Presidential campaigns are referendums on the economic status quo, but rarely offer more than superficial assessments of how much the status quo should be patched or tweaked in order to win the grudging support of a political majority. Candidates marshal economic indicators to make their case for how far and in what direction the status quo should be nudged.
In proper perspective, however, those indicators become a clarion call to go beyond nudges and patches to challenge the basic foundations of how our economy operates and who controls it. A look beyond the statistical snapshots candidates commonly use to long-term trends and global comparisons reveals that America’s economic problem is not that there’s something wrong with the status quo; it’s the status quo itself that’s wrong.
The Next System Project at the Democracy Collaborative recently published its first Index of Systemic Trends to better inform the political debate over the degree and shape of change America needs. While it is tempting to blame the nation’s ills on Donald Trump and the virulent form of populist, right-wing extremism he represents, this is an inadequate reading of our recent history —and a dangerous one at that. The rise of Trump is actually a symptom of a much longer systemic crisis that has been building over the last several decades. The Index of Systemic Trends is an effort to quantify, track, and visualize this crisis.
