"We're All Gonna Die!!!!!!!!!!!"
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in America | History — Comments (44) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Historian Thomas Madden explores the reasons for the spate of declinist literature concerning the future of American power:
Here's my theory: Prosperity and security are boring. Nobody wants to read about them. The same phenomenon occurred in ancient Rome, the last state to acquire such a firm hegemony. By the second century B.C., Roman citizens were affluent and their empire no longer had any serious rivals. With the dangers past and the money rolling in, they developed a taste for jeremiads. If you had a stylus, ink and scroll you could hardly go broke telling the Romans their empire, culture and way of life were yesterday's news.
Polybius blamed pandering politicians, who, he predicted, would transform the noble Republic into mob rule. Sallust claimed that Rome's vicious political parties had "torn the Republic asunder." Livy wrote his entire "History of Rome" just so that his fellow citizens could "follow the decay of the national character . . . until it reaches these days in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies."
The Romans may have been unquestioned masters of their world, but they sure didn't like reading about it. And when the empire actually did start its decline in the third century A.D., criticisms and predictions of collapse became noticeably thinner on the ground.
The military dictators who seized power in Rome and led the empire on its downward spiral did not much like reading about their own shortcomings, and they had ways of making sure that they didn't have to. These were the days of the panegyric - an obsequious form of literature that praised the emperor and empire to the skies. When you start seeing those, it's time to worry.
We're certainly not seeing that yet. Of course, I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s when a previous spate of declinist literature hit the bookstores. We've done fine since then. I suppose that there is a certain cache in looking at a crystal ball, seeing doom and spreading the message of doom to the masses. It makes you look really far-sighted in the eyes of some, as opposed to people like Madden who actually resist trendiness and keep some semblance of nerve as they cast a prophetic eye to divine the true state of America's destiny.
But thus far, in America's story, the optimists have been right far, far, far more often than the pessimists have.
Or as Ben Franklin put it after the Constitutional Convention:
I have often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicisitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.
It still is.
"We're All Gonna Die!!!!!!!!!!!" 44 Comments (0 topical, 44 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Where would we be without the 3/4 or so of our economy that makes up the service industry? The biggest reason for America's prosperity has been ingenuity and invention. Automobiles never would have been invented without sombody figuring out how to make one and the internet wouldn't be the greatest invention since the automobile without millions of people utilizing it. Creating Google or a successful website is no less valuable than laying down cable and building routers.
You have a love of doing physical work. That's awesome, but I think it's obvious that we need both manual and knowledge-based labor. I actually find it bizarre that you are antagonistic towards non-tactile work.
The service industry in this country is going to be the main reason it comes apart: there's no intrinsic value to a service. The value is totally dependent on whatever anyone says it is, and the bottom line is always dependent on what the actual, physical costs are.
We've created a nation of people who really believe that providing services to people in increasing esoterica is a legitimate pursuit and I think it's wrecking the country.
Ephemeralization, virtualization, and dislocation are the real forces turning the country inside out, combined with anonymity. We have transitioned from an industrial economy to a post-industrial economy and I don't think it's healthy for people in general.
Only about 10% of the people are well suited to do conceptual work in the first place, and we've got a whole society struggling to take people at the mean point on the bell curve and make them into knowledge workers, because obviously we cannot tolerate industrial activity any longer. Well, service industry people who are selling ephemera to other people who are buying ephemera are debased, in my opinion. It won't last long despite the beautiful theories of economists.
To the extent you agree with it, then you're going to be forced to accept what Arlen Specter has been forced to accept: that the American population is increasingly liberal. It has to be. It's like living in a city where you don't care very much about who your neighbor is intrinsically, what kind of work they do or what kind of creed they adhere to, as long as you're providing a service they need.
That's the future. That's the post-industrial economy. And anything is defensible in a post-industrial economy, from the adoption of Sharia Law (as long as there is someone you can refer clients to) to almost anything else you can think of.
America is going to look more like San Francisco in the next 20 years, and there's not much anyone can do about it.
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The Ephemeral vs Durable goods question is debatable. Also services have always been a significant portion of our economy we went over 50% in the 50s. This is more a measure of the productivity of the manufacturing sector.
Would you have people making goods that aren't needed ?
