Predicting the Demise of America (or Attempt at Honorary Doctorate ♯1)

To my knowledge, the theory I’m about to share is completely original.   I think it’s mine.  However, I’m an avid reader of Niall Ferguson, Martin Gilbert and David McCullough, among others, who sometimes comment on the intended topic.

I’m also reading The Invisible Gorilla, by Dan Simons and Chris Chabris, who’ve studied human memory and how it works.  Apparently, we often adopt others’ ideas as our own, and don’t even realize it – it’s called internalizing and happens when we connect deeply with an idea.  So it’s completely feasible that the theory I’m about to share is not mine, and I could still think it is.  As ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’, any plagiarism here surely qualifies.

Having shared that, I really believe this is my theory.  

If it proves to be mine, having blogged it will provide a publishing date.  This could help.  If you’ll indulge an explanation, allow me a diversion before I share the theory.  I’m a college dropout.  After my sophomore year my entrepreneurial calling began shouting and I left Georgia Tech to pursue the almighty dollar.  I’ve had almost no regrets.  Whilst I don’t lament missing an undergraduate or masters education, a doctoral thesis provides an opportunity to spend a couple of years researching a completely new idea, and setting out to prove it.  Wow.  That’d be amazing - to have the luxury of time to investigate something fully, to be a real-life detective, and to potentially lay down a completely unique idea in the annals of human history.  Alas, when I had the time, I didn’t appreciate it – opportunity is wasted on the disinterested.  Now it seems I’ll never have time to get that doctorate.  UNLESS, and here we get to the mini-point, an open-minded or enterprising university official happens to read this blog and decides to award me an honorary doctorate out of admiration for my sheer academic insight!  Yes, this may be unlikely.  Nevertheless, feel free to forward this blog to anyone you think might have the necessary influence.  As a helpful suggestion, it might help if they get stoned a lot, too.  Ok, here's the attempt.

            

History can be shared as the story of Empire.  From the vast Roman Empire to the British and presently American empires, this is where history happens.  Empire develops a form of law and a code of politics, embraces invention and invests in infrastructure.   Following these, it provides an environment for the development of the arts, and time for the appreciation of those arts.  The whole of human existence ultimately benefits from Empire, although clearly, during the height of their power, some relatively small groups benefit far more than others.  Nevertheless, their rise and fall is the story of human history, and countless observers have opined on the reasons for their emergence and demise.

Paul Kennedy has written perhaps the seminal work in this arena, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  In it, he argues that it is not the winning or losing of wars that leads to power, as it may seem at the time, but the economic strength of that country leading up to and during its wars:

The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequences of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason, how a Great Power's position steadily alters in peacetime is as important to this study as how it fights in wartime.

In a seemingly unrelated academic field is the work of Dan Ariely, a behavioral psychologist and the author of Predictably Irrational.  In this fantastic book (if you haven’t read it, watch this clip on TED and you may find yourself hooked), he details a variety of interesting experiments about how we make decisions.  We’re quite predictable and irrational, it seems.  It throws the notion of ‘free will’ into its own little tailspin.

Finally, in the little recipe for my intended doctoral recognition, we must add a dash of Einstein.  The little patent clerk realized a great truth about the world in the form of an equation but was, alas, an unheralded outsider of the academic community that would one day herald his genius.   Initially, he was lampooned for his ‘special theory’, but over time the world appreciated the brilliance of his equation, and he was awarded a few honorary doctorates.

My doctoral thesis attempt combines the work of these three academic leviathans into an equation that predicts the future.   Trumpets, please.

Moving on from Kennedy’s premise about the explanations for the rise and fall of great powers, I embrace Ariely’s research to understand that the decisions which lead to an empire's downfall are entirely predictable - it is the function of a simple equation that, like Einstein’s special theory of relativity, is a ground-breakingly unique piece of individual genius.  It will accurately predict when the American Empire will fall.  This equation could be used by banks to short Wall Street and damage the economy, so I think it’s imperative the equation is publicly and widely known as soon as possible.  Get this out there, people.

             E =  S / B³

Where E equals the duration of an actual Empire, S equals the Speed of communication between the centre of that empire and its furthest military outpost at its height, and B equals the length of time it takes me to drink a Beer, measured in seconds.

This may seem an unorthodox quotient, but I’m confident in the research.  If you’re surprised the time it takes me to drink a beer would play a key role in such a groundbreaking equation, imagine how I felt.   Suddenly, all those evenings drinking beer in college count as bona fide research.   If this equation helps me earn some money, they were tax deductible!  

