Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies.

The policy was adopted by the Israeli pro-settler right wing and Jewish activists in and around the Clinton and Bush administrations such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser (who all helped produce the original document). They identified as targets Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and were handed a golden opportunity after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. Iraq was falsely presented as an Al Qaeda base and the media planted with stories about an imminent attack on the United States using WMD. Despite the CIA knowing all along that the WMD didn't exist, the US still invaded Iraq and the story was quietly and unbelievably changed to "building democracy".

As Sniegoski points out, the war has exceeded the cost of Vietnam and the same activists, now working through Hillary Clinton are looking for "incidents" in Iraq to trigger the next phase of the plan which is a US attack on Iran.

The author is worth paying attention to since he was right about the internet and housing bubbles and predicted the collapse of both of them.

Now,(published 2012) he sees a bond bubble with the same root in FED enabled artificially low interest rates, and he spends some time on the sleazy alliance between fiscally irresponsible politicians and a currency debasing central bank.

He takes the entirely believable line that large deficits can't be funded for ever by dollar printing, and that politicians will never allow the massive tax rises and/or massive spending cuts necessary to reach budget stability, so the only route left is inflation with a consequent crash in the value of the dollar and government bonds.

I see some problems here with the evidence, and issues that could have been in the book but weren't.

The evidence (as of April 2013) is that FED liquidity isn't producing inflation. On the contrary, the banks are channeling liquidity into speculative market bubbles rather than real investments that would counteract societal deleveraging. Why should they do anything else? All sectors need to reduced debt and don't want to take on any more. The result is general deflation apart from the "bubble asset du jour" class with the evidence including falling commodity prices - particularly precious metals (which are on his list of recommended investments).

He wants to return government to the basic functions given in the Constitution and he is surely right that government has got involved in many areas where it should never have gone. Nevertheless, modern societies need a sophisticated "nerve centre" that is fairly large and expensive and the successful ones all have large and active governments. Because it is corrupt and inefficient doesn't mean that it isn't necessary.

The author speaks as if the United States is a homogeneous country like Germany, Holland, China or Japan, when in fact the government clearly states that it is multicultural. The evidence unfortunately shows that it is fast pulling apart (see The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart). Societies like this don't seem to react well to severe economic stress. If they can't pull together they fly apart like the once great multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Schiff recommends that people without capital store food and basic goods as a protection against 1) inflation and 2) societal disruption. The inflation may eventually come if a desperate government hands out wads of dollars to government workers, but the situation would probably be so chaotic that his recommendation would not work. A real possibility of dictatorship combined with some kind of civil war may well produce regimes like the Bolsheviks or Nazis who both outlawed food hoarding with a death penalty. In the winter of 1932/33 the Bolsheviks actually declared that all the food in the Ukraine was government property, and removed it, resulting in at least 3 million deaths from starvation (see Holodomor Kaganovitch in Google). A better recommendation if things go this way would be to leave the US temporarily or emigrate to a more functional country.

There's also the problem of how you get from here to there. If America is to return to a simple Constitutional style alliance of States with a minimal central government (which may work) and it can resolve its corruption and cultural issues, how under a Democracy will people (particularly minorities and the poor) be persuaded to vote to give up social medicine, schools, welfare benefits etc. etc? I may be wrong, but it seems very unlikely.

In this interesting book Bill Bishop describes the polarization of American politics from 1965 onwards. He is fairly obviously a Democrat but goes out of his way to speak to new millennium Republicans and appreciate their world view.

He describes the "Big Sort" very convincingly, particularly the way that Republicans and Democrats drift towards their respective majority states, or at least the majority Republican or Democratic areas within each state, and the way that this seems to happen almost unconsciously by what "feels right and comfortable" about the surroundings.

One way or another Americans seem to gravitate towards two very different lifestyles; A) the city / anonymous / environmental / minority-rights / European / intellectual/ state-interventionist, or B) the country / community / traditional / religious / Constitutional / nationalist / self-reliant with Democratic and Republican loyalists dividing neatly along these lines.

He shows the result as a separation and hardening of positions generating the familiar American Gridlock politics of the new millennium, and as he says, "Democracy has become so balky that the normal processes of representative government are being replaced by systems of issue brokering that are only quasi-representative"......" public policy is often negotiated among interest groups". This would have been a great lead in to look at where the power went and who these interest groups are but he doesn't follow it.