If you provide services you hardly have to be accepting.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
You can't make a living in this country any more. We've opened our economy willy-nilly to China and India and other places around the globe and at the same time we've drastically increased the costs on our own people for things like education, health care and electricity. They're going to eat us alive: they have ten times our population and they're willing to work for next to nothing, and they can do the services just as well as anyone here can. Nobody should be surprised that more people are finding that it's impossible to compete with them, and more people want to get out.
On an abstract basis it's wonderful: prices are going to seek their level, the rest of the world will get marginally more wealthy. But what's going to happen in the United States is that everyone except people who are plugged in to global finance as investors will get poorer. I can't compete with people in the printing business who do it internationally: it's costing me twice as much just to buy paper than it did a year ago. That means I can't pay my bills. What's next for me? Becoming a bond trader? Maybe a Harvard-educated entrepreneur? Sorry, those slots are already taken.
The dirty little secret of globalization is that it is going to make everyone in the United States poorer, not wealthier -- the average people, the people who have to pay bills here. The value of the work they do is being completely undercut by foreign competiton and there's no way around that problem except for everyone to get poor while a few people get rich. The Internet is accelerating the phenomenon. You think about creating a service industry job but let's face it, you need a few hundred thousand dollars in credit to do that, and none of that exists right now.
That's why one of George Soros' former partners is telling everyone to teach their children Chinese and move to Singapore. That's where the money is, that's where the future is.
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The only really reliable growth industries in this country are entertainment, pornography, and gambling. Universities are telling people that healthcare is a big winner but the money is going to run out, because nobody can stop the cost hyperinflation. Get used to changing bedpans.
Sorry, didn't mean to put a damper on the Fourth of July. But America ain't what it used to be.
I see your point and Health Care is definitely maxed out.(percentage not growth)
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I admit this post was a little hyperbolic, but I live in Massachusetts, where I pay $0.18 per kilowatt hour for electricity service for my business (take a look at this chart to see where that stands in the United States -- the numbers for 2008 are low: I can show you my bills) and I pay $1,800 a month for mandatory health insurance for three people. Now I also pay more thant $5.00/gallon to put diesel fuel in my small truck to deliver my work to the USPS, and the price of food is rising.
Between the federal taxes, the state taxes, the municipal taxes and fees, the price of energy, the price of (mandatory) health care, and all the ancillary costs, I simply couldn't afford to have a child right now. I couldn't afford to feed one, much less pay for Googleplex daycare, staffed by people with GPAs of 3.5+ from all the right schools and outfitted with the most expensive toys in a multicultural environment.
I can't afford to buy a new car. Credit doesn't exist. And the people I'm competing are no longer the print shop ten miles away or the mailing company 50 miles away: they're the people running printsweatshops in California, India and China.
It can't keep going on this way, and everyone knows it. Hence my unctuous and dyspeptic tone. Meanwhile the Republicans in our congress and this current administration have proven themselves to be every bit as craven and inept at throwing people's money away from Washington as any Democrats 10 years ago.
Please: give me a reason for some optimism here.
That by far the highest electricity prices in the United States are paid in ---- HAWAII.
Barack Obama's homeland. 28.53 cents per kilowatt-hour residential in 2008, almost 300% of the national average. So go ahead, America -- Elect Barack Obama -- he's used to seeing people getting royally screwed.
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doesn't benefit from the economies of an integrated grid. Also, like Alaska, much of it is diesel generated and that diesel is shipped in from the Mainland on expensive Jones Act tankers. The most "grid" Hawaii can have is each island, so there's no way to share load and capacity.
Here in Alaska, the only true grid we have is in the so-called Railbelt from Seward and the Kenai Peninsula, Anchorage and the Matanuska Valley, and with an intertie to Fairbanks. Most of the generation in the Anchorage-Kenai-Mat Valley area is produced from the dwindling Cook Inlet natural gas supply while Fairbanks is a combination of coal and oil. Here in Juneau and in Ketchikan we have hydro, but both systems are stand-alone with little linkage to outlying areas. The rest of the State relies on stand-alone diesel generation, at enormous cost. The number on the chart is artificially low because of the relatively cheap hydro and natural gas produced electricity. In rural Alaska, rates average well above $0.40Kwh, in some places much more. I suspect the same is the case for the more isolated areas of Hawaii - all you ever see is Honolulu, the big city, but much of Hawaii is quite rural and very isolated. Like most of Alaska, if you want to go anywhere, you take a ferry or fly, mostly fly.
