

Third world America: The decline of a superpower? - cwan
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/14/third-world-america/

======
lkrubner
I think this article has a good summary of cutbacks that are happening due to
the recession. However, the article makes no attempt to tease apart what
effects might be due to the recession, and what effects might be permanent.
The long series of stories about local governments is interesting - I'm
intrigued by what people cut back on when they run out of money. There is no
question that this is the most serious recession in living memory, in the US.
As such, the recession deserves a lot of attention. But it is a leap to go
from "Some town in Ohio had to layoff several police officiers" to "This means
the US is finished forever." (I am making up exaggerated quotes, which I think
summarize the gist of the article.)

It is possible that the US is finished forever, but there is nothing in this
article that convinces me.

~~~
tseabrooks
How many of these cutbacks SHOULD have been done before hand and are now
forced to happen because of the recession.

Laying off police officers.. Good idea - They probably don't provide enough to
be worth their pay over a certain point.

Maybe being forced to fill less pot holes will encourage us to come up with
cheaper ways to do the job.

Perhaps if we cut back on teachers and educational spending we'll be able to
do more with less... Money isn't the problem in education... if it was then we
wouldn't have this data mashup: [http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/spent-
student-and-sat-sco...](http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/spent-student-and-
sat-scores) \- It looks like spending more money per student isn't working.

Thinking that cutting back = massive failure is why most American's have
massive amounts of personal debt that they will never get out of.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's also not even clear they need to cut back on services.

Take Flint, for example. Instead of cutting 23 of 88 firefighters, why not
keep them all but reduce their compensation by 26%? It's Flint Michigan, they
don't exactly have other employment options. Besides, it's unlikely Flint even
needs that many firefighters - their population dropped by about 10% since
2000.

The same could be done for teachers - NYC pays entry level teachers roughly
the same salary as entry level engineers (total comp per month worked, not per
calendar year). Rather than laying them off, why not cut their comp down to
liberal arts grad entry level?

[edit: replaced word "pay" in second paragraph with "compensation". Thanks
chrisbolt.]

~~~
natrius
The answer to your rhetorical questions is politically powerful public
employee unions. Only a small minority of the members of the union got laid
off, so they'd have to be okay with making the sacrifice to keep those people
employed. They could fill those jobs at significantly lower salaries, but that
factor never enters the equation.

------
niccolop
How often do people write this article? I would be really interested to see
how many articles in a similar spirit were written during the 1930s or 1980s.
For one, based on the 'smart money' investments from China and Russia they
still seem to believe in the future of the US.

------
gamble
The US reminds me of a company that's suffered from stagnant revenue and
decreasing profit margins for years, yet whose profits continue to grow
through a combination of cost cutting and underinvestment in research and
infrastructure. Meanwhile, the shareholders demand an ever-growing dividend...

In relative terms, the US has been in decline since the early 1960s. It
benefitted from an unprecedented situation after WWII when all it's
competitors were reduced to bankruptcy and physical ruin, not to mention
political turmoil and the yoke of Communism. America had a growing population
and the best infrastructure in the world. Americans became accustomed to
effortless growth and weak competition, while the rest of the world learned to
compete with tooth and claw while rebuilding their economies and
infrastructure from scratch.

The current recession is a shock, but it's hardly the cause of America's
decline. The decline was inevitable--as other countries become more
competitive, the US becomes less so by definition. What's almost unique about
America is the refusal to face that fact and address it. I honestly don't
think that American society as a whole is capable of acknowledging that other
countries can be superior in certain ways. At best, there's always a nebulous
suspicion that foreign systems must possess some fatal flaw that will
ultimately tell against them. Hence, there's this obsession about which jobs
Americans are naturally advantaged at. There aren't any. Those are exactly the
jobs non-Americans covet and are working to acquire.

Those of us outside the US are privileged in a sense, because we can never
delude ourselves that success is possible without determined competition among
equals. If nothing else, we're always in competition with the US--whether you
know it or not.

