This Is How A Society Dies: US & UK In A Death Spiral, Rich Nations Turning Into Failed States

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Sat Dec 14, 2019, 04:02 AM - Edit history (1)

"This is How a Society Dies." America and Britain are Textbook Examples of a New, Gruesome Phenomenon: Rich Nations Self-Destructing Into Poor Failed States. By Umair Haque, Dec. 9, 2019. Excerpts & Edited:

Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world. The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them.
And yet what’s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that…well…nobody much seems to have noticed. There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It’s a relationship. What connects the dots?

So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union? To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that’s an overstatement. But it’s an empirical reality.
The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America’s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn’t provide basics for its citizens — hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one’s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People…die. (The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics — lethally real ones.)



Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren’t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They’re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way — every way — imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher — and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others...Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn’t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth wants worse lives excepts us.

Let me say it again: the average person can’t take care of themselves and their own — so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else? Our modern societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What’s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media — available to all, without life-crippling “debt”? It’s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it’s not America or Britain, either. The average American now lives in effective poverty — unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn’t have to, precisely because they invested in one another — and those investment made them richer than us. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period.
That’s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead.

Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can’t even afford your own? How are you supposed to? Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish...Read More, https://eand.co/this-is-how-a-society-dies-35bdc3c0b854

~ Umair Haque is the author of several books including 'A New Capitalist Manifesto' and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. His most recent piece, 'This is How a Society Dies,' hammers home a stark truth we cannot but must accept: the United States and the UK, once the envies of aspiring democracies, are in a possibly irreversible death spiral, not merely to Second World status, but to Late Soviet, perpetually-failing societies.
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(Thanks to DU member hedda foil for posting last week an Umair essay on Britain and America Self Destructing, and Daily Kos member Crashing Vor for the post 'A Must-Read' on Dec. 13, 2019).
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/12/13/1905388/-A-Must-Read?utm_campaign=trending

- "Is America Becoming A Third World Country?" (2019) Robert Reich, economist & former US Secretary of Labor.

[DanieRains]

1. Goodbye Cruel World

America is dying. Fighting each other over crumbs while we are being robbed by the rich and powerful.

Thats why insulin costs 10 times the going rate here.

The list goes on.

[OhNo-Really]

2. For years Wrote & Warned of this at dkos!

The articles were deeply researched & well cited. And, with little exception completely ignored by Marcos & is his A team.

8 hours a day for years fighting with the pen.

Perhaps we have lost the skill of creative listening.

I warned of worldwide austerity before it began gleaning clues from the trajectory in the US.

All mentioned because so few support contributors that we are limited to the most Brave willing to be bullied ignored or attacked for speaking out

A leader in this forum has never acknowledged anything contributed. No No biggie, just odd. Is it a sexist thing?

For my progeny I write. It is my duty.

My health limits other participation

So write. Be brave share.

Excellent article btw


Uk & Us have some serious karma issues imho

[appalachiablue]

15. Absolutely be involved and brave. Write and engage for the sake of

society, progeny and a better world. It's why I follow and post, also love of the USA.

Thanks for commenting and your writings likely touched more people than you know.

Best!

[OhNo-Really]

19. Thank you 🙏

✨✨For your warm kind response.✨✨

Word Warriors we are! 🥂

[cilla4progress]

3. This is

Truth. Those here who decry socialism be damned!

Does he prescribe a way out?

[appalachiablue]

11. At the end of the 3 min. video above, Reich covers how we

must get money out of politics and lessen corporate control to strengthen democracy. Also make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, and not give up on America. Umair's essay goes in depth on the difficulties and problems but doesn't provide solutions except by example particularly European countries that didn't take our path and have stronger working and middle classes, social systems and institutions.

[ck4829]

21. Good to know

[democrank]

4. There is more sobering truth written in this post than

in any other I’ve read on DU since 2003.

I honestly can’t believe what we’re willing to settle for and how little we expect from our leaders and representatives. Think about what we’ve become. We scream “Socialist!” at anyone who believes health care is a right. We accept that young people who graduate from an institute of higher learning will do so with future-crushing debt. We agree to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a car or truck. We think it’s okay to pay $100-plus per week for child care. We’re cool with a chunk of our politicians being bought and paid for. We accept that hundreds of thousands of us (including children)will sleep on the streets, even in winter.

We’ll come out in droves to buy a Megabucks ticket, but stay home watching the Kardashians while kidnapped children sleep (and die) on cement floors of their cages near the border. We even base a decision on impeachment on whether or not it will hurt us politically.

In my 74 years of existence, I’ve never seen anything like this and I’m troubled by how many of us are willing to make excuses or look the other way. It’s useless to compare ourselves to Republicans then pat ourselves on the back. Let’s compare ourselves to nations that truly care about their people and see how we stack up then. When it comes to social and economic justice, we’re a nation in decline.

