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 combi

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.