“The American empire is over,” warns this Economist, who explained why U.S. companies can’t compete in the global economy
Dr. Richard Wolff warns that the U.S. economy is structurally unfit to compete globally, especially against state-led models like China’s.
Economist Dr. Richard Wolff has a warning about the state of the U.S. economy and its ability to compete at the global level.
“The American empire is over,” said the economist who integrates Marxist conceptions about surplus labor value and leaves behind much of the deterministic notions some have come to associate with the economic school. Based on Wolff’s analysis, the U.S. economy peaked over a decade ago, and now the people are grappling with economic decline, with a political class that is not being honest about where the economy is headed.
What Dr. Richard Wolff is warning us about is not merely a shift in economic power—it’s a structural disadvantage embedded in the very DNA of the U.S. economy. Wolff is careful to show that the situation facing the U.S. is unique, emphasizing that while more jobs will be created in the coming decades, they are likely to emerge in economies that continue to grow—such as China and Brazil.
How the structure of the U.S. economy places the country at a disadvantage
Unlike China, whose state-run model allows for centralized planning and long-term strategic investment, the U.S. economy is beholden to the short-term demands of private shareholders. In China, the government can direct resources toward industries it deems vital for national growth—even if those industries operate at a loss for years.
Take, for example, the international market for rare earth minerals—critical components in batteries, renewable energy technologies, semiconductors, military equipment, and other essential goods of the 21st century. China began expanding its share of this market nearly 60 years ago, when its government first recognized the strategic importance of these resources in the 1960s, according to a recent NPR article on the country’s rise to dominance. After decades of largely unregulated mining—which severely impacted the environment and fueled intense competition among small-scale miners and refiners—Beijing moved in the 1990s to assert greater control over the sector by implementing export and import restrictions. These controls were widely viewed as unfair under WTO rules, but the strength of the Chinese government’s grip on the market proved overwhelming. For foreign businesses dependent on cheap Chinese exports, no protest was loud enough to slow Beijing’s ongoing consolidation.
Wolff’s point is that this isn’t just about economics—it’s about sovereignty. When a nation’s economic engine is driven by private profit rather than public purpose, it loses the ability to compete with systems that can afford to think in decades rather than quarters. The American empire, as he puts it, is over not because of military decline or cultural erosion, but because its economic model is no longer suited to the realities of global competition.
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