aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Is America shrinking?

Paul Kennedy, the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University, was made famous—“a superstar”—by the 1987 publication of his book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000, in which he had the temerity to predict the inevitable decline of the United States of America.

In February he spoke at the London School of Economics. His 90 minute talk is available via podcast. In it he says many interesting things. This, I think, the most interesting:

[@49:24] The power balances as between national units in this decade have been moving faster than at any other time since the 1890s, when at the beginning of that decade the U.S. economy overtook that of late Victorian Britain and by the middle to the end of that decade Imperial Germany overtook it, and Great Britain went from being the largest industrial economy in the world to being the third largest—and there was nothing really that the British could do about it.

So what I’m saying is that some things are recoverable, [but] long-term growth rates...are things that a four year president can do very little about. You might actually kick-start the U.S. economy again to have growth rates for four year at three to three and a half percent but if India’s growing at eight to nine percent and China at nine to ten percent then you just compound it out and the shrinkage is very fast.