The Myth of America's Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“A bracing and intelligent reminder that, for all its woes, America remains extraordinarily dynamic, innovative, and resilient.”—Fareed Zakaria
Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2013, The Myth of America’s Decline is a highly provocative look at how the United States, for all its failings, continues to be the leading business, political, and intellectual model for all other nations. In a world where America bashers constantly chortle that the United States is in decline, Josef Joffe, using lively historical examples and empirical economic models, demonstrates that these doomsday contentions are flawed, and that America—even when compared with a resurgent China—is the land where the future is being born.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Editor of Germany's esteemed weekly Die Zeit, Joffe ( berpower) builds his latest book around the idea of the U.S. as the world's "default power." Joffe rebuts those doomsayers who, over the course of the last half-century, have predicted that American influence was secondary to the Soviet Union, or Japan, and now China. While Joffe's counter-argument that indeed America is not in relative decline is persuasive on the issue of military power, he sidesteps domestic issues such as education, urban deterioration, and racial conflict. Joffe's detailed catalogue of economic and civil weaknesses in the Chinese police state is the book's high point, however, with the author observing that repression has been the Chinese way since the Ming Dynasty. Aggressively capitalistic and resolutely optimistic, Joffe revisits familiar conservative talking points about American vitality, private enterprise, and individual freedom. For readers tired of blame-America-first critics or who want to find out what a smart, influential European thinks of the country's prospects, Joffe's book is a useful place to begin.
