6 ms·

Third world America: The decline of a superpower?

20 points by cwan 16y ago

cjlars 16y ago
I can't be bothered to actually read this article. Does anyone actually think America is in 'decline'? As a retort, here's Hans Rosling on narrowing GDP/capita and the first world's role in this 'new economy': http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/912 http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/912
- maukdaddy 16y ago
  Your comment says it all about America. You can't even be bothered to read it. Secondly, stop giving MBAs a bad name.
nanairo 16y ago
There's a certain irony in hearing someone from the Reagan government talking about China's fast train. If you so much as suggested something like that in the USA you'd be billed as a socialist and the program will be immediately scrapped. Once the USA wasn't like this. Once it had a big government who looked after its citizens and did what no private investor could or would do. In Australia the government is building fiber optics to all houses. In Europe governments are building a network of fast trains. In China government is building pretty much everything. Are the Americans sure that they are backing the right politics?
- jdminhbg 16y ago
  Here is the President's press release on the multi-billion dollar high-speed rail project he proposed and Congress funded: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-speed-rail/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-sp... The program has surely been billed as socialist by one of America's 300 million plus citizens, but it has not as of yet been scrapped. I do not know whether we are backing the right politics.
  - nanairo 16y ago
    Yep. I surely had high hopes on Obama. What's worrying me is how much opposition he has found and how much power he lost. It was enough to talk about socialism and having a bigger governmental role, and people (on both parties) seemed to start distancing themselves from Obama. If he doesn't succeed, I am not sure there will really be another chance in time to make a real difference (i.e. to keep USA as no.1... I have no doubt USA will continue being a rich country for a long time to come).
    - jdminhbg 16y ago
      It is no more true that Obama is unpopular because people call him a "socialist" than it was true that Bush was unpopular because people called him a "fascist." You are confusing cause and effect. I think foreign observers think that the American public is atavistically motivated by invocations of "socialism" because they view the US through the lens of their own politics. In reality, Obama is unpopular because the economy is in the shitter and unemployment is running near 10%. It doesn't matter whether that's fair or not.
      - nanairo 16y ago
        I'll take your word for it. My impression of cause and effect was that it started pretty much from the beginning, when Obama tried to push for economic stimulus first and universal health service later. And now the teaparty are a force to be reckoned... and their whole point is to have a small government, and they don't want stimuli or similar (as well as no health service). But please tell me more. American politics is quite interesting. :)
- maw 16y ago
  Once it had a big government who looked after its citizens When?
  - nanairo 16y ago
    Either Roosvelt?
    - achompas 16y ago
      The more recent Roosevelt HAD to grow the government--they were the only demanders during the Great Recession. He also stuck us with Social Security and Medicare, which are the main drivers behind the intergenerational debt we're facing now. So, I mean, big government isn't always the best.
      - nanairo 16y ago
        Why are SS and Medicare the biggest drivers? Didn't Clinton leave you with a surplus? And didn't he have to pay for SS and Medicare too? What's changed since then and now? Anyway I am not arguing that big government are always the best. I am arguing that big government sometimes are. Or to put it another way I am arguing that SMALL government isn't always the best.
        achompas 16y ago
