cushy announcer/commentator role. (with an occasional chair smash backstab plot twist.) Dr. Morbius OTM.
m.

xpost TOMBOT

Hmmm, was somebody talking about hedge funds?

THAT SAID, I have to look at this country in the scope of history. I'm sure that men who died in the Civil War would be amazed that the USA lasted beyond the year 1870. Okies and Arkies choking on their own dust in the 1930s must've thought that the end was near. To imagine a time when it didn't look automatic that the Allies would win WWII.

And as bad as it is now with Bush and Iraq, can you imagine what it must've been like to be twenty years old in 1968? An uppity Texan president with his unpopular war, trying to draft your ass, while the few national leaders you do look up to are getting their heads blown open left and right. 1973 must've been a walk in the park with the draft coming to an end, the White House beginning to crumble down, and women finally starting to shave their pits again.

They were talking about Fidelity, so you never know. (I'm sticking with the basic savings stuff, the investments I handle via my life insurance policy.)

It's the dream of everyone everywhere to come to America and eat Too Many Corn Chips.

Bashing unions is going to help a lot.

I mean, yeah, the unions are holding onto an increasingly unsustainable economic model for as long as they can (the most reactionary of them, anyway -- the SEIU is more forward-looking, for the obvious reason that it's more in tune with the service-driven economy). But the unions didn't invent that economic model, they just made the best deals they could under the circumstances that existed at the time. And of course they're going to hold onto what they can, wtf else are they supposed to do? It's what their members pay them for. If you're a union negotiator in Detroit, what are you supposed to do about friggin' Asia? Even the people running the companies don't know what to do about Asia.

And a lot of analysts don't really buy GM's whining about its healthcare and pension costs, since the bigger problem is that nobody's buying their cars. Plus, I'd have more sympathy if GM and Ford were pushing for serious nationwide healthcare reform, but somehow that's not happening. I just think blaming the unions is missing the point. They're caught in the same set of global tensions everyone else is, and if they don't do whatever they can for their members in the short-term, it's hard to imagine who else is going to.

all you can eat BOOFAY! of course, many in hungry countries would say, "ah, in america even the poor people are FAT! how wonderful!"

we are blessed.

[insert photo of intestinal bypass here]

but perhaps too much?
m.

Stop making so many frickin' cars!

GM and Ford and Chrysler can't evolve??????

OTM. The unions are just trying to hang on to a decreasing number of straws while corporations are looking for a way to marginalize them further. After the Port of Los Angeles dockworkers strike a couple years back fouled things up, there's been civic paranoia about a new port being built in Mexico that (when open) will siphon off a lot of business.

just a thought.

i'm not against free trade, either. i just don't think that it's unproblematic, that it won't cause serious economic pain and dislocation (which is why i took a potshot at friedman, who is one of the most prominent pollyannas on this issue). then again, i am not a trained economist so i may be wrong about some things wr2 this subject.

So, so OTM. The things that could be repaired under those circumstances are legion.

x-post: Eisbar you're right that trade causes economic pain and dislocation. To those against more open trade I would say that the fruits of isolationism are far more bitter, though, and that there are things we can do from a policy perspective (like repeal the Bush tax cuts!) that would certainly go a long way toward softening the blow to workers. Closing our borders with China, India and others has the potential to create a whole raft of problems in the future, and the least of them are questions of economics.

True, but he's good with his notepad. He was/is a hell of a reporter -- he's good at going places and talking to people and trying to pull together a lot of information. Where he falls down is on the analysis side, because there's something in him that always wants things to be a little better than they are. Which is probably to his credit as a person, it just hurts his critical perspective.

xpost: I could be wrong, but it seems like Krugman's views of trade and neoliberalism have gotten more nuanced since his old days of bashing the anti-WTO demonstrators. Some of the things he's written about Latin America, for example, read like serious amendments to his prior thinking. And I totally agree that a sensible approach to trade has to take into account the very real negative effects on various populations of global competition. Which is why the U.S., for example, should be investing like hell in education business-incubation infrastructure instead of letting the Bush-Cheney pirates slice up the Treasury like their own private booty. I really think that's the best way to think of those guys -- they came into office, found this huge (theoretical) pile of money in those budget surpluses, and were just like, "Yo ho ho!"

Definitely. He's a nice little parable about one of the main problems of journalism, which says you have to have an opinion column in order to have a "voice." It's rubbish. A good reporter's voice will shine through in their reporting.

re one of the changes to our tax system that i (and apparently only i) strongly advocate: subjecting interest and dividend income to Social Security taxes. this is SUCH a glaring loophole -- esp. when dealing w/ small businesses (who often declare dividends in lieu of paying owner/shareholders a salary PRECISELY to avoid SS taxes).