I don't know if it is the case in Hawaii, suspect it is, but here every time somebody dares mention building intertie lines, the greenies go nuts about destroying the pristine wilderness and, of course, the unions side with them unless you're willing to give them Davis-Bacon wages and a project labor agreement, which raises the price exponentially.
In Vino Veritas
America thinks it is liberal when things are going well, and despite what one hears in the MSM, we may never see an economy like this one again in our lifetimes.
Properous and safe = soft.
Soft = liberal.
America is a fundamentally conservative country. Republicans make is safe and prosperous, then get voted out of office because Americans get soft. Dems take over, things go to hell, and Americans pay attention. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I've seen it happen before. Take it to the bank.
Service and knowledge are overhead, downstream products, wealth ultimately comes out of the ground. It is the enterprise actually making things that needs knowledge and the labor making those things that buys services - I'm leaving the financial sector out of this for the moment.
Yes, we can get the stuff out of the ground and the things made from that stuff elsewhere in the World and run our economy on providing what is essentially the administrative overhead for that production. But it comes at enormous cost to us and causes great vulnerabilities. Much of our military exists for the sole purpose of maintaining supply and shipping routes for natural resources and manufacturing that we've "outsourced." Much the same thing happened with the British Empire as they became more and more reliant on Colonial resources and production. It took an enormous military to keep the conveyer belt running.
And then there's the fact that as those "colonies" get more affluent, they can provide their own administrative support and their governments don't need our military to provide for their security.
In Vino Veritas
Thanks, I guess. I think the post could have and should have been written better and I'll do that in a different entry.
My most important critique of America right now is that it has to find more conservative principles of government, especially at the federal level. Medicare and Social Security have to be brought back into line with reality, in particular. Our federal government has to stop thinking that five cents on the dollar wasted on spending isn't something the people they're taking it from would be better off having themselves.
And Americans themselves are going to have to decide this for themselves and choose elected officials who believe in those principles. Otherwise I don't see these trends reversing, I see the United States become more Socialist as the average person gets poorer and has to "rely" more on the government for services. That's exactly what is happening in Massachusetts and it will happen to the rest of the country as well, if people don't wise up.
Is that they are almost unbelivably wasteful. Of the $790 billion dollars Health and Human Services spent last year, a careful accounting would show that most of it was frittered away. But we can't seem to stop it. We have a media that is actively participating in perpetuating it.
I don't know how to really change that except letting the country go bankrupt -- because we've got situations like the farm bill where nobody is willing to give up a penny of their federal largesse. It's an entire system that has become gangrenously bloated and I just don't see how to stop it until the country itself goes into very serious shock.
America's Wealthiest Immigrants have to be the Bukharan Jews who are building mansions in Queens, NY to the consternation of many of their neighbors.
He showed how in the space of a decade, Bukharians, mainly from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, had come to dominate some residential blocks, as relatives bought homes within walking distance of one another and some extended families crowded under one roof. Their houses were easy to identify by their bricked front patios and front walls.
...
There, Bukharians have been tearing down the neighborhood’s sedate Tudor, Georgian and Cape Cod-style homes, paving over lawns and erecting white-brick edifices that borrow from old Europe, with sweeping balustrades, stone lions bracketing regal double doorways, chateau-style dormers and pitched roofs, Romanesque and Greek columns and ornate wrought-iron balconies accented with gold leaf that glints in the sun.
These people are coming from Russia and are now among the wealthiest people in America. Meanwhile ordinary Americans, non-immigrant Americans, can't make a living.
What fields do these people work in? How in the space of less than a decade (not even a generation!) could they become so conspicuously rich that they're even getting criticized in the New York Times?
“It’s not to show that we’re rich,” he insisted. “I’m feeling this. Bukharian Jews feel O.K., it’s good, thanks God.”
The article notes that they mostly work in real estate and healthcare. It's Hillary Clinton's state.
Except my guess is that they're also being helped along ver generously by government contract setasides for "minorities." It's so taboo to mention these things that the New York Times doesn't even have this article in their search engine today. Go ahead: try it! Search for Bukharians at the New York Times right now: you won't find this article.
And all they are really doing is criticizing their taste in property landscaping.
