Re: kann kein englisch , sorry deshalb keinen komentar

Geschrieben von Napoleon am 02. Oktober 2003 13:35:52:

Als Antwort auf: Dauer des Niedergangs - Beginn des Dark Age geschrieben von Andreas am 02. Oktober 2003 13:25:01:

>Kernaussagen unterstrichen.
>The duration of the descent, which is the same as the time to onset of the dark age, depends upon how long the processes we described in Part III can continue before coming to a crunch. One such crunch involves the collapse of the welfare system, when the demands placed upon it finally out-run what the productive individuals who support it are able and willing to provide. Another crunch involves the breakdown of the international system into a state of total war, for example when growing tensions due to the aspirations of China and Japan can no longer be contained by the weakening hegemony of the United States.
>Thus, we described in Part 3 processes of disintegration, disorganisation and discohesion. Depressing though these processes may have seemed, it appears that they still have some way to run. And in the meantime, we will be able to enjoy the fruits of a thousand years of democratisation, wealth accumulation and cultural tolerance. Bork records how he was so shocked by the farcical hearings relating to the appointment of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court judge that he remarked to a friend 'television is showing the end of western civilisation in living colour'. The friend replied 'of course it is coming to an end but don't worry; it takes a long time and in the meantime it is possible to live well'.
>Nevertheless, the processes that we described have been in operation for centuries and it is in our time that their limitations are becoming clear. The decline may take some time and as it proceeds the fortunate ones, perhaps even the majority, may live better than they have ever lived before. Yet, it will come to an end, and there will be a definite reckoning - a rapid and calamitous unravelling. As Bork says, the eventual collapse will proceed not in slow motion but quickly, precipitously. To determine when that calamity will befall us, we need to consider at what point our ambitions will finally outstrip our capacities.
>Davidson and Rees-Mogg draw attention to the fact that in the US the 'crack baby generation' of today is meant to pay the unfunded inter-generational transfers known as social security and Medicare. They say it is highly unlikely, to say the least, that an increasingly non-white and impoverished work force will tolerate employment taxes of up to 50% of payroll in order to keep the largely white Baby Boom retirees in retirement leisure. This suggests that it may be no more than a generation or two before the crunch comes - let us say, fifty years. Thus, the work force of today was raised in the relatively sober times of the 1930s to the 1970s. Fifty years from now, however, the work force will consist of people raised between the 1980s to the 2020s - a time of widespread single parenthood and high welfare dependency, when the US's traditional institutions have been chronically under attack and heavily de-legitimised. The commitment of this work force, both to the work ethic per se and to the traditional structures of American society, is very much in doubt. In other western countries, the problems of welfare dependency in an alienated underclass may be less acute than in the US. However, these countries suffer from another factor - the overall ageing of the population that means within fifty years there will be one dependent to every two workers rather than one to every three as at present. Throughout the developed world, therefore, a period roughly equivalent to one working lifetime is sure to see a marked downward shift in the reliability of the productive element of the population coinciding with an increase in the burden placed upon this productive element.
>Meanwhile, McRae, surveying the chances for future war and peace, says that he is reasonably confident about the prospect for the next thirty years, but much less so for the period beyond that. If the world, seems dangerous now, he observes, it will seem much more so after 2020, when there will have been a shift of power from the US to China - and a China indeed very different from that of today, with the core having much less control over the periphery. This again suggests a timescale of the order of fifty years within which a breakdown is likely to occur. This collision course between weakening American hegemony and growing aspirations in other regions is somewhat predictable. Already NATO has rejected the notion of acting as a world police force. The action in Kosovo sees it protecting its members' own interests in its own near abroad. But this should not be taken to imply that it will intervene in third party conflicts in regions such as east Asia, the middle east, or Africa. This is a signal to China and Japan that their geopolitical ambitions may grow unchecked for the time being. It will not take long for them to erode the west's de facto global hegemony - something which the west will find uncomfortable. That is when tensions will reach breaking point, and there will be the overwhelming danger of miscalculation from world leaders whose perceptions of the geopolitical order are out of touch with the reality.
>Having said all this, humans and their societies are extraordinarily resilient. When it seems that it is all over with them, they have a tremendous capacity to pull back from the brink and sidestep what looked like inevitable disaster. In looking forward fifty years and seeing a denouement of the contradictions inherent in the present world order, we are reckoning without the adaptability and creativity of our institutions in response to the obvious problems. Our societies may generate solutions to these problems that we cannot yet conceive of. On the other hand, any such adaptability may postpone collapse for a while but not for ever. We spoke in Chapter 30 of conveyor belts and the impossibility of returning to the past in a controlled, deliberate manner. For example, to return wholeheartedly to a social order in which, say, single motherhood is not a viable life style would require the overturning of so many gains in freedom and welfare that it would likely initiate the catastrophe it is intended to avoid.
>Thus, we may be able to reverse some of the trends that are bringing us to an impasse, but only to a certain extent. Let us say we could wind back these trends, at the extreme, by a century or so. This would mean essentially wiping out the changes of the 20th century. It would mean restoring the unchallenged supremacy of the west, for instance, while dismantling the welfare state down to the barebones provisions of the old Poor Laws, and being prepared to shoot people at dawn rather than compensate them for post-traumatic stress disorder. The figure of a century as the greatest amount we could rewind is just a guess, but it is an educated one. The Poor Law commission of the 19th century succeeded in reversing welfare history by some thirty years. Rome lumbered on for something over a hundred years after the crises of the 4th century, when some historians have thought it came close to collapse. Thus a century is probably of the right magnitude as the time for which we could stave off the inevitable.
>Our best guess, therefore, is that the descent will last between fifty and two hundred years. This is, in other words, how long the present world order has got before its collapse. It could be sooner, it could be later, but it is most likely to fall within this time bracket. The collapse itself will be brief, taking a decade at most and possibly much less. Past instances of collapse have seemed to happen almost overnight. Once confidence goes out of the system it unravels very quickly. As in the stockmarket, when perceptions return to the fundamentals, they do so abruptly.



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