So what is holding the USA back? From doing the right things after everything else has been tried? There is wide spread failure to understand the exponential function. There is devotion to the “economy” of unequal accumulation of money-wealth to the few. There is lots of denial, so that it becomes someone else’s problem and not anyone’s responsibility. It is an abstract collective behaviour problem, like global warming, and some can see how well that is going. Cities and civilisations , and eventually our species will fail when as we can no longer organise to solve our collective predicaments, but prefer to let nature take its course.