There are no guarantees in how the long cycle plays out. It is a long term process that has been playing through what was originally the Euro-Atlantic region since shortly after the Americas began to be incorporated into the region, and once ... with Britain ... the dominant economy of one cycle succeeded itself, rather than giving way to another economy.

However, we are definitely nearing the end of the line for the technological regime that this cycle has been based upon, so that if China does not pass the US in size sometime in the next ten years, as expected, the US cannot rest secure that it remains the hegemon by default.

When a technological regime has played its course, there is no default ... everyone is forced to try to cope with the change in circumstances,  and some society will find that its economy has coped better than the rest.


So, here I am in Ravenna. Where exactly was the Rubicon, again?

"Capitalism hasn't failed, comrades! It's never been tried!".

This is a fashionable theory, but I'm not convinced yet that this can actually happen - because of resource constraints, because of deeper tensions and problems inside within these countries and, most of all, because in many cases their elites are as much trying to ape and join the global elite as they are trying to steer their countries towards prosperity or greater power.

Yes, that's the point isn't it. The rise of the third world isn't about creating an alternative economic organisation in competition with "Anglo-disease", it's just another limb succumbing to the body's wasting disease.

keep to the Fen Causeway

This is a fashionable theory, but I'm not convinced yet that this can actually happen - because of resource constraints, because of deeper tensions and problems inside within these countries and, most of all, because in many cases their elites are as much trying to ape and join the global elite as they are trying to steer their countries towards prosperity or greater power.

You words ought to be pasted up in front of every columnist and editor across the Western world, indeed, should be tatooed into their foreheads.

China and India are still predominantly Third-World countries. True, they are unusual in that they are very large and therefore offer large pools of cheap labour, and can sustain large 'wealthy' domestic populations.

But if inequality can screw up and derail the US, it can certainly prevent China or India from climbing to the top of the pile. Without imaginative leadership that envisages some alternative to simply slotting into the current world system on a subordinate basis, the fates of these nations are sealed.

But other than that... the fact that china and India will rise is independent of this crisis... actually, the only impediemnt to their growth in influence is the limit of resources... adn the local environment...w hile the rise of russia is precisely thanks to its resources.

the fianantial crisis (elite-oligarchy work) and the iraq war (geopolitical game of the neocons) has produced a faster shift of power 8who cares about the US in Asia any longer?)...a couple of decades earlier... like.. just right now...

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude