| A society the size of the US has a huge amount of inertia and fears over imminent US loss of global status are overblown. However, the US does have several serious structural problems that will eventually threaten its global position if they are not addressed. You note in your post that has very strong academic institutions. This is certainly true at the postsecondary and advanced degree level. However, the backbone of American innovation through academia is foreign students who come to study, then develop businesses and stay. This pipeline is under increasing pressure due to anti-immigrant reactionary politics and it is unclear if the foreign student to entrepreneur pipeline will survive both tightening official obstacles (e.g. restrictions on visas) and increasingly mainstreamed public hostility to immigration. It is unclear whether domestic students will be able to take up the slack in the event foreign students are excluded. Tied into this is increasingly steep American descent into dysfunctional politics, where the dominant political culture is now driven by hatred for the people and regions that actually make the US economy work. It is unclear if economically productive areas of the US will remain economically productive now it has become a stated objective of the dominant political culture to persecute productive areas and deprive them of the resources they need to maintain their human and physical infrastructure. While a second civil war along defined battle lines is unlikely, the historical record provides no reasons to be sanguine about the prospects of polities that reach this level of internal division. Political collapse into anti-intellectual despotism, potentially spurred on by outside help ('Russia, if you're listening....') is far from impossible. Finally, the US has a massive problem with inappropriate investment. The US pours a huge amount of public and private money into investments that are either socioeconomically useless, or only redistribute money into the pockets of the very wealthy, instead of enlarging the economy for everyone. Maintaining economic primacy requires creating and deploying innovations quickly enough that competitors cannot catch up. The past few decades of US investment, however, have been much more greatly oriented towards profit taking, oligarchic rent extraction, and graft rather than developing and deploying innovations on a large scale. It does no good to have invented the Internet when it's barely available in many parts of America and the Internet's primary business-to-consumer purpose is to help various economic parasites suck even more money out of consumer's pockets. The modern US falls down both on mass deployment and on maintaining enough of a market balance to ensure that the benefits of innovation aren't seized by rentiers. These are major vulnerabilities. The US is in good shape now--in no small part because both China and the EU have their own problems--but the red flags are rising and US standing will fall if nothing is done. |