        I'm confused, what does Clinton have to do with these programs? Worth noting that Bush Jr. signed a prescription drug bill that will cost $550 billion between 2006 and 2015 [1]. SS and Medicare are programs intended for older people which are funded by current workers. As time has passed and SS/Medicare eligibility has increased, more SS/Medicare taxes from current workers are paying for fewer people's benefits. This problem has worsened as baby boomers have reached retirement age--we've never seen SS/Medicare enrollment like this before. Point being: my generation is paying a large chunk of taxes that it will probably never benefit from, as SS/Medicare will likely occupy too large a portion of the budget and would thus need to be scaled back (or closed down). [1] http://www.cms.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2009.pdf http://www.cms.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2009.pdf
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Well, the US is richer (PPP adjusted) than nearly every single one one of those countries (the sole exceptions being Norway and a couple of city states). In the one case where I've seen good data (US vs Sweden), the disparity gets even bigger if you compare Swedes to Swedish Americans. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-one-picture.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-o... So maybe the US is doing something right after all.
  - nanairo 16y ago
    ... or maybe that you did something right in the past. By that meter then Nokia is doing things right too.
    - nir 16y ago
      Interestingly, Nokia's downfall is caused in part by its failure to compete with Google & Apple's - two American companies - innovation.
      - nanairo 16y ago
        Nobody is arguing that American companies can't compete, or that America isn't a great country. But the UK was an innovator once, and so was Italy before it. That said you could very well end up with a future with very powerful and very competitive american companies... in a country with no middle-class and a strong divide between managers and those with money, and the labour force with little privileges. Edit: I think USA got to where it is for a certain pragmatism that it seems to have lost. Now ideologies (free market, socialism, God, etc...) seem to be all that matter, and society is suffering for it. GDP is not a good indicator of the society's wellbeing and even less is current GDP for tomorrow's society's. At the end of the day the richest man in the world is Mexican, but Mexico is hardly a first world country.
        nir 16y ago
        I agree the problems you're referring to are real, but it seems to me Americans are more aware of them than you might think (BTW, I live in NYC but I'm not American). They elected a president who's decidedly a pragmatist (I think McCain would have been one as well, though not his VP candidate..), and one of the most talked about issues here is the disappearing middle class. My view is that they ultimately do have a good system in place to discuss and hopefully improve on these problems. Their core strength is flexibility. I still remember talk of Japan overtaking the US in the 80s, and Japanese companies are still strong in the markets they dominated at the time - but the Americans have moved on to lead in software/Internet industries. That's not coincidence, in my opinion.
niccolop 16y ago
How often do people write this article? I would be really interested to see how many articles in a similar spirit were written during the 1930s or 1980s. For one, based on the 'smart money' investments from China and Russia they still seem to believe in the future of the US.
lkrubner 16y ago
I think this article has a good summary of cutbacks that are happening due to the recession. However, the article makes no attempt to tease apart what effects might be due to the recession, and what effects might be permanent. The long series of stories about local governments is interesting - I'm intrigued by what people cut back on when they run out of money. There is no question that this is the most serious recession in living memory, in the US. As such, the recession deserves a lot of attention. But it is a leap to go from "Some town in Ohio had to layoff several police officiers" to "This means the US is finished forever." (I am making up exaggerated quotes, which I think summarize the gist of the article.) It is possible that the US is finished forever, but there is nothing in this article that convinces me.
- tseabrooks 16y ago
  How many of these cutbacks SHOULD have been done before hand and are now forced to happen because of the recession. Laying off police officers.. Good idea - They probably don't provide enough to be worth their pay over a certain point. Maybe being forced to fill less pot holes will encourage us to come up with cheaper ways to do the job. Perhaps if we cut back on teachers and educational spending we'll be able to do more with less... Money isn't the problem in education... if it was then we wouldn't have this data mashup: http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/spent-student-and-sat-scores http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/spent-student-and-sat-sco... - It looks like spending more money per student isn't working. Thinking that cutting back = massive failure is why most American's have massive amounts of personal debt that they will never get out of.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    It's also not even clear they need to cut back on services. Take Flint, for example. Instead of cutting 23 of 88 firefighters, why not keep them all but reduce their compensation by 26%? It's Flint Michigan, they don't exactly have other employment options. Besides, it's unlikely Flint even needs that many firefighters - their population dropped by about 10% since 2000. The same could be done for teachers - NYC pays entry level teachers roughly the same salary as entry level engineers (total comp per month worked, not per calendar year). Rather than laying them off, why not cut their comp down to liberal arts grad entry level? [edit: replaced word "pay" in second paragraph with "compensation". Thanks chrisbolt.]
jbarham 16y ago
> In July, a group of farmers removed the safeties from their shotgun triggers and surrounded a trailer in which a suspected house robber was hiding while they waited for the county’s last, lone squad car to arrive. Hah, that's certainly something you wouldn't see in Canada (and I say this as a Canadian). Go Team America?! :)
acabal 16y ago
I never could understand the logic of Americans who demand public services like police, fire, hospitals, roads, traffic lights, internet, water, sewage, parks, etc., and then turn right around and vote leaders out of office the second they whisper the words "raise" and "taxes" in the same sentence. Where does everyone think the money will come from? Of course it's always more complicated than that, but this country strikes me as one that demands to have its cake and eat it too. It's too bad that it could take a slide into "third world" status (whatever that might be) before the masses realize how entitled and illogical they often seem to act.
burel 16y ago
I live in an European country and I think especially since the eighties Europe have much more changed than America did. We had a very deep transformations of our society towards the American life style and we copied the American way to put 'market' everywhere. Good ol' European counter-capitalistic socialism is nearly dead. So I think the main thing that has changed for America is the number and the power of it competitors.
gamble 16y ago
The US reminds me of a company that's suffered from stagnant revenue and decreasing profit margins for years, yet whose profits continue to grow through a combination of cost cutting and underinvestment in research and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the shareholders demand an ever-growing dividend... In relative terms, the US has been in decline since the early 1960s. It benefitted from an unprecedented situation after WWII when all it's competitors were reduced to bankruptcy and physical ruin, not to mention political turmoil and the yoke of Communism. America had a growing population and the best infrastructure in the world. Americans became accustomed to effortless growth and weak competition, while the rest of the world learned to compete with tooth and claw while rebuilding their economies and infrastructure from scratch. The current recession is a shock, but it's hardly the cause of America's decline. The decline was inevitable--as other countries become more competitive, the US becomes less so by definition. What's almost unique about America is the refusal to face that fact and address it. I honestly don't think that American society as a whole is capable of acknowledging that other countries can be superior in certain ways. At best, there's always a nebulous suspicion that foreign systems must possess some fatal flaw that will ultimately tell against them. Hence, there's this obsession about which jobs Americans are naturally advantaged at. There aren't any. Those are exactly the jobs non-Americans covet and are working to acquire. Those of us outside the US are privileged in a sense, because we can never delude ourselves that success is possible without determined competition among equals. If nothing else, we're always in competition with the US--whether you know it or not.