Boy, I wish I had been born a Bukharian Jew in Russia who immigrated to Queens in the past ten years. Life's a bed of roses!
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would get them setasides? Probably more like having enough money to grease the skids.
In Vino Veritas
The definition of a minority-owned business is a murky area but a very profitable one if you can qualify. Same thing with setasides for female-owned businesses. And it's even better if you can do both.
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than female-owned. Course, they'd have no monopoly on that scam. Half the contractors I know are their wives' employees.
In Vino Veritas
I know someone who helped to build the Washington Metro and made a fortune doing it because he was a "minority" under U.S. Government contract rules. Has a house in St. Croix and a Piaggio jet, too. It'd be even more surprising if you knew what his nationality was.
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My guess is that everything that's going on is *scrupulously* legal. It's legal because the laws are written that way.
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To get contracts that make you that kind of money, you have to be pretty much a "made man," real tight with the unions and the politicians.
In Vino Veritas
I think the American taxpayer should know if their money is going to fund the mansions of Uzbeki immigrants in Queens. It's about time someone looked into it.
The danger of having someone look into it, of course, is that people's bodies wind up in dumpsters if they do.
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Don't go knocking on those doors, in other words, unless you're able to withstand the backlash. I brought it up today only because it strikes me as strange that this group of people from Uzbekistan are so profligately rich in New York after so few years that people are complaining about their conspicuous consumption in the New York Times.
That's essentially a message telling them: "You should tone it down a little. You're blowing the game!"
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The kind of money that changes hands in these deals is simply beyond the comprehension of Joe Sixpack and he can't get exercised about it. Steal $10K and you go to jail for a while and everybody is screaming to have you drawn and quartered. Get together with a few of your closest friends and steal $100 Million and you're a pillar of society beyond even the suspicion of reproach.
In Vino Veritas
And in my own family I've seen examples of it. Not on the Conservative side of the family, though. It has almost been exclusively on the liberal side of the family that I've seen the really profligate wealth based on very opportunistic readings of federal law. The only way to stop this abuse of the federal contract system is to make it really fair:
1) Decrease the amount of money available through it
2) Eliminate set asides across the board
There should be absoultely no "affirmative action" in government contracting. The only people who exploit those kinds of setasides in the laws are the ones who are already richer than you or I will ever be.
It's horrendously immoral, but it's basically how our government works now that the main purpose of government has become taking taxpayer money and redistributing it to various people's friends.
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They should care, because it's the single most unfair practice in our government: and liberals are usually the beneficiaries under a welfare-state system like the one our government currently adheres to.
The first rule of our government when it comes to fiscal policy is that it should have an overwhelming reluctance at every level to raising taxes and fees. It should immediately reduce taxes on businesses, particularly small businesses. And it should get absolutely medieval on the issue of setasides, which are basically the backdoor mechanism by which Democrats stay in power.
I understand where you all are coming from. I am electrical engineer I used to work for a company called RCA. Remember them ? They used to be an American ICON and institution. Now they are a brand for Philips.
You are both right and both wrong. I would be the first to argue that there are mammoth problems with the way we have been doing things. We have tilted things far too far towards the legal profession. Putting it bluntly just how much can you pay people to gum up the works before they get well and truly fouled. The other great problem is the ever increasing rise of bureaucracies that also do little but gum up the works. Can you say endangered polar bear ?
Inherently it doesn't matter what we are doing as long as we do it well. The misunderstanding is common to both the right and the left. If you don't believe that to be the case, wright now we are having this conversation thanks to computers and the internet both of which come as close to crystallized thought as anything mankind has ever invented. If you want another example Japan and Israel are both countries that do very well by living off their wits. Both countries of course prize intelligence and education. I caught a Japanese cartoon a while back calle Read or DIE, could you imagine that being made here ?
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
that I've used the Thomson mp3pro codec to cram CD-quality songs onto floppy disk singles (provided the song is under 3 minutes).I guess the format hasn't caught on because the licensing fees are so high.
It's a shame RCA exists today only as a trade name owned by some investor group. I actually have a CED player and many discs (the last consumer electronics format created entirely in the USA, by RCA).
BTW are they still retaining the information ?
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
CEDMagic is pretty thorough and (I think) includes a link to the other big CED site.
And frankly I don't think the New York Times doubts it either. They're minority immigrants, persecuted in their home country. My guess is that they not only qualify as minorites, there's a specific setaside for them.
