FT Explains The Decline And Fall Of The West ... Thanks!

The west is losing faith in its own future ... Living standards are even under pressure in countries that have done relatively well ... American and European politicians like to talk about values and institutions. But for billions of people around the world, the crucial point is simpler and easier to grasp. The west is the part of the world where even ordinary people live comfortably. That is the dream that makes illegal immigrants risk their lives, trying to get into Europe or the US. Yet, even though the lure of the west remains intense, the western world itself is losing faith in its future. Last week Barack Obama gave one of the bleakest speeches of his presidency. In unsparing terms, the US president chronicled the increasing inequality and declining social mobility that, he says, "pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the world". – The Financial Times 

Dominant Social Theme: The West is failing ... and it is a terrible thing. 

Free-Market Analysis: The Financial Times does us the favor of advancing what we call directed history in this article. It is certainly an amazing article, explaining how the West is collapsing and what it portends. You can see at the end of this excerpt that a specific threat is left dangling.

The only thing the article doesn't discuss is WHY. And there is a reason for that. 

Here's more: 

According to researchers at the Brookings Institution, the wages of working-age men in the US – adjusted for inflation – have fallen by 19 per cent since 1970. Joe Average – once the epitome of the American dream – has fallen back, even as gains for the top 5 per cent of incomes have soared. Even conservative politicians are worried. -

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