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1960

OTM! Yeah, his "olive tree" diatribes about how the free market will save us all convinced that the free market is the future, but NOT that it will save us all.

Another point of convergence for us, Eisbar. I'd also like the individual SS cap to be raised to at least $90,000. Not in our lifetimes, I'm afraid.

It's not about the UAW vs. GM. It's about american workers versus the world. If US citizens weren't, by and large, grossly overpaid in certain industries, we wouldn't have dudes like the guy who drove my moving truck who commutes 30 hours to and from his home+family in Mexico City to buttfuck Maryland to do non-CDL packing and shipping work. Certain unions are a part of that problem, and the minimum wage is another.

The answer to the migrant worker "problem" isn't coming up with a new wacky line of visas and hustling folks through immigration to make sure our vinyards are picked by people with orderly paperwork, it's opening up the system so that Real Americans(TM) can work at competitive rates. None of them will, of course, but at least you remove the compelling reason for farmers to actively AVOID hiring the naturalized and US-born-and-bred day laborers.

I love one of my current prof's arguments about minimum "living" wages: Let's just make it $75 an hour! Anybody can live on that!

1. have been compensating themselves at levels that are far more unsustainable than what their workers are compensated at
2. have generally mismanaged other aspects of their various industries (does anybody think the american automobile manufacturing and airline industries, to name but two, had good fundamentals even before 2001?)

m.

But even in right-to-work states like most of the South, people still hire migrant workers because that shit is hard work and a lot of people would rather earn their minimum wages at Pizza Hut. I really don't think unions are the issue here.

that's funny, i thought it was our crappy tax cuts, lousy fiscal policy, lack of capital investment, etc. what do unions have to do with affecting any of those? none that i can see, esp. since the gop controls the federal gub'ment these days. you guys are ascribing a power to unions they don't even have any more.

Unions, in the abstract, are not bad. The current functioning of many unions, however, is bad, and it doesn't seem to be getting much better (Andy Stern's SEIU being a notable exception). I'm not arguing against unions. I'm arguing for making them stronger by abandoning old models that no longer work. The steamboat was a fine invention, but do we really want to still ride around in one?

hstencil, what I dislike about some of the perfectly accurate things you're saying about labor unions is contained in one sentence you wrote, about refusing to see that they are even part of the problem. Just because a person isn't as wealthy as Jack Welch doesn't mean they aren't part of the problem. Just because something isn't public enemy number one doesn't mean it's not still an accomplice to other bad shit.

stence I'm trying to follow you and I agree with a certain number of your points but in the end it seems like you're making a circular argument that no one can actually attempt to argue with you because everything said trying to explain why unions should perhaps be abandoned or completely changed in the curent age is part of your point.

xpost

that said, the only union i've ever paid dues to was the seiu, and that was when i was a wrigley field seat vendor for a month.

xpost - yeah elaine chao can suck a fat one. ken lay still walks the earth free!

Hey, at least the accounting giants have been able to extract a whole new universe of fees!

xpost I think a lot of unionization should be tossed. Not all of them.

;-)

My nipples have no hair on them. I had no idea it was the norm. Do you think they'll ever go under the stadium to get the body?

Seriously, what the fuck kind of response is "there ya go, union union union union?"

anyway, i'm pretty sure i'm not the one losing their metaphorical shit here, ally.

anyway, i'm pretty sure i'm not the one losing their metaphorical shit here, ally.

Whereas there were FAR BETTER POINTS TO PICK APART in that post than the insult towards UAW, regardless of whether or not you consider unions in general to have been responsible once for non-right-to-work states or minimum wage and it'd be nice to have discussion of them instead of getting a response like "Haha yeah well unions did that! There ya go!"

xpost oh jesus. I'm not even going to discuss grad school unions with you.

Yes, America is in decline.

(note: i am NOT KIDDING about that last sentence -- this REALLY was said by one yale professor who styled herself a "radical" b/c, you know, she taught derrida and foucault and stuff. the same way that lenin starved the peasants on his estate so as to bring on The Revolution, i suppose.)

Not having strong unions hasn't helped South Carolina or Tennessee keep factories from moving to China. Even Mexico's been losing factories to China, for god's sake. Unions that cling to a protectionist rear-guard model are arguably not helping anything in terms of dealing with globalization intelligently, but it's not like anyone in D.C. or corporate boardrooms is providing a lot of leadership on that front either. Politicians of both parties would rather rail against China than talk sensibly about the actual challenges of the moment, and for all their free-trade bluster, corporations are the first to cry for tariffs or subsidies.

