Will America Fall Like Rome?
Video from The Atlantic
"The Roman Empire seemed all but invincible—until it fell. What would happen if the same fate was in store for America? Atlantic staff writer, James Fallows, explores the possibility in this latest episode of The Idea File." from video introduction
The Decline and Fall of Nations
"Ancient Babylon fell in one night after having been "weighed in the balance and found wanting." Can modern empires fall just as quickly? History and the Bible provide an answer.
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, presents an analysis of how empires can quickly collapse into chaos. Rather than a slow decline over centuries, Ferguson shows that many large nations of the past were gone in a few short years. They were seemingly strong and viable and faded virtually overnight.
Conventional wisdom presents the economic challenges to America's global dominance as long-term threats. Demographics alone will increase the debt to unmanageable proportions.
Citing long-term predictions of China overtaking America in economic size and output by 2027 or 2040, Ferguson asks, "What if history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic—at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?" ("Complexity and Collapse," p. 22).." from the article: The Decline & Fall of Nations
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