Maybe they're not particularly Democratic or Republican and they just want the money and the influence, but the author doesn't really go into this interesting question.

The author seems to be more concerned with establishing the reality of the "Big Sort" rather than evaluating it in a historical context. He refers to the early 1970's research of Robert Inglehart at the University of Michigan, suggesting that a young generation growing up in abundance will esteem self expression more than economic growth as they seek "higher values", but he doesn't refer to the more recent and much richer version of this idea available in for example William Strauss and Neil Howes' The Fourth Turning: an American Prophecy.

The book doesn't consider that the opposing factors of the "Sort" seem to coexist quite happily in some countries. Japan can be very respectful of tradition and community while developing leading high technologies with the same going for Germany and northern Europe in general.

The author doesn't look at the fairly obvious divide between Original Americans (OAs) and Newcomers (N's). OA's were in American prior to 1900, they mostly originated from European countries and now regard themselves as Americans first and have strong links to the Constitution and American history and also provided most of the troops and leadership in the two world wars. N's arrived after 1900 and are now mostly non-European hyphenated Americans with weak links to American traditions and a preference for identity politics, non-integration and minority rights and they predictably find their natural home in the Democratic party.

Equally, Bishop doesn't consider the 1965+ rise to power of the Jews as a prime example of an American special interest insider group. He does talk about the rise of advocacy groups that aren't broad based or democratically controlled but he could have shown Jewish tribal self-selection producing for example the present (2013) strange situation where the eight leading candidates for the post of Federal Reserve chairman are all Jewish or married to Jews (apart from Geithner who was mentored by Rubin and Summers), or Jewish students being selected to occupy 30% of Ivy League university places. This is a major shift of power to a non-European, non Christian newcomer minority group (3% of the population) which is also firmly on the Democratic left.

The author could also have usefully looked at the way in which the growing demands of the Democratic left generate a more extreme reaction from the traditionalist Republican right. For example he could have shown how the gay rights idea has progressed from 1965 onwards through illegality > ignoring > acceptance > protection > coming out > legal rights > marriage equality and adoption > to school teaching which is fine in a minority rights environment but is seen as provocative when legally applied to traditional Americans.

In general I think that the "Big Sort" was a missed opportunity but it certainly provides indisputable evidence for the post 1965 polarization of the Republican and Democratic parties.

The author shows the United States to be a captive of its Golden Age, and what an age it was. 1950's America was the world's military and industrial leader, the dollar was the de facto world currency, Detroit was generating a new middle class and America's European and Asian competitors were recovering from wartime destruction with no immediate possibility of challenging American supremacy.

Unger considers that this overwhelmingly powerful narrative has governed American policy ever since with only a few moments of self doubt (e.g. the Oil Price Shock of the 1970's and the Vietnam War), and he suggests that it accounts for the increasing separation from reality of the American government and the public from the 1970's onwards.

The unwelcome reality is that free trade benefits the lowest cost and highest quality industrial manufacturers and the US loses out on both counts to China and Japan/Germany respectively, plus combine this with an extreme free market ideology that unequivocally puts outsourcing corporate profits ahead of any national interest and you have a magical increase in unemployment and budget/trade deficits.

Add in extreme Congressional special interest pork barreling and the US simply looks wasteful, inefficient and broke.

The author's emphasis is on the military-industrial complex that has done so much wasteful spending and which is so central to the "America First" narrative. The book documents the marginal threats faced by the U.S. following the fall of Soviet Communism and the way that these have been ridiculously inflated into a permanent "War on Terror" that somehow needs more nuclear aircraft carriers or stealth bombers at the unbelievable price of $ 3.2 billion each.

The author considers that the United States had a chance to change direction under the Carter administration, with Carter speaking frankly about the challenges facing the U.S. and the need for a forward looking policy and national sacrifice. However, this was predictably seen as weak and wimpy and buried by the Reagan's "Bring back the 1950's" Stand Tall rhetoric with the party moving on to giant deficit financing with minimal government oversight.

It's a very good book but in my opinion it has some major faults.

