James K. Galbraith has a very pessimistic view of the U.S. economy going forward.

America’s economic plight is structural. It is not simply the consequence of Trump’s incompetence or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s poor political strategy. It reflects systemic changes over 50 years that have created an economy based on global demand for advanced goods, consumer demand for frills, and ever-growing household and business debts. This economy was in many ways prosperous, and it provided jobs and incomes to many millions. Yet it was a house of cards, and COVID-19 has blown it down.

Project Syndicate

Slow, underlying trends can undermine the resilience of a system, without obvious impacts on the surface. Then, when a crisis hits, whether or not that crisis is related to the underlying trend, the system is not able to bounce back the way it would have without the trend. Imagine rising temperatures and invasive species very slowly putting pressure on a healthy forest or water body. The ecosystem can resist these pressures, maybe for a long time. But then one day, a major storm, fire, or drought comes along. Absent the underlying pressure, the the ecosystem could have rebounded to its original state, but with the underlying pressure, it rebounds to something short of its underlying state. Even if the shock is less than catastrophic and the system rebounds to something just a little short of the original state, successive crises over time can lead to a long, slow slide that might only be obvious in retrospective. Or, if the shift is very slow, “shifting baseline syndrome” sets in, where the people involved lose their memory of what the system used to be like, and don’t fully realize what has been lost.