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I wouldn't be at all surprised, for example, if someone who is a Bukharan Jew from Uzbekistan qualifies as a racial or ethnic minority under U.S. Government contract rules, and particularly if you structure the corporation so that a female is the titular head of the business.
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I'll bet even money that if you did a careful accounting of the hardscabble lives of the Bukharan immigrants in Queens, you'd find that a significant portion of their money is coming directly from the federal and state government programs.
It helps to have friends in the right places.
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America has taught people in the world more about conspicuous wealth than any other country in history, particularly in the past 25 years.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I disagree with both of the above posts. The first one romanticizes physical labor to an absurd degree. There's nothing wrong with hard, gritty, dirty, back-breaking work, of course. I admire and appreciate the farmers and factory laborers of this country. Nevertheless, "intellectual" labor is just as essential and can be just as exhausting (albeit exhausting to different senses) as the most grueling manual labor.
The second post creates too great a dichotomy between intellectual and physical labor. Truly great innovation generally involves both. Developing an idea is only half the battle; one needs the raw materials, the skill and the physical labor to make the idea reality.
But anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with Madden's article. Stability and prosperity are boring; inevitable decline and collapse sell books (and movies). Even the most lofty academics ultimately desire some celebrity and most are more than willing to put an intellectual spin on the age-old apocalyptic motif.
That has been utterly devastated I have no idea how we will go on without this sector in its traditional position of prominence. This sector used to provide 82% of our overall exports and provided employment for most of our population.
That sector is agriculture. In the 1860s it was 80% of our exports. In 1900 it was 40% of our employment. Now it is 2% of employment, its not even in the top ten categories of exports.
Times change.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
http://tse.export.gov/NTDChartDisplay.aspx?UniqueURL=cs3yhrqi25n0yl45usz...
Thats manufactured goods we have another 1.4 trillion in other.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
You guys often have access to wonderful data and graphs and statistical data on economic and other issues. I try to look this stuff up and get inundated with stupid and useless links.
Maybe we could have an on running thread on Redstate where anyone who has found interesting statistical data could provide a link and brief description. Then we could just look it up by going back to that post.
thank you.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
is available from the USDOL, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and from state departments of labor as well. As joliphant linked, the US Department of Commerce has lots of data available on general economic activity and trends as do many states' departments of commerce and/or labor.
Don't take them uncritically though; government statistics are very much the province of the old saw about figures not lying, but a lot of liars do figure.
In Vino Veritas
Wouldn't be a bad idea to do one for general stats.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Prosperity and security are boring and they lead to a kind of ennui and disaffection, a sort of mass societal pity-party. Of course people like Chalmers Johnson would like nothing more than to see that pity party culminate in a mass suicide, but let's not talk too much about the really sick freaks -- even if they are tenured professors -- shall we?
Modern Britain is one of the most civilized countries in the world according to the standards of liberal judgment, and it also one of the most visibly depressed and moribund countries in the world. Reading anything on the BBC is only a little less bad than watching it, which makes you want to shoot yourself. France is a little less moribund but that's only because they have a lot of sex that the government pays for by enforcing a rigorous scheme of hierarchy when it comes to the elites: not only do they get the best sex, they're officially protected. Must be nice.
The key to avoiding these problems is work. That's it: it's really that simple. People who have too much time to think get depressed, because frankly their brains just aren't big enough. We have hands and feet and legs and arms because we were meant to do real labor: the big brains came later, and only a handful of people know how to use them well.
It's work that makes a country strong. There are people who will think this is an echo of Arbeit Macht Frei, but that was a uniquely pathological perversion of the truth: human beings need to talk less, complain less, and work more, because the truth is that they're not even smart enough to agree about what is bothering them so much.
My advice is to celebrate Independence Day not by sitting around at a barbecue or lolling back with a Rolling Rock, but by building something. Anything! Get out there and construct something worthwhile, or at least help someone else construct something worthwhile.
I'm only an optimist if America can continue to work, and I don't mean "service industry" or "knowledge worker" baloney: I mean the real stuff where people move things around with their bodies and get sweaty and tired and actually see the fruits of their labor. Knowledge-work itself is a dissipator. That's what ails America: too many people trying to accomplish something by relying on computers and formulas and abstractions.
This is going to be a controversial post. Oh well.