From the article (bold added):

This is the first of a two-part series on the causes of America’s decline—economic, industrial, social, spiritual—and on the thinking of two prominent intellectuals who address themselves to remedies.

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I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

—Arnold J. Toynbee

The U.S. currently exhibits multiple signs of national senescence to state the obvious. On the domestic front, the decay includes: a failed response to the Covid–19 pandemic, a pandemic of prescription drug overdoses-and a grotesque judicial settlement protecting the perpetrators, a catastrophic drought in the western half of the country and catastrophic storms elsewhere, infrastructure decay, extreme income inequality, a rent-extracting healthcare system that is one of the worst performing in the Western world, and a hollowed out industrial base.

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Professor Galbraith’s explanation of U.S. decline is nothing if not comprehensive. He finds the root cause in the economic sphere, generated by a set of interlinking factors. Galbraith accompanies his exploration of the economics of decline with a short set of measured, New Deal-style, risk-averse prescriptions for reversing it. All this is laid out in The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (Simon & Schuster, 2014), a work concerned primarily with the U.S. case.

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Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and billionaire, focuses on U.S. and (more broadly) Western decline. He, too, offers an economic explanation for America’s condition... Thiel’s thesis is rooted primarily in technological stagnation. But his proposal for reversing America’s decline transcends the economic and technological spheres to incorporate cultural and psychological considerations. This is a strength. It is a common error to treat economics as divorced from cultural, historical, and psychological considerations. It is Thiel’s move beyond economics that, I contend, will earn his solutions acceptance in lieu of Galbraith’s. However, simply because Thiel’s proposals are more likely to gain acceptance does not mean that Thiel will be able to deliver on his promises, as his proposed policies may end up killing the very host he is trying to save. Thielian policy alone will not work. For true success, Thiel needs synthesis with time-tested, Galbraithian market intervention.

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In Normal, Galbraith argues that there are four fundamental and interacting components to the economic decline of the U.S. The first is a choke-chain effect on economic growth, when demand for natural resources (primarily hydrocarbons) exceeds available supply. The Covid–19 crisis has altered this imbalance, but only temporarily, not structurally.

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These fixed costs skyrocketed with the first oil shock (1973) and brought stable economic growth in the U.S. to a very abrupt halt. The two oil shocks, the second coming 1979, thus induced a period of economic uncertainty due to the decline of cheap, steady oil supplies. This was structural disruption, as against situational disruption, which is what the spread of Covid–19 faces us with today. Increased financialization and speculation characterized the economic system that evolved to cope with this reduction in opportunity for “honest profit.” Here we find the choke-chain effect: The shift toward finance capital inflated the price of scarce resources, so slamming the lid on future growth.

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This transformation of the U.S. economy into a financialized/speculative mode is Galbraith’s second factor to explain U.S. economic decline. Here he considers the “financial casino” induced by the unstable nature of commodity prices and de-regulation. This, he argues, has resulted in chicanery not only in the commodities markets but also in the information-technology sector. Out of this came the dot.com crash in 2000 and subsequently the collapse of the once-stable U.S. mortgage market, which led to the great financial crisis of 2008. As Galbraith excellently puts it:

Fraud is a response, in short, to the failure of lenders to adjust to a decline in real possibilities.

Much, much more at the link and well worth the read. Part 1 is mostly about Galbraitih, part two will be about Thiel.