The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

Since 1980, the microchip has dramatically driven growth in productivity. But now those productivity growth numbers are declining to near zero.

We come together out of economic and other necessity. We remain bonded out of the pleasure in the fact that we are both human.

When the election of 2028 comes, the technocrats will be shocked at the outcome, and when the new government takes control, they will be stunned at the speed at which the assumptions they have lived by are overthrown.

life expectancy alone is not enough. There has to be a suppression of degenerative diseases that currently turn the older cohort into massive consumers of resources rather than producers. Diseases that kill quickly are economically sustainable. Keeping people alive who can’t produce is economically debilitating.

Colleges don’t simply teach you skills. They socialize students into the culture of the world they will be entering and introduce them to others who are already part of that culture. This is no different from an immigrant going to the Ivies in the 1920s. And that is the point. The declining class is not immigrants. The political consequences of tha

It will be a period in which the technocracy will continue to live well, while the rest of the country stagnates at best and more likely declines.

So too we can expect the vitriol to die down when Trump leaves office and an uneasy calm to exist. Then, following the election of 2028, a new explosion, as the incoming president’s radical policies—from the standpoint of the prior half a century—come under attack. But this vitriol will be simply the surface of the deep structural changes. For the

The second problem is that being a university professor is among the highest-paid part-time work in the world.

For the economy to evolve, then, so must the relationship of Americans to nature. That requires evolution in technology and, in turn, evolution in how Americans learn to create not only new technologies but the businesses that grow from them, the way Americans entertain

The price for honesty is impotence.