One is that a government can't engage in large scale deficit financing if no one will lend it the money, Unger says that, "..... thanks to the dollar's special reserve role as an international reserve currency and America's sterling reputation for political and financial stability, foreign savings and surpluses kept flowing inwards to pay the bills for America's government and private consumption." when the real reason is probably that Americas's Asian creditors recycled their dollars into American assets (bonds) to keep their currencies at an artificially low rate against the dollar in support of their export industries (i.e. they were cheating) and had no particular respect for the US financial system.

A second is the single favourable paragraph he gives to U.S. multiculturalism despite the obvious harm to society of identity politics and "Culture Wars" . He doesn't seem to see any problem in the every man/ company/ethnic group for itself idea and the destruction of the "General Interest" concept. He could for example have asked whether Rubin, Summers and Greenspan (while simultaneously Secretary of the Treasury, Deputy Secretary and Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Clinton) had a greater loyalty on ethnic, financial and social grounds to Wall St. investment bankers than the American public that they were hired to represent (and so obviously failed to protect).

Equally, the book would have been improved if he had clearly said that Jewish activists in and around the government provided critical support for the WMD, and Al Qaeda bases in Iraq stories and made a major efforts to enable the invasion and sideline Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. This was pure ethnic special interest action designed to benefit the Israeli right wing and had nothing to do with any "Building Democracy" argument or the interests of the United States ( see The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel for a detailed account.)

In this exceptional book the authors take a life-cycle view of human affairs that is analogous to the four seasons. A complete cycle repeats and runs through four quarters ; Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter with each season serving a purpose.

Since working together in the mid 1980's they became convinced by evidence that human societies follow a cyclical generational pattern rather than one of unbroken linear growth. The evidence is that societies grow, reach a maturity, stagnate and decline, with their particular angle being that generations can be counted from a time of major crisis with four generations (human life cycles) needed to complete the full cycle.

They show that "Ever Upwards", "Always More", "Always Better" are useful political slogans that really don't apply to human affairs other than in a narrow technological sense. Societal awareness of its success/performance/happiness is not an arrow shooting ever upwards but rather an arrow that is shot upwards only to fall to earth and (usually) be fired again to follow a similar but different arc.

In American terms they see the present cycle as starting with a post WWII "American High" (1946-1964)(Spring), followed by a "Consciousness Revolution" (1964-1984)(Summer) and "Culture Wars" (1984-2005?)(Autumn) with a Winter on the way that should cover the approximate period of 2005- 2025. As in nature, each season has its possibilities and they identify Crisis (Winter) as a time for societal survival, demanding a genuine gathering together in unselfish common action.

Each generation interestingly defines itself in opposition to its childhood parents with "Boomer" children looking for societal order and stability rather than the splintering revolution that was forced onto them. Equally, they show each seasonality as having a dominant ethos that is almost impossible to resist, with the best example probably being the final capitulation of Conservatives under Reagan to the "me first" individualism and personal freedom of a late stage Third Turning.

As they say, "Ideals become Ideologies" and an institutionalized revolution turns into a special interests power grab under the cover of a revolutionary smoke screen, i.e. Woodstock progresses to Animal Farm with some revolutionaries being more equal than others.

Paul Streitz has written a very valuable book of under 200 pages that explains how America's first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton planned an economic system that would provide opportunities for all Americans and encourage American national development. He explicitly wanted to avoid the formation of a disconnected elite of the British colonial or southern slave owning type.

Move on to the new millennium, and the author shows beyond doubt that America is now the unfortunate host to a new elite who enjoy wealth and power beyond the imagination of British colonials or Southern planters.

They are loosely described as "special interests" (i.e. not the interests of the 95% of other Americans) and have erected a series of complex barriers to protect their power and wealth. These include direct political contributions (money for laws), political revolving door directorships, neo-conservative think tanks and university departments and the media repeating neo-liberal free trade dogma and engaging in ferocious culture war attacks on any form of patriotism while promoting all forms of identity politics.

