Is America doomed? If our leaders don’t belay the bickering and focus on what really matters, disaster, sooner or later, will follow.
How do we know? It happened to classical China.
The fall of the Ming Dynasty, described in 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline, contains an important lesson for twenty-first century America. Could happen here.
America, and the world, are facing two slow-motion catastrophes. Both, politically neglected by both the left and the right, are almost too big to see.
Catastrophe No. 1: The debilitating impact of a 20 years of lousy economic growth at about half of the ~4% rate we enjoyed under Reagan and Clinton. 2% below-par growth might sound like no big deal. Compounded over 20 years, this means that median American income is around $60,000 instead of $90,000.
A 50% bump in our affluence sure would sweeten the national political and social mood as a 50% deficiency soured it. The cumulative deficiency also means that America’s annual GDP is around $26T, not the ~$40T it should, and would, have been. And can be.
This puts Uncle Sam into deficit, reducing the sums available for things we voters desire, like good roads and bridges and sustainable Social Security and Medicare.
Catastrophe No. 2: As recently pointed out by Brink Lindsey, much of the world is experiencing a slow-motion population implosion.
Don’t let the Malthusians fool you! Fewer people leads to poverty, not prosperity. Punk economic growth induced by bad policy compounded by a shrinking population.
These are the forests our political leaders, fixated on the trees, do not see. Uh oh!
The officials of the Ming dynasty resembled our own. China too had career civil servants — Mandarins. They ran the Empire’s administrative agencies.
China’s governing officials got distracted by palace intrigue and other irrelevant shenanigans. Focused on the parochial and the trivial — the trees not the forest — they ended up ignoring the existential threat: the Manchus massing at the border.
Then, the Manchus overthrew the Ming. Per 1587, a Year of No Significance’s publisher:
“In 1587, the Year of the Pig, nothing very special happened in China. … Through fascinating accounts of the lives of seven prominent officials, he fashions a remarkably vivid portrayal of the court and the ruling class of late imperial China. In revealing the subtle but inexorable forces that brought about the paralysis and final collapse of the Ming dynasty….”
As a 2022 anonymous review at Astral Codex sums it up:
“To modern sensibilities, Ming dynasty China was a lurid and savage place, where the gaudy veneer of an ancient and decadent civilization lent pomp and polish to underlying currents of unreconstructed barbarism. No doubt some of Robert E. Howard’s depictions of his Conan character adventuring and buccaneering and conquering in fictional exotic lands were inspired in part by his impression of the legendary dynasties of imperial China. But 1587 has no unambiguously heroic protagonist, not any dramatic resolution: in some ways it truly was ‘a year of no significance.’
“The settings and characters certainly lend themselves to the tropes of fantasy fiction: the Forbidden City, the Emperor’s Tomb, the Gate of Polar Convergence, the Literary Depth Pavilion — so many evocative names. The action involves floggings, concubines, eunuchs, dynastic scheming, and battles with Japanese pirates.”
Lurid and savage. Hey, sounds like 21st century American politics! Very theatrical, another “Society of the Spectacle.”
Sensational, yes. Yet not a recipe to produce the outcomes for which the U.S. Constitution was adopted: to form a more perfect union, establish justice, promote the general welfare, provide for the common defense, ensure domestic tranquility, or promoting the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Focusing on the forest rather than the trees could reframe our politics from bickering about, well, everything … to seizing currently neglected opportunities to create equitable prosperity. For example ….
Our officials could revamp our immigration laws to attract more high value, hard-working, law-abiding, patriotic immigrants — while interdicting the MS-13s and the (fewer than they claim) alien fentanyl smugglers.
Let’s embrace the forest of our good-guy immigrants’ contribution to our national wealth instead of focusing on the trees of the very, very few bad guys. Thus ends the border “crisis.”
And by getting to 4% GDP growth — which we know how to do — Social Security becomes solvent, indefinitely, without raising taxes or cutting benefits. Good growth, accompanied by restraining discretionary spending increases, will give us a great federal budget surplus rather than yawning deficits.
By transforming our perspective to focus on the forest, the big picture of the opportunities for achieving equitable prosperity, rather than the trees, the problems that derive from inequitable austerity, we can create a new golden age for America.
It’s that or else …
2023, a year of no significance.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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