Word: declinist
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Actually, forget the sign. He will be getting the same message to more people with American Theocracy (Viking; 462 pages). The message is, bad times ahead. Writing in the spirit of Paul Kennedy's 1989 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Phillips is a declinist, and a persuasive one. Looking back to the collapse of the Spanish, Dutch and British empires, he has come to warn about a trio of threats to the U.S. that he believes is already taking it down the road to disaster, and not slowly...
...those areas, the U.S. continues to be the wonder of the world. From 1947 to the oil shock of 1973, our productivity grew annually at an average compounding 3% rate. For the next 20 years that rate was mysteriously cut in half, the background for much of the declinist vogue of the '80s. Then in the past decade, when we finally stopped playing with our newfangled computers and figured out how to use them, productivity returned to the magic 3% level of the immediate postwar era when America bestrode the world like a colossus...
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