I have breathed much economic doom and gloom in the brief life of this blog. It is remarkable to me how many people I come in contact with who feel the same way even as the official media view seems to be this is just another down cycle like all the down cycles before.

But my view nonetheless is not unanimous. James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic, outlines How America Can Rise Again.

Fallows brings to his task considerable experience living abroad, most recently in China, where he saw its emerging economy first hand. He gives a number of reasons why each of our major economic problems is really minor or can be fixed.

The catch is, we lack the will.

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation … Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.
Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

On second thought, maybe Fallows and I are closer than first appeared. Able but unwilling eventuates about the same as unable.