20 points by cwan 16y ago

I can't be bothered to actually read this article. Does anyone actually think America is in 'decline'? As a retort, here's Hans Rosling on narrowing GDP/capita and the first world's role in this 'new economy': http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/912 http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/912

maukdaddy 16y ago
Your comment says it all about America. You can't even be bothered to read it. Secondly, stop giving MBAs a bad name.

nanairo 16y ago

There's a certain irony in hearing someone from the Reagan government talking about China's fast train. If you so much as suggested something like that in the USA you'd be billed as a socialist and the program will be immediately scrapped. Once the USA wasn't like this. Once it had a big government who looked after its citizens and did what no private investor could or would do. In Australia the government is building fiber optics to all houses. In Europe governments are building a network of fast trains. In China government is building pretty much everything. Are the Americans sure that they are backing the right politics?

jdminhbg 16y ago
Here is the President's press release on the multi-billion dollar high-speed rail project he proposed and Congress funded: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-speed-rail/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-sp... The program has surely been billed as socialist by one of America's 300 million plus citizens, but it has not as of yet been scrapped. I do not know whether we are backing the right politics.
- nanairo 16y ago
  Yep. I surely had high hopes on Obama. What's worrying me is how much opposition he has found and how much power he lost. It was enough to talk about socialism and having a bigger governmental role, and people (on both parties) seemed to start distancing themselves from Obama. If he doesn't succeed, I am not sure there will really be another chance in time to make a real difference (i.e. to keep USA as no.1... I have no doubt USA will continue being a rich country for a long time to come).
  - jdminhbg 16y ago
    It is no more true that Obama is unpopular because people call him a "socialist" than it was true that Bush was unpopular because people called him a "fascist." You are confusing cause and effect. I think foreign observers think that the American public is atavistically motivated by invocations of "socialism" because they view the US through the lens of their own politics. In reality, Obama is unpopular because the economy is in the shitter and unemployment is running near 10%. It doesn't matter whether that's fair or not.
    - nanairo 16y ago
      I'll take your word for it. My impression of cause and effect was that it started pretty much from the beginning, when Obama tried to push for economic stimulus first and universal health service later. And now the teaparty are a force to be reckoned... and their whole point is to have a small government, and they don't want stimuli or similar (as well as no health service). But please tell me more. American politics is quite interesting. :)
maw 16y ago
Once it had a big government who looked after its citizens When?
- nanairo 16y ago
  Either Roosvelt?
  - achompas 16y ago
    The more recent Roosevelt HAD to grow the government--they were the only demanders during the Great Recession. He also stuck us with Social Security and Medicare, which are the main drivers behind the intergenerational debt we're facing now. So, I mean, big government isn't always the best.
    - nanairo 16y ago
      Why are SS and Medicare the biggest drivers? Didn't Clinton leave you with a surplus? And didn't he have to pay for SS and Medicare too? What's changed since then and now? Anyway I am not arguing that big government are always the best. I am arguing that big government sometimes are. Or to put it another way I am arguing that SMALL government isn't always the best.
      - achompas 16y ago
        I'm confused, what does Clinton have to do with these programs? Worth noting that Bush Jr. signed a prescription drug bill that will cost $550 billion between 2006 and 2015 [1]. SS and Medicare are programs intended for older people which are funded by current workers. As time has passed and SS/Medicare eligibility has increased, more SS/Medicare taxes from current workers are paying for fewer people's benefits. This problem has worsened as baby boomers have reached retirement age--we've never seen SS/Medicare enrollment like this before. Point being: my generation is paying a large chunk of taxes that it will probably never benefit from, as SS/Medicare will likely occupy too large a portion of the budget and would thus need to be scaled back (or closed down). [1] http://www.cms.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2009.pdf http://www.cms.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2009.pdf
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Well, the US is richer (PPP adjusted) than nearly every single one one of those countries (the sole exceptions being Norway and a couple of city states). In the one case where I've seen good data (US vs Sweden), the disparity gets even bigger if you compare Swedes to Swedish Americans. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-one-picture.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-o... So maybe the US is doing something right after all.
- nanairo 16y ago
  ... or maybe that you did something right in the past. By that meter then Nokia is doing things right too.
  - nir 16y ago
    Interestingly, Nokia's downfall is caused in part by its failure to compete with Google & Apple's - two American companies - innovation.
    - nanairo 16y ago
      Nobody is arguing that American companies can't compete, or that America isn't a great country. But the UK was an innovator once, and so was Italy before it. That said you could very well end up with a future with very powerful and very competitive american companies... in a country with no middle-class and a strong divide between managers and those with money, and the labour force with little privileges. Edit: I think USA got to where it is for a certain pragmatism that it seems to have lost. Now ideologies (free market, socialism, God, etc...) seem to be all that matter, and society is suffering for it. GDP is not a good indicator of the society's wellbeing and even less is current GDP for tomorrow's society's. At the end of the day the richest man in the world is Mexican, but Mexico is hardly a first world country.
      - nir 16y ago
        I agree the problems you're referring to are real, but it seems to me Americans are more aware of them than you might think (BTW, I live in NYC but I'm not American). They elected a president who's decidedly a pragmatist (I think McCain would have been one as well, though not his VP candidate..), and one of the most talked about issues here is the disappearing middle class. My view is that they ultimately do have a good system in place to discuss and hopefully improve on these problems. Their core strength is flexibility. I still remember talk of Japan overtaking the US in the 80s, and Japanese companies are still strong in the markets they dominated at the time - but the Americans have moved on to lead in software/Internet industries. That's not coincidence, in my opinion.

niccolop 16y ago

How often do people write this article? I would be really interested to see how many articles in a similar spirit were written during the 1930s or 1980s. For one, based on the 'smart money' investments from China and Russia they still seem to believe in the future of the US.

