The Declinists at Work eit Ie YWae Pgh . & my (OW: <5 : / ie a YN . 2", ~~ £0 March 1979 July 2016 Used with permission of Bloomberg L.P. Source: Financial Times. Martin Wolf/James Ferguson, 2016. “Global elites must heed the warning Copyright© 2016. All rights reserved. of populist rage.” Financial Times / FT.com, 20 July. Used under licence from the Financial Times. All Rights Reserved. Conference Board. Even median household income, Lady Liberty’s face. Since WWII, the waning of US as measured by the US Census Bureau, rose in preeminence has been a topic of recurrent hand- 2015 at the fastest rate on record. wringing. Whether prompted by the flexing of In the corporate sector, total profits of domestic Soviet muscle, most spectacularly with the launch corporations as a percentage of GDP, as measured __ of Sputnik in the 1950s; the civil rights upheavals by the national income and product accounts and growing fallout from the Vietnam War in the (NIPA), are close to all-time highs. At 11.5% of 1960s, the Arab oil embargo and the Watergate GDP, profits not only are well above the historical — scandal of the 1970s, the rise of Japan in the 1980s average of 9.6%, but have been higher than or the rise of China in the 2000s, the declinists current levels only 17% of the time since 1950,as have foretold the ebbing of American preeminence. shown in Exhibit 2. Typical of the genre is a 2009 book provocatively Despite these “glass half-full” facts, the titled When China Rules the World by British announcements of US decline that pervaded the columnist Martin Jacques. airwaves in the depths of the global financial Yet, as we wrote in our 2011 Outlook: Stay crisis have persisted. We continue to be inundated the Course, neither the global financial crisis nor with analysis of “America’s relative decline,”* the rise of China will hinder what we described “America’s slow-growth tailspin” and “sclerotic as “America’s structural resilience, fortitude growth,”> “an economic in-tray