Streitz interestingly doesn't take political sides, he doesn't believe in big government tax and welfare or trade unions, seeming to agree with what Ayn Rand actually said about the dangers of Communism/Socialism, while at the same time he emphasises the need for GOOD government but not NO government, of the kind more or less advocated by Milton Friedman and supported by Reagan inspired free market activists. He sees the climax of this thinking under the Clinton administration with the repeal of Glass-Steagall (giving Wall St access to main street bank deposits) and the passing of NAFTA (an invitation to move whole sectors of industry to Mexico).

The author provides a very complete look at the "Comparative Advantage" argument for Free Trade and shows beyond doubt that 1) the offshoring of whole industries is harmful to the U.S., 2) off shored industrial jobs are not replaced by higher paying service jobs 3) anything that can be done by a computer can also be off shored i.e. high skilled service jobs 4) offshoring generates unemployment, trade deficits and budget deficits that become debt which is just dumped onto the 95% of onshore U.S. taxpayers.

Combine all this with mobile capital and technology and the quote of Gilbert Williamson, president of NCR could sum up the views of many corporate leaders, "I was asked the other day about U.S. competitiveness, and I replied that I don't think about it at all. We at NCR think of ourselves as a globally competitive company that happens to be headquartered in the United States".

Or Brian Valentine, a senior vice-president at Microsoft, nş2 in the Windows development unit, urging managers to, "pick something to move offshore today." In India you can get, "quality work at 50% to 60% of the cost. That's two heads for the price of one."

All Americans absolutely need to buy and read this book.

In this excellent book, the author shows the quasi-religious nature of neo-liberal economics with its dogmatic refusal to consider obvious reasons for the U.S.A.'s economic problems.

Towards the end of the book he makes a list of "Off The Table" issues which include for example, - serious regulation of Wall St., - abandoning the role of world policeman, - a single payer health care system like Canada's, - industry and trade policies, - strengthening the bargaining position of workers, - with the key unacceptable heretical words being "Protectionism" and "Nationalism".

Never mind that America's main industrial competitors Germany, China and Japan have overt national interest policies with regard to protecting and developing key industries and guarding their own intellectual property. These countries don't automatically look to outsource production and none of them allow key industries to entirely disappear overseas.

The author doesn't dispute the greater marginally efficiency from a global point of view of manufacturing in China but he also shows that the much more important (for the U.S.) income distribution aspects are "Off The Table". The reality of the situation is that CEO's like Jack Welch have for years been applying his 70/70/70 rule (70% of research and development should be outsourced, 70% of that should be outsourced offshore, 70% should be outsourced overseas and sent to India) and forty years of determined outsourcing = an impressive trade deficit + loss of entire industries = US unemployment + loss of skilled work = dangerous structural budget deficits.

And the story doesn't stop there. Faux refers to a study undertaken in 2006 by a Princeton economist and former Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Blinder, which concluded that approximately 42 million US jobs were potentially off-shoreable, and his focus was not on manufacturing jobs but on the high-tech service occupations that were supposed to compensate for the loss of manufacturing jobs. As Blinder said, "Perhaps contrary to what we have come to believe in recent years, people skills will become more valuable than computer skills. The geeks may not inherit the earth after all.", so he seems to be talking about the $14 an hour waitress, pizza delivery and shop assistant jobs.

The author interestingly goes on to show that economically successful countries carry out national political/economic policies. They emphasize the efficiency of government and 1) build infrastructure 2) educated their people to a high standard 3) set national priorities and employ benchmarking to see how their country compares internationally in key areas.

The U,S, does none of this and is obviously failing in infrastructure, education, health costs and actively rejects the idea of benchmarking so the author suggests that it is heading down in world economic rankings rather than up.

The book sees the core of the problem in the capture of Washington by special interests with their big money flooding into campaign contributions, lobbies, think tanks and even academia to buy policies that are highly profitable for them but disastrous for most of the rest of America that is outside the gilded circle, so much so that the role of government now seems to be restricted to clearing up the regular speculative messes and engaging in futile arguments about hopelessly large deficits.

Other interesting issues that the book doesn't cover are technological unemployment(a good book here is The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future: 1) and the dangerous complexity of US government in for example the tax code ( a good general book on this is Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change ) but nevertheless this is one of the best books I've read about the U.S. political gridlock.

In 1923 the price of a cabbage which had not so long ago sold for 25 pfennigs, arrived at 50.000.000 marks.

The author takes a broad social approach in looking at the German hyperinflation of the early 1920's giving a deeper understanding of the phenomenon than the traditionally narrow economics "science" viewpoint.

He reaches into contemporary culture where I followed him watching Fritz Lang's 1922 film Dr Mabuse - The Gambler [1922] [DVD]and looking at Simplicissimus magazine covers from 1918 to 1924 (available on simplicissimus.com) illustrating the "Hellish Carnival" of the early interwar Weimar Republic. He describes a chaotic witches cauldron of gambling, hoarding, gluttony, hunger, riots, psychosis, jazz, prostitution and drugs overwhelming the German middle class.

Contemporary Germans viewed it as the end of civilization as everything that represented tradition, stability and trust was destroyed. Oswald Spengler's book The Decline of the West (Oxford Paperbacks) was seen as applying to them, as middle class doctors, lawyers, government officials etc. were reduced to selling their valuables on street stalls to avoid starvation while a commercial class able to obtain loans, foreign currency and commodities became rich overnight.

Widdig interestingly shows a certain ambivalence in the situation. It was undoubtedly a catastrophe, but at the same time the government could pay back foreign war debts in worthless currency and find employment (inflation = full employment) for the millions of soldiers returning from WW1. The hyperinflation also served to remove the ossified 19th century class system and approach with (excessive) fluidity the new modernity of for example, mass commercialization, automobiles, radio, films and new egalitarian ideas.

The equation seemed to imply that hyperinflationary chaos destroyed but also allowed a societal rebirth and a renewed adaptability. It went too far but there is a long shot similarity to the central idea in Andy Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive: The Threat and Promise of Strategic Inflection Pointsin that organizations need to combine the contradictory features of a solid structure with adaptive flexibility. Equally Jane Jacob's book, Systems of Survival (Vintage): A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics follows the same idea in stating the need for a Guardian class working together with Commercials for a successful society.

A doubtful aspect of the book is Widdig's equating the depreciation of the currency with the later National Socialist depreciation of the Jews. A simpler explanation would be that hyperinflation allowed the Jews to augment their already dominant position in finance and commerce and therefore be seen as the hyperinflationary winners in contrast the German middle class losers. The sub title of Mein Kampf was "Eine Abrechnung" i.e. it was revenge.

I can highly recommend Widdig's broad societal approach to an "economic" issue.

In this interesting book Barlett and Steele convincingly show how outsourcing over the last 40 years has removed great swathes of US industry and employment while enriching the top management of politically connected corporations. They gain spectacular profits and incomes while the social costs of unemployment are dumped on the American government along with the consequent trade and budget deficits.

They also contrast the attitude to trade and industry of American governments since the 1980's with those of the US's main industrial competitors, Germany, China and Japan, saying that these countries all run a trade surplus and pay a lot of attention to nurturing national technological skills, high level training, protecting or developing key technologies and when necessary blocking unrestricted access to their markets.

What the authors don't do is ask some fundamental questions about why US corporations can get away with it.

They give some superficial answers based on lobbying and money politics while the real reason (that they don't consider) may be that a multicultural US governments function in a completely different way from those of Germany, China and Japan. Germany is German and has a clear German national narrative and history with the same applying to Chinese and Japanese.

When the Germans, Chinese and Japanese governments make policy there is no question that they are considering the wellbeing of all their citizens who are in it together with the same experiences, customs and traditions (i.e, they are in a sense a family).

The authors could have asked some deeper questions about US multiculturalism, especially as the British prime minister and German chancellor recently admitted that it had failed in England and Germany. It seems clear that multiculturalism emphasizes minority interests and identities over a national identity and is a sort of return to the tribalism of the Middle Eastern or African sort where groups try to grab power and put their family and tribal members in key positions to loot their country (e.g. Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak etc.)

If one accepts that the US is multicultural, then Bartlett and Steele could have asked, "Who are the tribes?".

The answer would be Europeans 64%, Latinos 16%, Blacks 12%, Asians 5% and Jews 3%, and the next question could have been "Who has the power?"

A useful proxy here could be Ivy League university admissions giving the answer that Asians presently have 20% of the enrollment and Jews 25%.