Despite the notoriety and inconvenience of this discovery (I’m mostly a wine drinker now), some explanation is in order.  As you’ve read this far, coddle me a bit longer whilst I share both the principle and the mathematics.

The principle is simple.   The reason the Roman Empire lasted 600 years, and the British Empire for only 360 years, was not because the Roman form of government was superior to the British.  It wasn’t better at collecting taxes or more efficient at spending them.  It wasn’t more ambitious in its conquests or better at administrating them.  It wasn’t stronger militarily as compared to its rivals, or cleverer in its strategies.  The Roman Empire lasted twice as long as the British Empire because of one simple factor.  It took news longer to travel.  Events developed more slowly.

One may rise and fall more quickly than the other, but the stages are analogous.  They have a similar trajectory.  Various historians have suggested a life cycle to be found in all empires, and I’ve amalgamated them into my own version here: 1. The Era of Creators, 2. The Era of Conquest, 3. The Era of Commerce, 4.  The Era of Affluence, 5. The Era of Collapse. 

These stages are like a blueprint.  Every empire goes through them.  If I had time to actually write my doctorate, I would detail the characteristics of each one.  But you get the idea.

The more interesting idea I’m proposing is that the time it takes for an empire to go through these stages is entirely predictable.  And the time it takes for news to travel is the most important part of that equation.  My beer drinking is just a mathematics devise used to show proportionality, but we’ll get to that later.

Consider these ideas.  When Caesar vanquished Gaul, it took months for the Senate to discover.  During this time, Caesar was able to think, plan and act.  He recruited, set up lines of supply, and mobilized his forces.  During the height of the Roman Empire, in about the 2^nd century, it took 63 days for the cursus publicus (Roman mail) to travel between two major economic centers: Rome and Alexandria.  A return letter would thus take six months to arrive.  Whilst urgently good or bad news was quicker (specific time-lines are hard to find) the standard of communication was biannual at the empire’s height.

The British Empire enjoyed slightly more advanced communications.  On 10 May 1857 in Meerat, India, many sepoys mutinied.  It was India’s First War of Independence, involving tens of thousands of soldiers and took the British nearly a year to quell.  The British responded with incredible ruthlessness, in some cases blowing the captured mutineers from cannon.  Some reports consider this the beginning of the end of the British Empire.  Despite the importance of their final victory, it took almost four weeks for reports of this to be published in The Times on 8 June 1857.   Standard news took far longer.  

When the second tower was hit on 9/11, George Bush was informed within seconds.  America enjoys instantaneous communication.  As the American Empire can be said to start in 1989, how long have we got?

Hold on.  Are there true parallels here?  Do the lessons of history teach us anything about today?  

They do.  An examination of the history shows that politicians and generals in the Roman, British and American Empires were (and are) equally brilliant and boneheaded, comparably honorable and sleazy, evenly inspiring and pathetic.  Their stories are similar.  They changed the world.  Their empires’ demise was down to internal factors.  But as the trajectory is similar, and the timing can be shown to be also.

This is where Dan Ariely comes in.  Ariely has proven that, given certain situations, we act very predictably.  These behaviors are irrational and unexpected, but still predictable.  His clever research has provided examples ranging from choosing a holiday to choosing a life partner.   In order to establish this, Ariely did require similar decision platforms to study.  It’s impossible to predict what someone would do when confronted by a twenty-foot dinosaur because we don’t have any patterns of behavior to observe.

Fortunately, when it comes to empires, we have an immense level of history and observation.  Since Plutarch, perhaps the only topics that have been written about more plentifully are romance, sports and cooking.   Therefore, we can use this history to predict exactly when the American empire will crumble.  For those who know the formula, we’ll be able to finally beat the banks at shorting the economy, and go on that holiday and buy that house which proves money isn’t everything, but you can’t believe it for sure until you find out for yourself.

Unfortunately, this blog has been my own little holiday writing diversion, and my holiday is now over.  I don’t have the time to rant further, nor to mathematically prove the brilliance of my theorem.  Einstein would understand - he received lots of honorary doctorates, and never did prove his Unified Field Theory.  Hence, my theory should still qualify for an honorary doctorate, preferably before America implodes.

[Once mathematically proven, the only remaining variable to establish is, of course, the exact timing of the demise of America, which simply requires the time it takes me to drink a beer.  That is top-secret.  Only those readers privileged with the opportunity to buy me a beer, and secretly time the drinking of that beer, will have access to the final pieces to this puzzle.  I encourage and applaud the scholarship and enthusiasm of those determined to overcome these obstacles for their own enlightenment.]