I think the author is confusing the effects of a housing/lending catastrophe with intense sociological decline.
What happens when you have millions of junk mortgages going bust? Millions of houses empty in Heartland USA. It's a visceral and highly potent image of economic mismanagement, giving stories of families living in expensive cars. What it is not is a profound
new weakness in American society. The problems in the US economy are due to a highly specific set of causal factors, almost none of which are particular to the US, and has consequences which are also shared by other developed nations. America's universities are still world-renowned (if not ideally accessible - but this is probably
why), it's companies employ millions abroad, it's military is still potent.
Also, pivoting a paragraph on data from the New York post and a quote from Arianna Huffington? That wouldn't get much credibility here at SUBSIM
