Dr. Yacoub Issa is a Palestinian Christian economist (PhD Economics, Harvard University) and co-author, with his wife Dr. Mariam Issa, of The State of the World: How the American Century Ended and What Came After (Al-Quds University Press, 2047) — the definitive economic retrospective on the American century’s end.
Yacoub was sixteen when his family fled Gaza in 2027 after his father, a surgeon at Al-Shifa Hospital, was flagged by an AI-driven population monitoring system deployed by an American-Palantir consortium and held without charge for six weeks. The family resettled in Boston. His subsequent academic work traced the mechanisms of American economic decline — the AI bubble collapse, the dollar’s reserve-currency unraveling, and the military industrial complex’s dissolution — through the lens of structural finance rather than politics.
He returned to Gaza with Mariam in the Great March of Return of 2046. His closing passage from The State of the World — “The American century ended the way all empires end — not in a single defeat but in a thousand decisions that each made sense at the time” — is the most cited line in subsequent Era II political economy.