Ezra Klein

This article was authored by Ezra Klein and appears on Bloomberg.com.  Article courtesy of Bloomberg.com

“Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned,” said PresidentBarack Obama in his 2012 State of the Union address, “doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

It was a “rah-rah America!” applause line for a president who needed to get the assembled Republicans out of their seats a few times over the course of the evening. But the line works literally, too. Whenever someone tells me that the U.S. is in decline, I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. And neither, I tend to think, do they.

The claim is maddeningly vague. What does it mean for the U.S. to be in decline? Are we talking about our geopolitical influence relative to other world powers? Our standard of living relative to other nations? Our current standard of living compared with some assumption about its appropriate rate of improvement?

Let’s flip the question: What does it mean for the U.S. to be on the rise? If it’s growing at a perfectly respectable 3.5 percent a year while China is growing at 8.5 percent a year, enabling China’s economy to surpass the U.S. in a decade or so, does that mean the U.S. is in decline? [Read more...]