Decline and Slide of the West

The linked article ties in nicely with the latest series of posts here. Much better researched and thought through, but you'll notice a lot of ads on his page that you don't see at AotF.

The big thing to take away from this is the concept of Material Productivity. There may be other terms, but it's exactly what I've been on about and it fits perfectly.

Yet Rome did not fall for four centuries after its moralists wrote of its decadence and decline. Why the resilience?

Entitlements and official corruption were for centuries subsidized by the profits accruing from global standardization and Romanization — brought about by the implementation and imposition of Roman law, order, and commerce throughout the Mediterranean. As long as the empire was cohesive, it brought in thousands yearly into its sphere of influence.

And:

So such global uniformity created real wealth in newfound places faster than such bounty could corrupt the citizens in the old Italian core to the degree to bring down what was now a world system. In other words, the creation of entirely new cities like Leptis or the growth of Asian centers such as Ephesus, brought previously unproductive tribal folk into the Roman system at precisely the time old Romans were no longer doing the things that had once created their own vibrant culture that swept the Mediterranean — the ancient version of the Chinese youth working 10 hours in an Adidas factory while an American counterpart is still “finding himself.”

The point? We see something like this today. What made American culture boom through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traditional American values like the Protestant work ethic, family thrift, limited and stable government, equality of opportunity rather than result, lower taxes, personal freedom, opportunity for advancement and profit, and faith in American exceptionalism.

But the cloning and spreading of this system after WWII (“globalization”) did two things: literally billions of non-Westerners adopted the Western mode of production and began, in economic terms, becoming far more productive in creating valuable manufacturing goods, food, and exporting previously unknown or untapped natural resources; in addition, the vast rise in population added billions to the world’s productive work force.

Yes, lazily blockquoting someone else could be taken as another sign of said decline, but I do have a day job too. I am more than passingly familiar with the Roman Empire, though certainly no expert; this sounds like what happened to them, and the analogies with today are ignored at our peril.

Something I know even less about is Economics, however the same could be said for most people who specialize in it; the Dismal Science indeed. Free Trade was seen by many as the thin edge of the predicament we find ourselves in, and can't claim mastery of the intricacies of those arguments. However, if there is one thing I have learned by surviving this long is that if you need a complicated explanation of or complex scheme for anything you're doing something wrong.

Brushing aside the obvious exceptions to that statement I am reminded of that one house that remained standing in Chicoutimi during the 1996 Saguenay flood while all else around it was washed away. The reason it stood is that it was built on bedrock. The more we undermine the foundations of our economy, the closer our collapse as a society comes. I think that NAFTA could have worked, as long as we protected it against wider competition. Even that is cold comfort to people who used to do jobs that moved to Mexico. Now those jobs have moved to China, and our wealth is moving in an ever widening loop, less of it making back to us.

Again, this is a more acute problem for the U.S. than for Canada, but I am not optimistic that all the recently lost manufacturing jobs will return to Ontario when this slump is over. Watch and shoot.