America in Crisis

America is in trouble. Today’s young people seem destined to become the nation’s first generation poorer than their parents. A changing climate, dangerously overvalued financial markets and political instability (recent polling shows many Americans believe civil war is imminent) simultaneously threaten America. What has happened to us? What can we do about it?

America in Crisis employs the new disciplines of cliodynamics and cultural evolution to explain how and why we have come to this place. Cliodynamics teaches that crises like this have happened before and stem from consequences of rising inequality. Cultural evolution provides the processes through which inequality and society in general change with time. The book tells the story of how and why America evolved from the previous crisis a century ago through a period of broadly shared prosperity and stability (both political and financial) to the current crisis. This story welds the ideas of cliodynamacists, evolutionary scientists, cultural historians, economists and political scientists into data-rich verbal and mathematical models illustrated with numerous charts and tables. From this synthesis come fresh insights concerning race relations, economics, foreign policy, and how addressing climate change can create a stronger and more prosperous America. The final chapter describes some ideas on how we might proceed going forward.