The United States economy, by all reasonable expectations, ought to be in tatters. Crippling debt, political paralysis, a populace addicted to cheap credit and TikTok. Yet here we are, watching the American behemoth rise from the ashes of its own predicted doom. The dour mandarins in His Majesty’s Treasury are now, I am told, scrambling to decipher the ‘resilience playbook’ being written across the Atlantic. One can almost hear the collective grinding of teeth in Whitehall. But there is a simple, bitter truth they will not find in any spreadsheet: America succeeds because she is America, and we fail because we have forgotten what that means.
Consider the evidence. The US economy grew at an annualised rate of 3.3% in the final quarter of 2023, defying every gloomy forecast from Davos to the Bank of England. Employment is robust, wages are rising, and even inflation, that persistent ghoul, is being wrestled into submission. Meanwhile, Britain teeters on the brink of stagflation, our trains do not run, and our political class debates the finer points of gender-neutral language while the nation’s productivity flatlines. The contrast is not merely statistical; it is a moral and cultural indictment.
The Treasury’s task force will pore over tax cuts and deregulation. They will admire America’s shale oil revolution and its voracious venture capital culture. They will note that the US has a flexible labour market, a housing system that does not punish builders, and a government that, for all its screaming idiocies, still understands that business is the engine of prosperity. But they will miss the real lesson. The secret ingredient, the one that cannot be legislated or imported, is a stubborn, almost irrational belief in the future. Americans, for all their faults, still believe that tomorrow will be better than today. They take risks. They fail, get up, and fail again. They do not sit around in focus groups discussing how to ‘manage decline’.
Britain, by contrast, has become a museum of itself. We are obsessed with our past, terrified of our future, and pathologically addicted to safety. Every new development is met with a thousand objections. Every innovation is smothered in red tape. We have created a country where the greatest ambition of the young is to secure a public sector pension and a flat in Zone 2. The entrepreneurial spirit, the thing that once made Manchester and Glasgow industrial powerhouses, is now a quaint historical footnote. We have become the world’s most polite nation, and we are dying of politeness.
There is a historical cycle at play here. Look at the fall of Rome. The late empire was filled with brilliant jurists and administrators, but the vitality had drained away. The frontiers were left to barbarians because no one believed in Rome anymore. America today is not without its barbarians (look at the university campuses), but it still believes in itself. The American creed, however battered, still means something. Here, we have replaced patriotism with PowerPoint presentations on ‘wellbeing’. The Treasury mandarins will learn nothing from the American playbook because they are looking for algorithms, not for faith.
Let us be clear. I do not worship America. It is a noisy, vulgar, often cruel place. But it works. Its economy is the envy of the world precisely because it has not been ‘managed’ by clever fools. And we, the clever fools, sit in our meeting rooms, commissioning studies and wondering why our empire is rotting. The answer is simple: we stopped believing. The Americans haven’t. Yet.
