This case study applies Coupling Geometry to the United States from 1991 to the present, testing seven predictions frozen from the coupling architecture against quantitative data from the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Congressional Budget Office, Gallup, and Pew Research Center, with the analytical spine supplied by David North’s A Quarter Century of War. It is the most data-rich case in the corpus and the first whose subject system is still active: unresolved, still generating evidence, and now also the object of the programme’s pre-registered prospective testing, with scores and predictions locked in April 2026 against interim markers in 2028, 2031, and 2036. All seven predictions are confirmed against the historical record to date. The central finding reverses the standard reading of the post-Cold War period: what was interpreted as triumph was structurally an intensification of internal contradiction. The Soviet dissolution expanded the frontier and removed the external constraint — competitive ideological pressure — that had moderated domestic extraction; the peace dividend was captured by the extractive class, with the top one per cent’s share of net worth rising from 22.8 per cent in 1989 to 30.8 per cent in 2024 while the bottom half’s share fell; financialisation operated as a self-defeating spiral, presented as the answer to deindustrialisation while accelerating it; institutional trust declined secularly with distribution rather than with political events, persisting across administrations of both parties; the legitimacy system passed through a predictable sequence of progressively more brittle coordination modes — material, triumphalist, securitised, populist-nationalist — each transition tracking material falsification; and the post-9/11 security apparatus exhibited the refractive field in liberal-democratic institutional form, inflating threat assessments because the securitised legitimacy mode required threats to be real. The analysis is post-hoc, its estimates analyst-dependent, and the frozen-prediction record carries the evidential weight of internal-only pre-registration; the pre-registered markers, committed before outcomes, are where the case will earn or lose its standing, and adversarial examination by sceptical scholars is invited. Case Study XV: The Chinese Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1949–1979 – Case Study XVII: The United Kingdom, 1688–Present
Philip Pepper (Tue,) studied this question.