ABSTRACT
Much of the discussion about the decline of the United States is based both on the rising clout of China, as observed through its fast-paced growth and growing commercial surplus, as well as on the imbalances of the American economy, best revealed by its deficits: federal deficit, commercial deficit and stockpile of private – household and corporate – debt. The aim of this chapter is to suggest an alternative view, grounded in the editors’ and CERVEPAS’s multi-factorial and civilizational approach. More specifically, the current situation of the US economy can be interpreted as the result of dynamic interactions between the international role of the dollar and the cultural factors that have shaped America’s consumer markets and contemporary revenue distribution. This postulate, which is at the heart of CERVEPAS’s work, is grounded in the fundamental perspective that the economy should be re-embedded within its historical, cultural, political and institutional dimensions to be fruitfully analyzed. A similar approach has irrigated the current work of heterodox economists such as Veblen (1899), Polanyi (1944) and Galbraith (1967), but also authors like Boyer (1990) and Orléan (2014). In this perspective, the 2008 crisis and the current imbalances of the US economy can be seen as expressions of an original form of world leadership, rather than the symptoms of its decline.
