By Neil Irwin, Updated:

What does politics in the United States have in common with that of declining empires of ages past? Too much, argues Glenn Hubbard. The Columbia Business School dean and former adviser to President George W. Bush and would-be president Mitt Romney makes the case in his new book (written with economist Tim Kane), called “Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America.” He sees long-simmering failings in the American political system, and the economic policies that result, as risks that ultimately endanger the nation’s standing in the world. He discussed why he is not, despite it all, a declinist, in a recent conversation with Wonkblog. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Neil Irwin: One could easily argue that America’s economic and fiscal challenges are real, but manageable in the scheme of things, and it will take only some modest changes to health care programs and so on to put us on track. You take a view that deeper changes are needed to avoid us going the way of the Roman Empire. Why?


Glenn Hubbard:
I do, but it’s not a disagreement with what you just said. There are two schools of thought. The declinist school is mainly historians and some economists who think that all great powers stumble. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s accurate in history. And it’s certainly not an accurate description of the U.S. today. But the troubling thing is this is not an economics problem, the U.S. faces, it’s a politics problem. There’s too much discussion how you could do this modest thing or the other thing to solve U.S. fiscal and competitiveness issues, and how if you got four Democratic and four Republican economists in a room we could work it out. But the forces that keep that from happening are the really important things to understand.

The United States doesn’t have to stumble. But it does have to take pretty deep process reforms, maybe including amending the Constitution. I view that as a good news story. There’s no reason the U.S. is going to fall off of a cliff. But we do have a politics problem. ...


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