lkrubner 16y ago

I think this article has a good summary of cutbacks that are happening due to the recession. However, the article makes no attempt to tease apart what effects might be due to the recession, and what effects might be permanent. The long series of stories about local governments is interesting - I'm intrigued by what people cut back on when they run out of money. There is no question that this is the most serious recession in living memory, in the US. As such, the recession deserves a lot of attention. But it is a leap to go from "Some town in Ohio had to layoff several police officiers" to "This means the US is finished forever." (I am making up exaggerated quotes, which I think summarize the gist of the article.) It is possible that the US is finished forever, but there is nothing in this article that convinces me.

tseabrooks 16y ago
How many of these cutbacks SHOULD have been done before hand and are now forced to happen because of the recession. Laying off police officers.. Good idea - They probably don't provide enough to be worth their pay over a certain point. Maybe being forced to fill less pot holes will encourage us to come up with cheaper ways to do the job. Perhaps if we cut back on teachers and educational spending we'll be able to do more with less... Money isn't the problem in education... if it was then we wouldn't have this data mashup: http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/spent-student-and-sat-scores http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/spent-student-and-sat-sco... - It looks like spending more money per student isn't working. Thinking that cutting back = massive failure is why most American's have massive amounts of personal debt that they will never get out of.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  It's also not even clear they need to cut back on services. Take Flint, for example. Instead of cutting 23 of 88 firefighters, why not keep them all but reduce their compensation by 26%? It's Flint Michigan, they don't exactly have other employment options. Besides, it's unlikely Flint even needs that many firefighters - their population dropped by about 10% since 2000. The same could be done for teachers - NYC pays entry level teachers roughly the same salary as entry level engineers (total comp per month worked, not per calendar year). Rather than laying them off, why not cut their comp down to liberal arts grad entry level? [edit: replaced word "pay" in second paragraph with "compensation". Thanks chrisbolt.]

jbarham 16y ago

> In July, a group of farmers removed the safeties from their shotgun triggers and surrounded a trailer in which a suspected house robber was hiding while they waited for the county’s last, lone squad car to arrive. Hah, that's certainly something you wouldn't see in Canada (and I say this as a Canadian). Go Team America?! :)

acabal 16y ago

I never could understand the logic of Americans who demand public services like police, fire, hospitals, roads, traffic lights, internet, water, sewage, parks, etc., and then turn right around and vote leaders out of office the second they whisper the words "raise" and "taxes" in the same sentence. Where does everyone think the money will come from? Of course it's always more complicated than that, but this country strikes me as one that demands to have its cake and eat it too. It's too bad that it could take a slide into "third world" status (whatever that might be) before the masses realize how entitled and illogical they often seem to act.

burel 16y ago

I live in an European country and I think especially since the eighties Europe have much more changed than America did. We had a very deep transformations of our society towards the American life style and we copied the American way to put 'market' everywhere. Good ol' European counter-capitalistic socialism is nearly dead. So I think the main thing that has changed for America is the number and the power of it competitors.

gamble 16y ago

The US reminds me of a company that's suffered from stagnant revenue and decreasing profit margins for years, yet whose profits continue to grow through a combination of cost cutting and underinvestment in research and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the shareholders demand an ever-growing dividend... In relative terms, the US has been in decline since the early 1960s. It benefitted from an unprecedented situation after WWII when all it's competitors were reduced to bankruptcy and physical ruin, not to mention political turmoil and the yoke of Communism. America had a growing population and the best infrastructure in the world. Americans became accustomed to effortless growth and weak competition, while the rest of the world learned to compete with tooth and claw while rebuilding their economies and infrastructure from scratch. The current recession is a shock, but it's hardly the cause of America's decline. The decline was inevitable--as other countries become more competitive, the US becomes less so by definition. What's almost unique about America is the refusal to face that fact and address it. I honestly don't think that American society as a whole is capable of acknowledging that other countries can be superior in certain ways. At best, there's always a nebulous suspicion that foreign systems must possess some fatal flaw that will ultimately tell against them. Hence, there's this obsession about which jobs Americans are naturally advantaged at. There aren't any. Those are exactly the jobs non-Americans covet and are working to acquire. Those of us outside the US are privileged in a sense, because we can never delude ourselves that success is possible without determined competition among equals. If nothing else, we're always in competition with the US--whether you know it or not.