[p2p-research] What's different about this economic downturn? -- the severe unemployment

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 7:06 AM, Ryan Lanham<rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for big nations, the world's hopes still rise and fall with the US, I'm
> afraid.  Perhaps that is one reason I am so pessimistic about the future.
> The US has suffered a long stretch of ugly politics and a very difficult
> battle in its move toward becoming a legitimate social democracy.  I'm not
> sure it will ever find its way wholly there.  The bad sort of libertarianism
> runs deep there now, and will for a long time.  My own guess is that the US
> begins to fragment...a number of Federalists wanted to break off New England
> in the early 1800s when they anticipated this...those groups will again
> rise...even with the Civil War in hindsight.


The US has several different major cultural regions that reflect
history and ethnic migration patterns. As Federal power grew during
the 20th century, you started to see the odd consequences of these
various groups wresting control of Federal policy from each other. To
an outsider, it probably looks schizophrenic. Some of these regions
are in ascendency, such as the South, other regions are in steep
decline, such as the upper Midwest (which probably has the closest
thing to a Euro-style socialist culture in the US except that it is
almost as religious as the deep South).  Political power is moving
west and south, and most of the political novelty will come from the
inclusion of western US cultures in policy; policy has traditionally
been decided east of the Rocky Mountains.

The most novel change is the rapid ascendency of the Mountain West
culture, which is demographically the youngest, least religious, and
second most urbanized region of the US. While being famously very
socially libertarian, it is also distrustful of centralized authority
for historical reasons. This is not something you can say about
regional cultures in the eastern US, so it will make things
interesting.

Rather than true fragmentation, you may instead see the return to a
more decentralized model, particularly with the increasing political
power of the western US since they have that bias. The Federal policy
during the 20th century of bludgeoning or bribing to enforce policies
across such a diverse set of regions and cultures seems increasingly
untenable.


-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com