The Decline of the American Economy

The Decline of the American Economy is intended to tell Americans that their country's economy, which fed American power and buoyed up Western civilization in the past two hundred years, is declining. American leaders and politicians, however, refuse to admit that there is a problem. Part of the cause of the problem is politics. It is now a country in which we are seeing the ugly side of democracy where nothing gets done because of partisan politics of democracy. In my mind, however, the greater part of the problem is the failure of US economists to understand and diagnose the country's basic economic problems.

Conventional economics in the US and indeed the West is stale and unable to deal with a world that is getting more technologically complicated every day. For most conventional economists today, the American economy is all about finance: interest rates, inflation, Wall Street indexes, globalization, trade, economic indexes, financial reserves, etc. For those of them who still think analytically, production is made up of only labor and capital, omitting material, despite it being quite oblivious that one cannot produce anything without materials.

They continue in the path of increasingly squeezing labor out of production in the name of productivity in order to reinforce the supremacy of finance. These are the basic errors of capitalism. There is the belief that the sum total of the rowdyism of private enterprise creates maximum economic growth and prosperity for all. In the context of capitalism, conventional economists equate capital invested in US dollars as the measure of US economic growth achieved through financial management.