Are America's best days behind us?

Here's a rubric for evaluating stories like this. First, think back to news stories from 2007. Everybody's house is going to keep going up in value forever. Wall Street is an obvious place to go if you're smart and ambitious and want an easy way to make a lot of money. Is America ready for a black president?<p>However wrong-headed that seems now, however enormous a failure of imagination or refusal to pay attention to what's actually going on in the world, that's how stupid this article will look after whatever big thing happens next starts happening.<p>None of which is to say that the world isn't changing. But Time is a business that sells magazines, and a very effective way to do that is to spin anxieties common among its audience into a narrative and then feed that narrative back to them in an authoritative way.

If you haven't read Zakaria's "The Post-American World", I highly recommend it.<p>I agree with his assessment that the landscape is changing rapidly and profoundly, although I don't know if the resultant loss of economic and political weight means that we can't still have our best days ahead of us.<p>All that's necessary, I think, is the political will to move forward in the right direction. I would argue that large infrastructure projects in telecommunication and energy, and shifting education goals towards an information economy and away from it's Taylorist origins are most important to be able to compete in the future.<p>Although even with that, we will probably never have the kind of political dominance we've had in the past. I don't think I've ever had a problem with that.

The best point made in the article is that the danger to the United States comes from its track record of success:<p>"Mancur Olson . . . was prompted by what he thought was a strange paradox after World War II. Britain, having won the war, slipped into deep stagnation, while Germany, the loser, grew powerfully year after year. . . .<p>"Olson concluded that, paradoxically, it was success that hurt Britain, while failure helped Germany. British society grew comfortable, complacent and rigid, and its economic and political arrangements became ever more elaborate and costly, focused on distribution rather than growth. . . . The system became sclerotic, and over time, the economic engine of the world turned creaky and sluggish.<p>"Germany, by contrast, was almost entirely destroyed by World War II. That gave it a chance not just to rebuild its physical infrastructure but also to revise its antiquated arrangements and institutions . . . with a more modern frame of mind."<p>On the other hand, Britain is arguably not very far behind Germany even today, as Britain later had opportunities to learn from failure. Definitely a country that learns to embrace learning from failure (even the relative failure of not always being the best, while still being quite good by world standards) is a country that can keep making progress. I'm not counting out the United States yet as a country that can learn to do better, especially because the United States is still very receptive to immigrants from all over the world who feel an urgency about bettering their lives.

That was the question posed by Jim Collins when he spoke at West Point to a group of 36 people-- 12 U.S. Army generals, 12 "Fortune" 500 CEO types and 12 leaders from the social sectors.<p>Specifically, he asked them, "Where’s America? Is America at an inflection point? And if so, which way? Because great nations -- Athens, 500 BCE, Rome, Egyptian Old Kingdom, Egyptian New Kingdom, Minoans of Crete have fallen."<p>This question was the inspiration for his fascinating book, "How the Mighty Fall" -- you can watch his interview with Charlie Rose on this here: <a href="http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10565" rel="nofollow">http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10565</a><p>He said his research team found 5 stages of decline that were common among all the great enterprises that fell. He said the first stage is hubris, but you can go through the first 4 stages and still recover before reaching the fifth and final stage, which is capitulation or death.