awooga83 all advanced economies are facing similar trouble
Funny that, it's almost as if they have something in common: the decline of the domestic political power of labour since the advent of globalisation transformed their domestic productive forces.
The "one weird trick" to put a stop to managed decline will be a new political settlement with capital that restores the people of any given advanced economy to their proper place as its rulers.
This settlement is the prerequisite of any reliably rational government dedicated to the common interest from their parliaments, and cannot be its result. Systems of electoral democracy are captured, in effect, and cannot readily be restored at the vote: quantitative research bears this out as well as the pub test of universal disappointment among workers about how society is being ordered, also known as "anti-politics".
To obtain such a settlement, new forms of power will be required. If history's any guide, these will involve being able to hold the productive forces of the global economy at gunpoint until capital relents. The first step towards this is to understand the enemy: it's not drug addicts, migrants or workers in other nations. It's the spirit powering the engine of uneven accumulation.
Europeans may be among the last to grasp this. The cultural memory formed by the sweep of European history is still that prosperity relies on victory in war with other advanced nations, and competitive colonial looting. These practices, for a European, are the essence of a modernity structured by capital. Their sublimated echo is felt in league tables of OECD GDP trends, as well as in their deep-seated anxiety about being colonised themselves, even if it's by the inward migration their historical accumulation has fostered.
Don't trust I'm right? Well, I'm painting with a broad brush, but the numbers aren't incompatible. The things I'm saying can be defended pretty well by observation of the tendency. The state of affairs in the so-called global North can certainly worsen. With any luck those of us in these countries who don't happen to be sitting on investments that grow faster than our material needs eventually agree on what's necessary.
