In one science fiction book a group was on a planet which had once been a giant advanced society. They were trying to find the reason. They came to a town where a priesthood worshipped the Ancient Gods who had come from the sky, like the Aztecs worshipped the Fair Gods from the Atlantic.

When they found out how to communicate, one of the explorers told the priest he was there to study the collapse of civilization. The priest went deathly pale and said,

“Is civilization about to collapse?”

After all, his was the only “civilization” he had ever known.

A lot of people see some kind of “collapse” as the US slides into the third world. But what we are seeing is the third world moving at an amazing speed toward our own standard of living, but our own standard of living is just sitting there.

Marxism is based on the idea that “the economy” can be built under central direction. So back in the fifties, when hula-hoops became popular, the Soviet planners produced several million of them. They just laid there in a warehouse where they probably still are.

Marxism requires that “the economy” be a fixed thing. It’s silly.

For decades the third world tried to use a socialist model to catch up with the West. They stayed poor. One of the best-kept secrets today is that there is no more starvation and if you look at it in logarithmic terms, the third world is so much richer than it was and growing so fast it’s hard to believe.

All that was holding them back was the economic planning from LSE and Harvard.

If you get into the world economy, you can catch up.; Despite the fact that anybody in the third world with any get up and go and smarts is moving into the white world as their first entrepreneurial act, jobs are being outsourced and the results are staggering.

I am old enough have SEEN the third world. When any Intellectual bothers to look at it, all they do is whine about how someone is working for a quarter an hour. When I saw it, today’s quarter an hour would have been a nickel, and it would have been big money to a starving family.

But once again, information is produced for a reason. No one wants to talk about Africa after Liberation. Nobody wants to talk about the third world except to proved how evil the white man is and how Intellectuals should run the economy.

So stagnation does not come with a bang, but with a whimper.