I live in rural America where many folks around me have more jobs than shoes and more flags than vacations.So many of them have lost their farms in spite of resilience and hard work. Something needs to change in America. We need structural, fundamental change and the courage to demand it.

[7wo7rees]

5. +1000 times and then more, n/t

[appalachiablue]

12. Well said, when we examine the big picture it's quite distressing.

Think of all we've lost and what has been demolished in the name of 'freedom' and free markets. The demonization and evisceration of the welfare society here in the US is visible everywhere, and it's appalling. 40 plus years in progress.

People as you say working 2-3 jobs to get by in America and barely making it. Low wage McJobs in the gig economy with no benefits or security, with automation and AI barreling ahead.

'American Jobs are Getting Worse, A New Index Shows,' CBS News, Nov. 26, 2019. Excerpts:

- "We discovered that 63% of all jobs that were created since 1990 were low-wage, low-hour jobs."

- "44% of all workers are low-wage workers. These workers make a median pay of just $18,000 a year."

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016243248

[UpInArms]

6. I have been pondering the question of why they hate us so much ...

And how the republicans have lassoed that hate so well ...

More from your link ..

That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this. A social surplus isn’t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He’s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment — nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer — because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to.

A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence — at light speed, in the space of a generation. That’s America and Britain’s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union’s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany’s, before that.

[appalachiablue]

13. These parts are so important but I didn't have room for the full essay.

Weimar and the Soviet Union, significant and scary examples. Thanks for posting.

[appalachiablue]

16. More from the article, OP:

"And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task — what an Emile Durkheim might have called “social reproduction.” They’ve managed to reproduce society in their image. What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly.

We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on “investment bankers.”

The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites — they’re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. We’ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people."

[UpInArms]

18. I have never understood how the Kardashians have become so wealthy

It boggles my mind that there is any value there

[ck4829]

22. It's sad this is what we're turning into

[Freddie]

7. That article is 100% spot-on

They want us to be like 3rd world countries behind their guarded gates while the rest of us fight over scraps. Too busy trying to survive to even think about helping each other. And not realizing WHY we can’t help each other - there’s nothing left after the ultra-greedy take everything.

[appalachiablue]

14. People are not even thought of, but are conveniently out of sight

and mind as in many 3rd world places. Otherwise maybe incarcerated to work and generate some bucks for corporations. The US has the highest prison population in the world with only 5% of the world's population; gun violence here is bewildering. Big change and reform is needed.

[ck4829]

23. Yep

[BeckyDem]

8. Excellent!!! Be warned and be prespared to fight back.

Thank you and hedda too.

[appalachiablue]

17. The challenges are many, Umair really captured hard truths and reality.

It's major

[ck4829]

24. Indeed

[appalachiablue]

9. Noteworthy comments to the very same article posted at DK:

1. I named Reaganism “ the era of greed” . I was shocked to enter my favorite coffee shop and over hear teenage girls bragging about how much their parents houses were worth. When I was a teenage girl we talked about boys, grades, teachers and our sports teams. ( sadly the girls who preferred other girls couldn’t discuss that)

2. Yes, our ways of thinking have changed. When I first attended college, in 1968, I did so without a clear career goal. Most in my clique found themselves in a similar stage of self-discovery. Curious about virtually everything, we wanted education for its own sake.

Today’s youth think differently. They know, often long before they begin college, how they will leverage their degrees in the job market. I know this because I teach at a college, and I’m struck that so many of my students are so practical, so calculating, so mercenary. They eschew the humanities. They reject philosophy, languages, history, writing, literature—subjects that encourage critical thinking, communication, introspection, subjects that shed light on our enduring human struggles, and attempt to explain our place universe. So now we now produce generations of business analysts, accountants, software developers, and assorted technicians for whom the highest good is not contributing in a positive way to society but rather to earn themselves a healthy paycheck.

The constant appeals to selfishness and greed made by Republicans since Reagan have taken root. Our society has become less empathetic, less compassionate, more shrewd, and more greedy since you and I were young.

3. To be fair to a lot of those kids, college is so expensive and their parents could well be in hock up to their eyeballs that the only thing that makes sense is to get a degree that gets you a job.

Trust me, my daughter with her International Studies degree and pretty much only unpaid internships is having a horrible time of it. It's a constant for all of the kids that wanted to do anything other than business, tech, or engineering.

And that’s not the kids fault, that's our fault for building a society that only values money, that has lost the value of the arts of the humanities.

Yes, there are a lot of kids that are mercenary, but then they kind of have to be, don't they?

[tblue37]

10. K&R for visibility. nt

[ck4829]

25. Thanks

[ck4829]

20. K&R

[Prosper]

26. Taxes and laws to influence the velocity of money

and to prohibit gambling and heretofore illegal practices.