Nelson Rosit: 'Off-Balanced Empire' - Review of 'Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America,' by Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane - "It is striking that, against all evidence, 'Balance' posits the malleability of human nature and dismisses the importance of human biodiversity. ... The authors are either unaware or have completely rejected the evidence of Richard Lynn and others that differences in intelligence and character ultimately define the limits of a peoples’ social and economic progress."

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Off-Balanced Empire

Review of Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America
by Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013)

Having a vested interest in the demise of the existing dispensation I was first drawn to Balance in the hope of finding some good news about the present system’s vulnerabilities. What I found was a neo-conservative take on what ails us, and what it would take to set things right.

The authors are: Glenn Hubbard, Dean of Columbia Business School, former chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, and economic advisor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign; and Tim Kane an economist formerly with the Heritage Foundation now at the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank.[1] The Hubbard and Kane (H&K) book represents a contribution by America’s center-right establishment to the literary genre known as Declinism.[2]

Declinism is the study of how societies and civilizations weaken and fall. Seminal works might include: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776); Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); and Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West (1918). But it has really been in the last couple of decades that works in Declinism have proliferated. . . .

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/04/off-balanced-empire/#more-23041