American Collapse is a Disease. And You Might be Next.

The Four Horsemen and the Pale Rider

If you’re not American, you’re probably watching the spectacle of American collapse with a strange mixture of dumbfounded hilarity and reluctant pity. Like any big bully, America has allies and tributaries, but it doesn’t really have friends.

Not so fast. American collapse isn’t like a natural disaster. It’s more like a disease. It’s spreading. You’re not immune. That doesn’t mean your country is going to collapse as spectacularly as America, but it does mean that it’s likely in for a rough ride. The global political economy, aka the way that we run the world, is deeply and profoundly broken — and that includes you, me, all of us, whether we like it or not. And the only way to really fix it is one that unfortunately people just don’t like, want, or even often really understand.

Let’s begin with today’s big global problems. There are five major problems in the world today — an incomplete list, and you can add or delete problems as you see fit, what’s behind the problems is the point (we’ll get to that). Climate change. Inequality. Mass extinction. Populism. That’s only four — and I’ll call these the four horsemen.

All of these are driven by the fifth, the pale rider of the horses if you like, which is the cause: a stagnant global economy. That means: the world isn’t producing enough real gains to go around. If you are a pundit, you might say: gains are being hoarded at the top. But that’s a profound misunderstanding of what political economy is. What’s being hoarded at the top is money. And what isn’t present at the middle and bottom enough is what money creates: real human well being, genuinely good lives.

All the former four problems, the four horsemen, have one striking thing in common: they are all problems of underinvestment and overconsumption. The world is simply consuming too much — and that is why the animals and the fish and the trees are dying off. And what is consuming is often simply inflated: the cost of healthcare in America, for example, is totally detached from reality — it’s just fictional prices set by beancounters. But that means that much less money is being saved, and therefore invested. The flipside of too much consumption is always investing too little: as a simple example, in the environment, or healthcare, education, transport, media, and so on.

Now let’s link the four horsemen to the rider. The world is underinvesting and overconsuming because too much money is going to the top. That means that the only way out is for nations to invest more in genuinely good lives for people. The super wealthy are going to buy more palaces. But those palaces aren’t going to fix any of the problems above, are they? So: investment. In what? In…everything. Pick an area. Invest. At this point, in this beleaguered world, it doesn’t really matter. Schools, hospitals, media, trees, etc.

But investing more is precisely the great divide in politics today, isn’t it? If I ask you, should your government invest more, what’s your instinctive reaction. Probably “no!”. But why not? You are reacting impulsively and ignorantly (sorry, but it’s true), without having thought much through. Trump and Brexit and Le Pen and so on — all these nationalist movements want to return “money to the people”, by cutting taxes and so on. Unfortunately, we cannot fix the first four problems that way. Only by investing in people, the environment, society, and the future. Can we plant more trees by cutting down trees? In the same way, we can’t fix inequality without investment in people, mass extinction without investment in the planet, and so on.

So nations are hitting a paradox. They need to invest. They need to replace consumption with investment. They need to do it fast, heavily, and seriously. And yet people themselves do not want to invest. I don’t blame them. Their incomes are shrinking in real terms — not just in America, but across the rich world. But that is the paradox: if each of us saves then all of us suffer. If all of us invest, then each of us lives better. If we collectively we invest against climate change, inequality, mass extinction, populism, then there is a real hope of fixing these problems. If we simply hope that they are the next person’s problem, then they won’t be solved at all. They will just get worse.

In that sense, America is the canary in the coal mine. Where did America really go wrong? Trump is just an effect, a symptom. Of what? Of the four horsemen: decades of underinvestment, that created severe, crippling versions of all the larger global problems above. That era of underinvestment began in earnest with Ronald Reagan the Hollywood hero. And today the results is parts of America don’t even have safe drinking water, life expectancy is falling, ignorance and bigotry are so widespread they are normalized, and society has lost faith in the future. The horsemen are laughing while the average American suffers — and punishes his fellow American for that suffering.

If that vicious cycle of collapse is what you want for your country, then by all means, follow America’s lead. Don’t invest in wise and beneficial things. Consume too much of the wrong things, for no good reason. Punish the next person for your own foolishness, by starving your neighbours and fellow citizens of rights, income, opportunity, and safety. And then lie down. Because probably sooner rather than later, the four horsemen will come to claim you. America is just their first victim. The real question today is: who will be next?

Umair
July 2017