What we're really lacking is coherent, thoughtful leadership on all these issues. Not like that's any big news. But it's absurd to expect that to come from the unions when it's not coming from anywhere else.

even outsourcing destinations need immigrants

(they also need unions)

if you worked for a big law or accounting firm, then you might think twice about that comment.

i'm 1/2 serious.

(xpost--I agree 100% with Eisbär's statement though about the way the so-called professionals react to this. A highly paid professional should still remember how to fucking grade papers.)

And while some unions have certainly lost a lot of power--shifting manufacturing jobs overseas in massive numbers will do that--the teacher's union is arguably more powerful than ever.

No offense, but based on my own grad school experience -- yes, in humanities, no apologies on that score -- the UC grad student union was long overdue.

all i was saying, ally, was that in a world without unions, reprehensible ideas like the abolition of the minimum wage would be more likely. an idea like the minimum wage and the eight-hour day and all sorts of other benefits that even non-union workers enjoy are a direct benefit of what labor unions did for the american worker. should they rest on their laurels? no. should they continue to follow strategies that are only increasing their irrelevance? no. should they be corrupt and in bed with mafiosi? no. there's nowhere on this thread where i've advocated for any of those things.

and i think american grad students, just as much as mexican maquiladores, or indian call-center workers, or finnish cell phone designers, or anyone else you should name should have the right to collectively bargain. even those 18th century enlightenment types (which tombot so lovingly quoted out of context) had guilds.

that's my real problem here. that's what GWU's new part-time faculty union is doing, because DC isn't right-to-work, and it's fucking my program right in the ass.

some nurses in MA are unionized, but you don't have to sign the agreement to work in a union hospital. you do pay dues, I hear. still makes better sense.

Do you believe in open states, too hstencil?

I think the anti-union people are being a bit inconsistent here. Further up the thread, someone suggested that unions and collective bargaining are unnecessary, because if people don't like the terms that the employer is offering they should simply look for a job somewhere else. Well, by that same logic, if someone feels like they are being forced to join a union to work in a closed-shop, then they should find a job somewhere else. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I don't see anything wrong in principle with letting employees try to gain as much leverage as they can in the employer-employee relationship, which is what unions are basically about.

uh, that's hardly the only reason or the primary one.

Right. It's just fight for power and money here. I've sat in on some union negotiating sessions, and my feeling was that the union guys were the biggest jerks in the room...except for the management guys.

Also, there are a lot of ways to look at this, but right to work states tend to have lower average incomes than strong union states.

But Eisbar is also right to note that the political balance between union workers and nonunion employees is a delicate one. When should nonunion employees who work under the protection of the contract participate in job actions? Should they have the same access to union reps and the grievance process as members? These are all thorny issues that many unions have done a poor job of resolving, if they have treated them at all.

How one answers the question depends on how the concept of "decline" is defined. I think it would be good if the US could maintain and improve its current standard of living, opportunity, equality, and so forth, and I would like to see all other countries in the world reach the same standards that Americans enjoy. So if that means that we must "decline" relative to the rest of the world for this to happen, then I would say that's a good thing, and not something to fear.

Why do you see the state of the world as some sort of a static concept?

Think of the ecological implications.

Well, naturally, I'd like to see this happen while also protecting the environment. But it's an indefensible position for Americans to tell the developing world, "Sorry you have to stay poor because if you consumed as much as we do, the world would be even more of an ecological disaster than it already is."

OTOH, they might reasonably insist we only use resources commesurate with our population.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4617275.stm

again, any bets on who's going to survive?

cf. European airlines post sept 11 vs US ones, I realise the market is very different

America's biggest problem is not being able to swallow it's own philosophy. Capitalism says that in changing circumstances companies have to adapt or go to the wall, there has been a reluctance to allow this to happen with some sacred cows.

x-post

Crushing Upward Mobility

The United States is rapidly abandoning a longstanding policy aimed at keeping college affordable for all Americans who qualify academically

I thought that "college" as the only surefire method of upward mobility was debunked a while ago. Shall I tell the story again of my coworkers, many of whom do not have any degrees, yet make close to six figures? p4tr1ck and I are on the job hunt lately because we decided we hate our office and he's asking in the range of 105-115 for his next position.

i can vouch for lot's of success without paper as well. my boss never graduated for example.
m.

I'm a bit confused by this part of your post -- Why does having an authoritarian regime = letting undesirables disappear? I thought China was a society that took care of its elderly. Also, are you saying there are communist holdovers in India?

Anyway, sorry to interject. Ed's last post is OTM, disregarding the whole fancy-man ball player evolution thing temporarily.

