Sublime

fiscal stimulus was out of the question. This ‘asset-price Keynesianism’ offered an alternative way to get the economy growing in the absence of deficit spending and competitive manufacturing.

But they are not static or permanent. They require constant renewal. The express agenda of the New Liberalism is a vast expansion of social services—massive intervention and expenditures in energy, health care and education—that will necessarily, as in Europe, take away from defense spending.

A fundamental way to put the point is this: A lot of our recent innovations are “private goods” rather than “public goods.” Contemporary innovation often takes the form of expanding positions of economic and political privilege, extracting resources from the government by lobbying, seeking the sometimes extreme protections of intellectual property

What the war had achieved, in effect, was the Keynesian solution for depressions in an industrial society: substantial deficit spending.

If Fukuyama’s words were naive in 1992, then in the decade that followed the financial crisis of 2008 they became positively ridiculous. Indeed, he admitted as much in a book he published on identity in 2018.

The reality is that members of the American left have, whether they like it or not, become the new conservatives. At least in economic policy, they are usually the defenders of the status quo. In contrast, some of the so-called “conservatives” are the radicals seeking major change; at a recent public event, I heard two African American intellectual

And the decade from 2020 to 2030 will already be very painful from the crises caused by the intersection of the two major cycles. Add to it that a core technology is running its course and no new core technology has yet replaced it, and that pain increases.