Most of America's rural areas are doomed to decline

Large populations of young people used to be these countries’ greatest strengths. But in the age of AI, that group will be made up of displaced workers unable to find economically productive work. This sea change will transform them from an engine of growth to a liability on the public ledger—and a potentially explosive one if their governments pro

This crisis of real wealth may well be not merely situational, but structural, no evanescent crash, but what economists call a bad equilibrium—a toxic convergence decades in the making. The different forms of bucket emptying—wealth destruction—are long-run trends, not transient phenomena. All have been under way for at least a decade, and most as l

Ours is a finite world marked by constraints. To a large extent, these constraints define the five crises set to radically shape the course of the coming century. Together, these crises – encompassing climate change, resource scarcity, ever-larger surplus populations, ageing and technological unemployment as a result of automation – are set to unde

All affluent countries have seen a relative decline in manufacturing, but in the United States these losses have gone farther than in Europe or Japan. The sector employed about 30% of the labor force during World War II, but by 2005 the share was less than 12%, compared to 18% in Japan and 22% in Germany

as started to happen in U.S. manufacturing industries, such as steel, autos, machine tools, and consumer electronics in the 1960s and the 1970s—the result is vulnerability to foreign competitors with higher standards and stronger investment policies. In each of these industries, loss of market share to foreign competitors was blamed on external fac