>Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when th

>Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy. And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance. Decline is an interesting metric. Will America fail as a country? Probably not. Will America cause more suffering with the current trajectory than it would have if choices were made to better society rather than treating humanity as a zero-sum game? Certainly! It's easy to find evidence of that whichever side of politics you come from. > Productivity levels and living standards have increased so dramatically that it takes people less time to earn the money to buy the things they need. During the Middle Ages, an English laborer had to work 80 hours to pay for a pound of sugar. By 2021, an English laborer had to work only 1.89 minutes to do that. In 1800, it took 5.4 hours of work to buy 1,000 lumen-hours; in 1992, it took only 0.00012 hours of work for someone to light their home for six weeks. > From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent, according to the book Superabundance, by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. That, too, frees up a lot of time and resources that can be spent on other things. Healthcare spending from 1970 to 2020 has increased by 10x (394 billion to 4124 billion in 2020 dollars). Salaries have not increased by quite so much :D