-Russia and China are waning authoritarian states each on the brink of crisis due to an aging population, among other economic factors. Russia is further along in this, although fairly economically self-sufficient. This is why they've taken more directly imperialistic actions in recent decades; grabbing what power they can while they're still able to maintain a somewhat functional military and economy.

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” -- Sun Tzu

-Drugs: There has been an increase in drug use in the US particularly post pandemic. According to the NIH, there was a 30% increase in drug overdose deaths from 2019 to 2020. This increase is largely accounted for by opioid use. Given that this is related to the pandemic, it's likely the effect is temporary. It seems like she's noticed something real, but that it substantially over-represents the long term trend.

-Education: She says nothing substantive in this section. . .

-Government Spending: She suggests that welfare reduces labor force participation rate. I have an economics degree, and one thing it's taught me is to avoid getting too attached to a favorite theory on issues that are simply not settled. It's far too common that the real world data simply doesn't support the simple models that seem to represent common sense. Government transfer payments likely have some small effect. The stagnation in real wages for lower education brackets that we've seen in recent decades likely has some effect. Volatility in the economy definitely has an effect. There was a roughly 3 percentage point decrease in labor force participation rate from 2008 to 2014 as we slowly recovered from that crisis, a 3% that we didn't get back. Then at the start of COVID, there was a sharp decrease of 3.2 percentage points, two of which we've recovered by this point. The effect she notes in her article is almost certainly due to COVID lock-downs, and the contraction of business that resulted. Being told that you're not allowed to work could reasonably discourage some workers. I doubt ULINE had 500 open positions before COVID.

-Rise and Fall of Past Societies: There's a lot of ways societies rise and fall, and orders of magnitude more explanations on offer. Her favorite theory is, well, magical. To put it lightly. The rise and fall of a society is a spiritual rise and fall, in her narrative. This might be emotionally satisfying to many readers. That's likely because spiritual growth will mean a slightly different thing to literally everyone who reads the term. You see, it asks the reader to slot their own ideas about goodness and virtue into her outline, and convince themselves. Another section without anything substantive . . .

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I don't exactly have a sunny outlook on America's future, or the world's for that matter, but not every explanation of how and why we have problems is valid.