How long america will last

Foreign troops last occupied U. That free security also permitted the United States to be the last major power to enter both wars, to suffer the fewest losses, and to emerge in a dominant position when the fighting stopped.

To be sure, U. They adopted a constitution that privileged individual freedom and spurred the creation of a boisterous capitalist economy. They opened the continent to immigrants from all over the world and managed to contain the frictions that waves of immigrants occasioned.

Since becoming a great power, the United States has also been fortunate in its choice of enemies. Imperial Germany was a daunting military power, but its armed forces had been depleted by the time the American Expeditionary Force arrived in The Nazi Wehrmacht was even more capable, but Adolf Hitler was an incompetent strategist, and the Soviet Union did most of the work to defeat Germany anyway.

World War II in the Pacific was hardly a cakewalk, but the outcome was not in doubt once the United States mobilized for war. The Soviet economy was significantly smaller, its allies were much weaker and less reliable, and it faced serious rivals on several frontiers while America sat unthreatened in the Western Hemisphere. The Soviet command economy was a wonderland of waste and inefficiency, and Soviet leaders had to devote a much higher percentage of GDP to defense just to keep the United States in sight.

The result was a brief unipolar moment when the United States faced no serious rivals and both politicians and pundits convinced themselves that America had found the magic formula for success in an increasingly globalized world. The hubris of the s was to be expected, perhaps: No other country could claim such a long and mostly unbroken run of success, where ill fortune never seemed to hold the country back for long.

Is this still the case today? Can Americans continue to assume that the world is their oyster and that things will always turn out right no matter how irresponsibly they seem to behave? Maybe, but maybe not. First of all, the free security that the nation has known since its founding is not quite as profound as it used to be. Why can they do that?

Unfortunately, has given us a grim reminder that the protection the United States once enjoyed is not as ironclad as it once was. Distance still matters, but it does not protect against every danger. We also learned last week that a foreign power generally believed to be Russia has hacked into a vast array of government computer systems, including many that are part of the U.

The full extent of the damage is still unknown, but the incident illustrates another vulnerability that distance cannot diminish. The United States is still fortunate to be located where it is, but that advantage is not as great as it once was. There are many more complex and intricate models of how civilizations grow and decay, but perhaps something could be gained by creating a very simple model that looks only at life span.

Others were short-lived, for all their power: The Phrygian and Lydian empires were around for only about six decades each. The data set, based on earlier research in empires, ends at A. If you crunch these all together, the first thing you discover is that the average lifetime of these powers is years. And that should perhaps give us some pause. To make this explicit, the United States has now outlasted the majority of the empires in my historical data set, and is now crossing the threshold into hoary old age.

But there is a more interesting way to look at it than simply taking an average. They can be skewed towards one end or the other. This is quite unlike, for example, human life span, where the older you get, the more likely you are to die.

But we are also in good company. This memoryless property is not unique to empires. Yet instead of sinking into a prolonged downturn, the economy staged an unexpectedly rousing recovery, fueled by massive government spending and a bevy of emergency moves by the Fed. By spring, the rollout of vaccines had emboldened consumers to return to restaurants, bars and shops. Suddenly, businesses had to scramble to meet demand.

Global supply chains became snarled. Costs rose. And companies found that they could pass along those higher costs in the form of higher prices to consumers, many of whom had managed to sock away a ton of savings during the pandemic. Furman suggested, though, that misguided policy played a role, too. A resurgent job market — employers have added 5. And the supply chain bottlenecks show no sign of clearing. Megan Greene, chief economist at the Kroll Institute, suggested that inflation and the overall economy will eventually return to something closer to normal.

That was when higher prices coincided with high unemployment in defiance of what conventional economists thought was possible. Unemployment is relatively low, and households overall are in good shape financially.

Economic growth, after slowing from July through September in response to the highly contagious delta variant, is thought to be bouncing back in the final quarter of