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Our democratic system requires strong-enough economic growth to raise living standards and support activist government. These expectations, present in most advanced democracies, are no longer realistic, because the global economy has changed in ways that reduce growth.

For the United States, Europe and other developed nations, this means that “anything over 1.5 percent [annually] should be seen as healthy,” he says. This would be a big drop for the United States. Since World War II, the American economy has usually grown each year by 3 percent or better.

To be fair, there’s no technical consensus on these issues. Consider another recent report by innovation experts Michael Mandel and Bret Swanson. Contrary to Sharma, they predict a productivity boom that would boost annual U.S. economic growth closer to 3 percent a year — a target of the Trump administration — from the 2 percent of recent years.

.“While America has never been able to right every wrong, America has made the world a more secure and prosperous place,” Obama declared at the time. “And our leadership is necessary to underwrite the global security and prosperity that our children and our grandchildren will depend upon.”Contrast Obama’s move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with President Trump’s betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran — and, of course, Russia, because almost everything Trump does seems to end up benefiting Moscow.

Given the Kurdish heroism in arresting genocide against the Yazidi in 2014, it is savagely ironic that Trump’s betrayal has now put the Kurds themselves at risk of war crimes and ethnic cleansing by Turkey.

So we’re sending more troops to Saudi Arabia to help a misogynist dictatorship that kills a journalist for an American newspaper, even as we betray the Kurds who have been trying to build a democratic enclave that empowers women; we’re sending troops to Saudi Arabia to confront Iran, even as we give Iran a helping hand in Syria.This is where incoherence and inhumanity converge

Black Friday is insulated, in a way many other pseudo-holidays are not, from the Culture Wars, because what could be more implicitly agreeable to an American—or to anyone, for that matter—than the simple promise of a good deal?

"Black Friday highlights the contrast between rich and poor." As a spectacle, it may be celebrated by all, but it is participated in, increasingly, by a few.

But Black Friday is also, as pseudo-holidays go, more class-conscious than most. It is thus more divisive than most. If you can't normally afford a flat-screen/iPad/Vitamix/Elsa doll/telephone, Black Friday discounts could offer you the opportunity to purchase those items. If you can normally afford those things, though, you may well decide that the trip to the mall, with its "throngs" and its "masses" and its sweaty inconvenience, isn't worth the trouble.

Awash in grief and anger, we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt down Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for letting him turn a maze of caves into a launching pad to attack America.

Even then, it was clear that our attempt to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into model democracies was not going well. Touring those countries, Gates could barely leave the small secured zones.

Gates told reporters he had only just learned the “eye-opener” that the Taliban were attracting so many fighters because they paid more. Generals in Afghanistan said the Taliban were giving fighters $250 to $300 a month, while the Afghan Army was paying about $120. So Gates, employing the American way of throwing more money at a problem, got the recruits a raise to $240.