One of the most powerful frames for understanding our difficulties is Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. He argues that infrastructure costs rise faster than productivity and do so until all surplus is eaten up by infrastructure costs. In the US the most important are, health, security, energy, and education. There are other ways to cut it, but you can see that the costs of each of these is increasing faster than overall productivity of the economy.
See more at
http://dieoff.org/page134.htm and Jerad Diamond on Tainter at
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond03/diamond_p2.html
For commentary see http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/faculty/Turchin/Tainter%20resp.htm
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Politics must deliver a result that feels resoanble to most of the population, and a result that allows for governance. The attempt of Bush to purge the CIA means that feedback not consonant with Bush goals gets cut off. This will rapidly produce an incompetent government (not tense is in question). The first criteria seems met in this case, but the second is in play.
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I missed this.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000021.html>
August 15, 2004
WHO ARE THE REAL NEOCONS?
AFTER 9/11, THERE WAS SO MUCH ANGER AND DEMAND FOR REVENGE that raising questions about how and why a group of highly educated, middle class mostly Saudis would be willing to sacrifice their lives and inflict such horrific damage on America was considered to be unpatriotic. The lemming-like, group think of Washington public policy intellectuals following bin Laden's attack was a time of shame for approximately 1500 think tanks in Washington.These policy institutions receive tax exempt status for serving the public good in their role as idea incubators and as the collective conscience of policy debate in the nation's capitol; but our industry mostly failed during this time.
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(WHITE HOUSE) - Secretary of State Colin Powell is quitting the Cabinet -- one of four top officials whose resignations are being announced Monday.
Other top officials who won't serve in President Bush's second term are Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Abraham struggled in an attempt to get Congress to endorse the Bush administration's broad energy agenda and was unable to convince Congress to enact energy legislation. Paige was the first black secretary of education. The departures bring to six the number of Cabinet officials set to leave in what's shaping up as a major second-term shakeup. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans quit soon after the president's re-election.
Pasted from <http://rdu.news14.com/content/headlines/?ArID=58904&;SecID=2>
It will be very interesting to see if we get a tightening of control, and if those who leave talk.
above posted on Monday, November 15, 2004, 9:22:18 AM 