Of these, the Jews are far more politically active, so in the "culture wars" it would seem that they are the winners with the main targeted losers being European Americans (the Dead White Males) + their Constitution + their religion.

The evidence seems to support this view as recent US governments make highly skewed "Tribal" type decisions. For example they launched the Iraq war on false information and paid for it on credit (see The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel) which certainly harmed an already weak economy and in the recent 2008 credit crisis Wall Street was bailed out at the expense of the taxpayer with a key player like Goldman Sachs receiving full dollar in exchange for mortgage backed securities that may not have been worth even 20c.

The interests of the United States in the latter case were represented by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (ex Goldman Sachs CEO) and it was his Jewish colleagues Robert Rubin (while Treasury Secretary), Larry Summers (while Deputy Treasury Secretary) and Alan Greenspan (while Chairman of the FED) who enabled the junk-mortgage boom with the removal of the enormously important Glass-Steagall Act that had separated investment banking from high street banking since the 1930's. This created"To Big to Fail" and they also changed the rules to allow 30:1 leverage - but did they care if they took the gains and the US taxpayer carried the risk?

The authors needed to consider how multicultural tribalism works in the US and the toxic way that it continues to interact with an out of control free market ideology.

In this excellent book, Dani Rodrik, professor of International Political Economy at Harvard, argues that the "World Isn't Flat", and that it is in fact rather lumpy, and he goes on to show that this is its natural state, rather the bland homogenized version favoured in neo-liberalist arguments.

He further links the "lumpiness" to the essential characteristics of individual nations derived from their history, their stage of economic development, their sociological background etc.

A key point of the book is that this "lumpiness" is in no way bad, it is only the unique starting point of each county as it moves towards the future and chooses policies that best suit its individual needs. He uses the well known Hedgehog and Fox metaphor, advocating the flexibility of the Fox rather than the single one size fits all action of the Hedgehog (unquestioning liberal free market in all things), showing that the remarkable development of Asia has been the result of a "Fox" strategy in which governments have used the global market to gain technology, skills and happily used trade subsidies and protection to aid developing industries. This would apply to Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China with Rodik clearly making the point that the unprecedented escape from poverty of these countries was necessarily based on an "a la carte" approach to globalization and the liberal free market.

If Asian governments had adopted in their development stage the complete liberal free market package with its intellectual property rules, floating exchange rates, lack of tariff barriers and blocking of technology transfer they could have expected to remain offshore sources of cheap labour, which may after all have been the intent of the original globalization project.

Rodik presents each country as having unique development requirements but this is not to say that the world has not been "Flatish" during certain unusual historical periods. Occasionaly sufficient outside force has been available to flatten the landscape and in this regard he gives the examples of the 19th century British Empire and the post WW2 United States. In both cases they were strong enough to provide a world currency, an international legal framework and dominate world trade and industrial production (and not coincidentally they both supported free trade open markets for their manufactures).

Interestingly they also both ran into similar problems as they lost manufacturing competitiveness and encountered severe debt-financing difficulties with imperial overreach and heavy social security commitments.

However, rather than abandoning the reserve role for their currency and accepting deflationary adjustment as the British did, Rodik shows that from 1980+ the United States elected to keep the party going with large scale deficit financing and a hard line neo-liberal philosophy encouraging extreme outsourcing, even at the cost of removing whole sectors of US manufacturing industry. Essentially the author sees this as a political sell out to special interests putting their profits ahead of national social needs like employment and skill development. He usefully shows that the ignored distributional aspects of outsourcing greatly outweigh the minimal overall "gains from trade" and also illustrates the critical importance of modern industries and their local supply chains for an advanced economy.

The book doesn't go a great length into the current situation but the author shows that delaying the inevitable doesn't mean that it's not coming. Whereas the British engaged in a long deflation, the US chose to build up enormous deficits funded by Chinese and Japanese purchases of treasuries (to keep their currencies competitive) and continues to spend on a lavish scale money that it doesn't have.

The author doesn't say it, but in reality, no imaginable tax increases or spending cuts can fix the American problem so he might have added a last chapter explaining how U.S. society would deal with large scale inflation (devaluation of the dollar) and the implications of U.S. inflation for globalization and trade in general.

An unusual and highly recommended book.