I got as far as this passage in Megan McArdle’s smirking behind her fan Washington Post column, noting the political problems in both the U. S. and U. K.:
There has been a lot of talk lately about the erosion of the long-standing U.S.-British “special relationship.†Yet in one respect the countries are more tightly linked than ever before: Both are enduring a collective nervous breakdown of their political institutions.
It is not just the United States and the United Kingdom. France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Sweden, and who knows how many other countries are also having “collective nervous breakdowns” all at the same time. It makes you wonder if there’s something in the water.
Maybe it’s something inherent in social media. Maybe it’s Russian interference. Maybe it’s the spirit of the times. Maybe mass migration inevitably results in political unrest. But there’s clearly something happening here and what it is ain’t exactly clear.
I think that greed is one of the factors. Greed is a natural human emotion. It cannot be stamped out only controlled. You can have a rapacious elite and a rapacious civil bureaucracy (there is some overlap there) and, in the presence of robust economic growth and prosperity all may still be well.
Here in the United States for the last dozen years or more economic growth and prosperity have been greatly concentrated in just a handful of cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Boulder, Houston, you know the list. It isn’t as pat as “coastal”, “big cities”, or “red” vs. “blue”. Denver and Boulder aren’t coastal or megacities. Chicago is a big city and its economy has languished. I don’t know enough about France or Germany to know whether there have been similarly uneven patterns there.