------
acabal
I never could understand the logic of Americans who demand public services
like police, fire, hospitals, roads, traffic lights, internet, water, sewage,
parks, etc., and then turn right around and vote leaders out of office the
second they whisper the words "raise" and "taxes" in the same sentence. Where
does everyone think the money will come from?

Of course it's always more complicated than that, but this country strikes me
as one that demands to have its cake and eat it too. It's too bad that it
could take a slide into "third world" status (whatever that might be) before
the masses realize how entitled and illogical they often seem to act.

------
jbarham
> In July, a group of farmers removed the safeties from their shotgun triggers
> and surrounded a trailer in which a suspected house robber was hiding while
> they waited for the county’s last, lone squad car to arrive.

Hah, that's certainly something you wouldn't see in Canada (and I say this as
a Canadian). Go Team America?! :)

------
nanairo
There's a certain irony in hearing someone from the Reagan government talking
about China's fast train. If you so much as suggested something like that in
the USA you'd be billed as a socialist and the program will be immediately
scrapped.

Once the USA wasn't like this. Once it had a big government who looked after
its citizens and did what no private investor could or would do.

In Australia the government is building fiber optics to all houses. In Europe
governments are building a network of fast trains. In China government is
building pretty much everything.

Are the Americans sure that they are backing the right politics?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Well, the US is richer (PPP adjusted) than nearly every single one one of
those countries (the sole exceptions being Norway and a couple of city
states). In the one case where I've seen good data (US vs Sweden), the
disparity gets even bigger if you compare Swedes to Swedish Americans.

[http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-
in-o...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-one-
picture.html)

So maybe the US is doing something right after all.

~~~
nanairo
... or maybe that you did something right in the past.

By that meter then Nokia is doing things right too.

~~~
nir
Interestingly, Nokia's downfall is caused in part by its failure to compete
with Google & Apple's - two American companies - innovation.

~~~
nanairo
Nobody is arguing that American companies can't compete, or that America isn't
a great country. But the UK was an innovator once, and so was Italy before it.

That said you could very well end up with a future with very powerful and very
competitive american companies... in a country with no middle-class and a
strong divide between managers and those with money, and the labour force with
little privileges.

Edit: I think USA got to where it is for a certain pragmatism that it seems to
have lost. Now ideologies (free market, socialism, God, etc...) seem to be all
that matter, and society is suffering for it. GDP is not a good indicator of
the society's wellbeing and even less is current GDP for tomorrow's society's.
At the end of the day the richest man in the world is Mexican, but Mexico is
hardly a first world country.

~~~
nir
I agree the problems you're referring to are real, but it seems to me
Americans are more aware of them than you might think (BTW, I live in NYC but
I'm not American).

They elected a president who's decidedly a pragmatist (I think McCain would
have been one as well, though not his VP candidate..), and one of the most
talked about issues here is the disappearing middle class. My view is that
they ultimately do have a good system in place to discuss and hopefully
improve on these problems.

Their core strength is flexibility. I still remember talk of Japan overtaking
the US in the 80s, and Japanese companies are still strong in the markets they
dominated at the time - but the Americans have moved on to lead in
software/Internet industries. That's not coincidence, in my opinion.

------
burel
I live in an European country and I think especially since the eighties Europe
have much more changed than America did. We had a very deep transformations of
our society towards the American life style and we copied the American way to
put 'market' everywhere. Good ol' European counter-capitalistic socialism is
nearly dead. So I think the main thing that has changed for America is the
number and the power of it competitors.

------
cjlars
I can't be bothered to actually read this article. Does anyone actually think
America is in 'decline'?

As a retort, here's Hans Rosling on narrowing GDP/capita and the first world's
role in this 'new economy':

<http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/912>

~~~
maukdaddy
Your comment says it all about America. You can't even be bothered to read it.

Secondly, stop giving MBAs a bad name.

