We've been here, before, Joe. It was called the 70s and 80s. One thing I know from reading American history is that when it comes to national confidence, we only have two modes: Insane hyperconfidence, and insane hyperpessimism. And they're cyclical.

My personal memory goes back to the mid 70s, and from that time until about 1990, the gestalt mindset was that we'd be lucky-- lucky!-- if we didn't get crushed by the Soviets.

Then 1989 happened, and until about 2005 we were convinced that history was over and we won.

Now the banking crisis hit amidst China's rise, and we're back to sky-is-falling doom. The cycle goes back before I was born, too-- the heady postwar boom, the Depression, the Roaring Twenties, etc.

People like Haque are obligated to state up front, clearly, loudly, why this incarnation of doomsaying is so very different from every other round of doomsaying we've seen over the last two hundred years. Why are we really doomed this time, for serious?

Yeah, we have challenges. We always have.

Marcus V. is right. Once upon a time, the Japanese were coming to get us. Before that, it was the Arabs of OPEC.

But the reason that there are so few "middle jobs" is that the unions have, plain and simple, destroyed them and the companies that provided them. Unions have dwindled to 8% of the non-government work force, but they stand as a deterrent to any kind of industry. There's no reason why we should accept that as a permanent condition.

Kelso and Adler wrote The Capitalist Manifesto and The New Capitalists in the 1970s. I've never heard of this fellow, Haque, but will check it out. I've been working on some notions that merge Kelso's ideas with those of James Buchanan.

Also, the "thin vs thick" (description) derives from the socio-anthropologist Clifford Geertz. The argument is that there isn't an "objective" way to look at culture, so the only way to study it is to bore down from the superficial while attempting to maintain the relatedness of observations. Well, we wouldn't want to "impose" any values on anyone... but just how coherent is this approach?

Oh, I think the reasons for decline run deeper than finances. Where did the foolish people come from that ran the banks into the ground? Where did Barney Frank come from? How come California can't get it together? Why can't anything be built without spending years and billions fighting lawsuits, filling out forms, and complying with regulations of all sorts? So on and so forth. All this on top of a largely uneducated populace, among which I count many college graduates, not to mention faculty.

It's a quagmire I tell you. But at the root of it all I would put education and it's ruination by the left. I think something of a dark age is coming to the West. Hopefully it won't be anything as long as the decline after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I remember the 70s/80s too, but think this is not the same thing. We solved some of the problems back then, but some major structural issues persisted, and have led us here.

The level of debt, the level of savings, the level of primary productive capacity in the economy, the nearness of unfunded public liabilities, the much-increased volatility of markets due to opaque private liabilities, and the role of public service unions have all sen significant changes since then.

Those changes matter, a lot. In fighter jock parlance, we're looking at a much larger "no escape zone."

The tools used by FDR (which relied on a large domestic savings pool) and Reagan (which relied on a debt level much smaller in relation to GDP, and much larger primary productive capacity) will fail if tried. Obama tried the New New Deal. Fail. The GOP may be about to try "Reagan II" - and if they do, they'll find that they, too, will be bitten in the ass by "unforseen" outcomes.

Well of course FDR-II failed, and Reagan-II would fail if tried. This isn't the 1930s, and it isn't the 1980s. That the nature of the American collective psyche is cyclical doesn't mean that the nature of the problems we face is cyclical-- not cyclical enough to just copy the solutions, anyway. (So in that sense, I realize, I should not have been so flip in saying "We've been here before.")

Still, according to the blurb, at least, Haque's exceedingly depressing lead-in is misleading. He starts out by claiming a Great Decline, structural, unavoidable, unstoppable. Unless, of course, you buy his book, in which case he'll tell you how to avoid it.

So I find myself frustrated and feeling manipulated. My read on history leads me to argue immediately, "No, this is not a permanent defeat, it's just a challenge to overcome, as we adjust to the changing world." Which Haque clearly wants to capitalize on in a sale of his book.

Franky, Haque and I may even agree, if I were to read his book in full. But I get annoyed at the sales approach. Don't trick me into reading. If you wrote a book about how the world has changed and what we need to do to adapt and what you think the measures of success in the 21st century global economy will be, great! I would like to read that book! But don't sell it to me by trying to scare me and depress me with premises I barely find credible.

Look at Germany, nowadays performing good (we´ll see in the years to come) through the crises: a relatively good education system and a culture of keeping investing during decades, if not centuries, in science and engineering. No oil, and a relatively small finance sector. High investment in fundamentals and high saving rate.

Of course, as drawback, we have a paranoid population (as a result of two World Wars and a third cold one), higly dependent from the government, completely underpaid (if we account taxes) for their productivity: a worse way of living.

I agree with Marcus when he says that "No, this is not a permanent defeat, it's just a challenge to overcome, as we adjust to the changing world."

I'd preface that by saying this is a very large challenge, because most of the problems are internal and structural, because we no longer have the kind of bullets and reserves we once had to throw at these things, and because neither party really seems to have a grip on what's really going on, let alone what to do about it.

The party that begins to get that grip fastest probably starts attracting independents into it. Which will change that party, and prepare it for the next stage of the crisis.