Oh, you know, one question I didn't ask before but I am curious about. If you had a magic wand and could have people make the changes necessary to prevent the pending downturn, what would it be?
"What magic wand could you wave to make a person live forever?" It's the same question - civilizations and nations have their arc, and pretty reliably go through it. There's no quick fixes.
At this point? I don't think there's much that can be done - one of the things history teaches is that the only way to make a civilization last a very long time is to have things be very, very static - you get stability, but not much in the way of technological progress or anything. You can have Egypt under the Pharoahs, which was very stable and long lasting, but had very little change over time, technological or otherwise. China managed to find a way to maintain some sort of cultural thread through their repeated cycles, but it wasn't particularly stable over the long run either. They just kept doing it over and over again.
There's no way to take a nation or civilization that's heading down the backside of their arc through history and turn it around that anyone has found, so far.
That said, things that would radically reduce the impact of what I view as the coming likely storms, and likely prolong the nation:
- A return to a focus on local manufacturing and local economies - and not debt-backed ones, either. Those work great right up until they don't. Having heavily distributed production facilities means that you don't lose as much when one area fails due to a natural disaster. It's very inefficient, but "efficient" systems have little or no redundancy - look at Toyota when their one supplier of brake cylinders a few years back had a problem.
- A radical reduction in energy use - this would be the biggest one in terms of having an impact. We should be designing housing to work with the local environment, not fight against it (typical suburban homes are uninhabitable without a lot of energy spent on climate control, and a properly designed home for the environment doesn't have that issue). Renewable energy sources are fundamentally intermittent, and designing low energy housing systems that work with that goes a long ways. There's no excuse for homes being built without solar hot water, proper thermal mass, earth coupling (if in a cooling dominated climate), proper solar exposure, etc. Unfortunately, you can't retrofit that into a home easily.
- A focus on distributed food production - industrial scale food production has major problems if the debt and non-renewable resources (phosphorous is the most likely to get exciting soon) aren't available. The same thing with distributed industrial capabilities applies here.
If we are going to try and maintain an industrial civilization, on top of that, I'd like to see a good high voltage DC grid built out for regional interconnection in the US (it's a lot easier than AC for long distance now), and I'm a fan of breeder reactors to make use of our waste sitting around (the amount of unusable nasty stuff in reactor waste is pretty small - most of it is either short lived or still entirely unburned and useful uranium). But I'm not sure that building new reactors is a good idea at this point in our arc.
And then there are the cultural aspects. We've passed the point where politicians are particularly useful - and people look at the political process mostly as, "What can I get for me out of who I vote for?" Again, history shows that this doesn't end well. I can dream of a few politicians with their heads on straight, but when the whole system is focused on short term thinking and funneling wealth to whoever scratched their back last, a few people don't make a difference.