British Decline, American Decline – And Brexit

British Decline, American Decline – And Brexit, Forbes, June 22, 2016, "James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute is – at least to this historian of Britain – one of the most readable and stimulating commentators on economic affairs out there today. His recent column on “Is America Really in Decline? What We Can Learn from Britain” raises a few points which shed some light on the declinist argument and on the case for Britain’s exit from the European Union, or Brexit. As Pethokoukis puts it, drawing on historian Robert Tombs, the so-called decline panic that Britain experienced in the post-1945 decades “rests on two assumptions: First, Britain experienced a collapse in global influence and economic dynamism. Second, those results stemmed from ‘long-standing failures’ of the nation’s core institutions.”"