America has accomplished amazing things in the first 250 years of its nationhood. It went from being a peripheral colony to being the richest and most powerful country in the world. We are the nation of Midwestern corn and wheat fields, the automobile, the personal computer, the internet, Hollywood, television, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, rap, social media, fast food and blue jeans. We are prosperous, influential and a military superpower.
However, being a great nation does not mean staying a great nation forever. Empires fall. Superpowers fail. America is at a historical juncture. Can it do what it takes to give itself another 250 years? To improve its odds, the U.S. could draw on lessons from history — in particular, the stories of three nations that self-destructed.
Byzantian mismanagement
There is no place called Byzantium today.
In its prime, from AD 813 to 1045, Byzantium was a vast empire running from Sicily and southern Italy through the Balkans to all of Turkey. Between AD 718 and 1453, Byzantium always controlled some share of this region.
Byzantium was technologically advanced. Its literacy rate was higher than that of 18th century France. Byzantines built aqueducts, designed clocks, wove magnificent silks and made the world’s greatest mosaics. The empire was fabulously wealthy.
What went wrong?
One emperor, Basil II, wrecked all this.
He did this by giving massive tax breaks to the rich.
Byzantium was under constant threat from geopolitical enemies. To survive, it had to be able to regularly raise armies. After the tax break, Byzantine emperors found that they no longer had the funds to do so. Before Basil II were an uninterrupted string of military victories; after, a series of losses. The empire weakened until it finally fell to the Ottomans.
Basil II’s tax breaks for the rich led to deficits, insolvency and government nonperformance.
Spanish inequality
If rich countries always get richer and poor countries always fall behind, Spain should be the world’s dominant power today. In 1500, Spain was an economic and military juggernaut. Its crucial asset was New World silver. Mexican and Peruvian silver represented more specie than was available in all the rest of Europe. Had Spain invested these proceeds in rational economic activity, the Industrial Revolution would have happened in Spain rather than Britain.
Spain killed its own economy by promoting extreme social inequality. The landed aristocrats of Spain wanted complete economic and political domination of the country. The aristocracy’s control of the government meant they could cut off all market competition to their businesses. With no competition from agricultural imports, the Spanish lords had no incentive to improve their agricultural efficiency. The other nations of Western Europe improved farming between 1500 and 1800. Spain stayed locked in place.
The nobility did not want merchants to compete with them for political power and so shut down merchants who favored reform. Businessmen seeking market freedom fought no fewer than four civil wars trying to remove the aristocracy’s stifling of economic life. A fifth civil war was an attempt by workers to reduce social inequality. The aristocrats won all five of these wars. The bloodshed was horrendous. The economic losses were catastrophic.
Inequality stifled Spain’s ability to industrialize by killing the size of its domestic market. England and the U.S. were less unequal, with domestic markets thanks to working classes with money to spend. Spain’s impoverished peasants could buy nothing. Entrepreneurship died. Spain stagnated.
Thus, after 1600, Spain continuously fell behind the rest of Western Europe. In 1600, it was the world’s richest nation. By 1900, Spain was poorer than Argentina and Venezuela.
British hubris
Britain’s fall is not as dramatic as that of Byzantium and Spain. The United Kingdom still has a high standard of living. But in the Victorian era, Britain was the unquestioned dominant power.
Its power came from superior technology. The Industrial Revolution was British. Britain invented the steam engine, mechanized spinning and weaving, the railroad and the telegraph. The rest of the world strained to catch up with British technology.
A century later, that lead was gone. The dominant technological powers were the U.S. and Germany; their universities taught math, science and engineering. American and German engineering became the best in the world.
Britain sent fewer of its children to university than did its two economic rivals. Oxford and Cambridge were finishing schools for aristocratic gentlemen. The universities added mathematics and science to their curricula only reluctantly. Doing research in those areas was considered vulgar.
British engineers were working-class men who learned their technology on the shop floor. This worked well in 1750. By 1900, there was far more math and science than could possibly be learned in a factory. The technical skills of British engineers withered.
The United States and Germany became the dominant political and economic powers of the world. Two world wars had to be fought between the U.S. and Germany to determine who would be the hegemonic power of the 20th century. Had Britain invested in its universities the way that America and Germany did, the U.S. and Germany would have been battling over second place, not dominance.
Lessons for the U.S.
George Santayana, the Spanish American poet-philosopher, once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What should America learn from these three nations that self-destructed?
- Tax breaks are dangerous if they impede your government’s ability to function. An ineffective government is a formula for military, economic and social disaster.
- Inequality poisons future economic growth. The poor have to have enough money to purchase the products made by your companies. The rich cannot be so powerful that they can protect themselves from economic competition. Antitrust policy exists for a reason.
- Universities are the basis of technological power. Technological power is the basis of economic growth. Give up your universities and your technological edge at your peril.
If we solve these three fundamental problems, America has far better odds of being prosperous at its 500th birthday.
If we do not solve these problems, America may not have a 500th birthday.
Samuel Cohn is a professor emeritus of sociology at Texas A&M University.
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