The Storm Before the Calm: America's discord, the coming crisis of the 2020s, and the triumph beyond

of the federal government will be questioned.

new president who does not create the new cycle but rather permits it to take place.

other words, she won the heartland of the technocracy and lost the heartland of the country—the

The problem with the federal government is not financial. It is institutional.

Diffusion is the distribution of authority among several departments or agencies. At a lower level, it is the diffusion and fragmentation of knowledge among individual experts. Knowledge of what is happening is diffused rather than integrated.

For most of the 2020s, the driving economic force will be low growth in productivity, decreased opportunities for investment of accumulated capital, and low interest rates. It will also be a period of increasing unemployment, driven by continued decline in industry and stagnation in high tech as the result of the maturation of the core technology.

Therefore, as in all social fears, there will be an increasing belief in the coming decade that the federal government is in the hands of conspirators. Such a conspiracy was unthinkable in the two prior institutional cycles, because federal power was simply not that vast. But in the 2020s the image of the federal government will make deliberate col

undertaking frequently lacking a center from which it can be understood.

There were federal agencies responsible for managing the economy. The entire range of the subprime mortgages had federal involvement, but the federal agencies did not work with each other. Had they done so, the problem would have become apparent. But experts in buying mortgages from banks at Fannie Mae, experts in white-collar crime at the FBI, exp