The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490-1990 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Implications and Conclusions

Clearly, every case of systemic leadership decline need not represent the interaction of identical processes. Evidently private consumption plays a significant role in the American case but not in the earlier British case. This observation needs to be counterbalanced by the uniform absence of any support for public consumption—either military or civilian—acting as an antecedent of investment, productivity, or growth in either case. Moreover, in the American case the economic performance variables more often precede the consumption variables than the other way around. Our findings are therefore only partially mixed.

We certainly cannot reject the idea that some forms of consumption deserve further consideration in the etiology of leadership decline. Yet it would also appear to be the case that neither public nor private propensities for consumption are either necessary or sufficient factors in the relative decline of modern lead economies. Support is also quite evident for the proposition that relative decline influences the ability to consume. Such a conclusion is hardly startling. But if we had to choose between viewing consumption as a primary or a secondary factor in bringing about leadership decline, the evidence in our two cases is tilted considerably in favor of the secondary emphasis.

Of course, we are not forced to make a final choice between the two interpretations at this time. There are, after all, potential threats to the validity of our findings that suggest analytical caution. On the technical side, there is the potential problem of spurious relationships. A more ambitious modeling effort with many more variables might reveal different findings. Much more subtle, indirect relationships between public consumption and investment might be uncovered.

In our research design, we have what might be termed a historical problem. Confined as we are to the two most recent cases (encompassing, however, the last century and a half), we encounter some awkwardness in the fact that only one of the subjects has completely lost its once preeminent position. We cannot dismiss the possibility that American relative decline has simply not progressed far enough to make it a good case for analysis. We may be jumping the analytical gun to compare the late twentieth-century United States with nineteenth-century Britain.

This possibility must remain open. Yet we should not exaggerate its potential threat to the validity of our findings. The evidence for the erosion of the relative economic foundation of American preeminence is plentiful. While the passage of more time and the availability of longer data series may produce different findings, it is difficult to ignore the temptation to try improving our understanding of what is presumably an ongoing process. For example, the optimistic, mainstream position is that faltering U.S. economic performance remains a temporary problem that can be fixed by reducing something, such as imports, interest rates, entitlements, taxation, the value of the dollar, the size of the national debt, military spending, and the size of the budget deficit. We have not examined all of these variables. Yet the cases for some of these quick-fix candidates, especially those pertaining to public spending, have not been strengthened by our present analysis.

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