Capitalism says that in changing circumstances companies have to adapt or go to the wall, there has been a reluctance to allow this to happen with some sacred cows.

OK, sure, but then what? Right, let the airlines and General Motors get carved up and redistributed by people who can do those things better and more flexibly. It's not like we're going to stop making cars or flying planes, someone's going to provide the services, we shouldn't cry for United and Delta.

But then what else do we do? That's what's missing. If we're going to accept a lot more instability and insecurity in some parts of our lives -- and we're going to have to -- then how do you make that up? Because people still need some level of security somewhere. Unstable societies don't turn out well for anyone. So where will the stability come from? It's all well and good to say that some companies have to go to the wall, I think we can all live with that, but what about people? Are we willing to let them go to the wall too? The American experience at the moment says yes, we are -- but only up to a point. We like our Social Security. We'd like to have some health insurance. And if we hit another bad patch of unemployment -- which we probably will -- then we're going to want unemployment insurance too.

Europe's bogged down in all that shit right now, and we sit around all proud of our higher growth rates and productivity, but we haven't solved any of those problems in any meaningful way, we've just pushed them down on the middle and working classes, and there's a limit to how much pushing people will take. The whole appeal of unions in the first place was providing some of those protections, some sense of stability. But if unions aren't going to do it, and employers aren't going to do it, and the government's not going to do it, then where does the stability come from? The decline in that sense of security and confidence is part of the decline asked about in the thread title.

gm, I agree with what you're saying, the question of "OK then what do we do if we do that" and the point about the decline in a sense of security and confidence. I don't offer a solution to "what next, what happens during a period of instability, what happens if we put these sacred cows up against the wall." But I still agree with Ed's theories, mainly because in the long run it's going to happen anyway. These things haven't really been real security and, I mean I don't think anyone will disagree, there's this real sense of entitlement in America (were you the one who made the post about people refusing to do the kind of work migrant laborers do anymore?), and I think that people ARE going to have to go against the wall eventually.

What happens DURING that period, besides a lot of really miserable citizens, I don't really know. But I agree with him that, in the aftermath, 10 or 15 or 20 years after that, there'd be a market equilibrium, it'd result in more global stability, and yes, currently "strongest" nations would recover.

it isn't going to happen, of course! Nations and empires do not demolish themselves willingly!

The neo-cons are very actively trying to take us in the other direction by implementing a poorly conceived idea of global empire, as per the dictums of the PNAC (why is the PNAC never discussed at length on ile...does it have its own thread?), but are ironically only hastening our slide thru overextension. Which is why it was interesting to see Hagel's comments about US decline, since as a Republican (if not a PNACer, i don't believe he's part of that "club") he probably committed career suicide by coming out and admitting the very opposite of the platform/ideal his colleagues want to continue to win elections on: American invincibility. Can a Democrat like Clinton return to restate the message while managing to win an electorate once again, in this new, war-time / post-invasion era?

It's never going to be 1996 again.

LA Times reporter Peter Gosselin has written a really fantastic series about all this, which is superior to the current NYT series on class in almost every way. It can be found here: http://www.latimes.com/business/specials/la-newdeal-cover.special

Also, Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker has written alot about these themes. His home page is: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jhacker/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0506080148jun08,1,1504734.story?coll=chi-business-hed

That does look like a much more interesting series than the NY Times one, which was sort of spotty and vague.

Which is obviously what the whole PNAC thing is about, not going gently into that night. But I think part of the reason the PNAC and even the neocons don't get talked about as much as they did a few years ago is that they just seem increasingly irrelevant. They've been overtaken by events (and of course by the second-term shift to domestic policy, which they don't have much useful to say about).

And this is otm X 100: the shifting of the burdens of macroeconomic risk from the government and corporations to individuals. Although of course as the LAT notes, not to all individuals. Can't have an ownership society without owners, can we?

well.

i assume you're referring to this piece of breaking news?
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-19/hillary-clinton-let-s-go-camping

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.–Hillary Clinton would love to see sleepaway camps for adults and more relationship-building in Washington, she said Thursday at what will likely be her final paid appearance before launching her expected presidential campaign.

"We really need camps for adults," the former secretary of state told the American Camp Association of New York and New Jersey’s Tri-State CAMP Conference. "None of the serious stuff ... I think we have a fun deficit in America."

straight down the well xp

i wonder how close to the mole people in Lang's Metropolis the have-nots will be before any type of insurrection begins.

HRC wd be a fine elderly Robot Maria

Oh come on think of all the jobs that would create!

I assumed this was bumped for the house judiciary buzzfeed press release