On 9/10/2010 3:38 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> People say this after every recession or stock-market crash. In the early 90s everyone was talking about Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
> True, and then that receded in the dot.com mania. But maybe the long-term trend is down, obscured by the occasional bubble.
To extend your analogy, the problem is how do you construct a consistent time-series for this? In 1945 the number of countries whose asses the US couldn't kick was 1. Now it's zero. Yet people still talk about decline. So it seems like there was a break in the series somewhere.
SA