What of the future? The slowdown in the growth of real wages for lower-skilled workers, the increase in the inequality of wealth and income, the deterioration of the environment, and the increase in various indicators of social malaise, such as the murder rate, brought to center stage a series of pundits who claimed that Americans faced a longterm decline in their living standards if they did not quickly shape up. Some focused on the lack of savings and the government deficit; others stressed America’s dependence on foreign oil; still others decried the spoiling of the environment.
In his widely acclaimed book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), Paul Kennedy, one of the most thoughtful prophets of decline, stressed the tendency of great empires of the past to decline once they had reached a preeminent position because they would inevitably exhaust their resources in foreign adventures. It was natural for Americans who had witnessed the destructive domestic consequences of the war in Vietnam to see the force of his point. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq provide more recent confirmation.
Most students are familiar with prophecies of decline based on environmental dangers, such as global warming. The problems addressed by the prophets of decline are real ones. Solving them will not be easy. It is important to remember, however, that prophecies of decline are not unique to our age. For the British, especially, it is an old story. Writing in 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus, in his celebrated Essay on Population, predicted that eventually Britain’s growing population would run into its declining ability to produce food. After all, the amount of agricultural land was limited, but the population could, if the food supply was adequate, grow without limit. Wages, Malthus argued, would eventually fall until they reached the minimum necessary to sustain life.121 Disaster could be avoided only if the population could somehow be held in check. Nearly 200 years later, the population and standard of living of England is far higher than Malthus could have imagined. William Stanley Jevons was another prophet of inevitable decline. In his famous book, The Coal Question (1865), Jevons predicted that England would eventually be forced into decline because its reserves of coal (then its chief source of industrial power) would be exhausted. England would face not only economic decline but also “moral and intellectual retrogression” (Engerman 1993). This catastrophe never came to pass: more reserves of coal were found, technological change permitted other sources of power to be used, and the development of world trade made it possible to escape from the confines of a theory based on the premise that Britain was the only industrial nation.
We cannot say that the Jeremiahs of the current generation are wrong. The economic historian, looking at the long record of growth achieved by the American economy, however, is likely to be skeptical. The point was well put long ago by English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay:
We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason. (Macaulay 1881, Vol. 1, ii, 186)122
World History
