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Is America In Decline?

You think America is in decline? I don't.

And neither does Bret Stephens, a truly literate foreign affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal, whose piece today takes on the orthodoxy in the academy and in other fashionable circles of how American civilization is going down, down, down.

The article is called "Marinating in 'Decline'." And it is a marinating process. But after most such processes have been going on for some time, they begin to smell. Which is actually what's happening.

China apparently is the great winner in the race for dominion. Or at least that's what the established wisdom says. But there's a challenging column in today's FT by the Harvard economist, Kenneth Rogoff arguing that "China may yet be the economy to lose sleep over." One index: "According to the World Bank, income inequality (in China) has leapfrogged that of the US and Russia -- which is no small feat." And this is a Communist economy, no less.