I think the decline in the west is probably more the result of political parties and the corporate worlds wholesale embrace of 'Neoliberalism' and worship of 'The Market' as 'The Arbiter of Everything' over the last 30 or 40 years.
I think that the decline in the west is due to the immigration / property ponzi scheme, to central bank policies of money printing and interest rate suppression in order to bail out markets & corporations and to promote a 'wealth effect' via artificial asset bubbles, to runaway government spending and debt creation which has made it necessary to do the money printing, to the bailout mentality where everyone from homeowners to corporates to local government to banks to hedge funds and everyone inbetween expects to be bailed out of any mess they get themselves into, to the rise of 'moral hazard' where no amount of debt is ever enough and crazy risks become the norm because everyone expects to be bailed out all the time, to the rise of MMT to provide some sort of intellectual justification for the madness......
