Explore Your Possibilities: Industrial age.

English: Pres. U.S. Grant (between 1870 and 1880) Français : Le président américain Ulysses Grant (Photo prise entre 1870 and 1880) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No More Industrial Revolutions?
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
The American economy is running on empty. That’s the hypothesis put forward by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Let’s assume for a moment that he’s right. The political consequences would be enormous.
The author express here "dark age " feelings common if you are familiar with e-book subject.
While the mass market print book is threatened, the long tail of the print book market is more alive than ever. While the mass market print book is indeed threatened, for once the threat is not from political or religious extremists. Instead, it is from the ebook. There is some confusion about what a book is.
Economy is indeed threatened. It is from the e-Economy.
The picture painted in the article above is very one-sided. Tracing the rise and fall of various one-time imperial powers, from Portugal and Spain to France and England, Kennedy shows how the cost, mostly military, of maintaining and defending their trade routes and colonies around the world eventually produced unsustainable debt and eventually caused these empires to fall.
This is clearly part of what is happening to the United States. Our struggle to maintain our military and political dominance of the world -- two wars in a decade and another on the way -- it is an important contributor to the decline of our productivity and our increasing debt burden.
In the long run it will be hard for the US to maintain it's "superpower" status as it attempts to compete economically with countries that do not have the huge military overhead that we do. Our military budget is larger than that of the next the next 20 countries combined.

Paul Kennedy's book may be 25 years old, but what it said about the future fate of the United States shows that some predictions can be quite accurate, especially if they are ignored.

Technorati Cosmos: other blogs commenting on this post