Oct 31st 2011, 16:10 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA

TO THE chorus of discontent about America’s position in the world today, add Umair Haque, writing on his blog for Harvard Business Review. He diagnoses the problem as far worse than a bad unemployment rate:

Consider this thought experiment. If you were really, really, really rich — say, not just part of the routinely opulent 1%, but a card-carrying member of the eye-poppingly decadent .01% — what part of your life would be American? If you had the money, I'd bet you'd drive a German car, wear British shoes and an Italian suit, keep your savings in a Swiss bank, vacation in Koh Samui with shopping expeditions to Cannes, fly Emirates, develop a palate for South African wine, hire a French-trained chef, buy a few dozen Indian and Chinese companies, and pay Dubai-style taxes.

Were you to have the untrammeled economic freedom to, I'd bet you'd run screaming from big, fat, wheezing American business as usual, and its coterie of lackluster, slightly bizarre, and occasionally grody "innovations": spray cheese, ATM fees, designer diapers, disposable lowest-common-denominator junk made by prison labor, Muzak-filled big-box stores, five thousand channels and nothing on but endless reruns of Toddlers in Tiaras — not to mention toxic mega-debt, oxymoronic "healthcare," decrepit roads, and once-proud cities now crumbling into ruins. Sure, you'd probably still choose to use Google on your iPhone to surf the web — but that's about far as it'd go.

Now, one can quibble about some of Mr Haque’s points. The German car may well be made partially in South Carolina or Alabama, for example. Spray cheese has been around since the 1970s, Swiss bank accounts far longer. Anyone with cable or decent internet access can skip the terrible reality television shows in favour of “Parks and Recreation”, “Breaking Bad” or “Mad Men”. More substantially, Mr Haque’s list of alternatives is not about innovation versus lack of ideas, but small-scale exclusivity versus mass production, and when has the 0.01% preferred the latter to the former?

(Furthermore, what’s so grody about American-designed diapers? Granted, that great diaper-related invention, the Snappi, is South African. But the domestic cloth-diaper market is dominated by American innovators, whose advances have made cloth diapering a great deal more palatable than it would have been a generation ago.)

But those are quibbles. Let’s stick with Mr Haque’s larger accusation: that American business is “not nearly good enough for 21st century prosperity”. This then raises the question of why American business schools are still so highly regarded. Presumably the thousands of MBA graduates turned out by Tuck, Booth, Darden, Harvard, Haas, Stanford and Columbia—the seven American schools in the top ten of The Economist’s most recent rankings—are contributing to this rolling snowball of mediocrity Mr Haque describes. Particularly, as we’ve noted before, since while at American schools those graduates studied mostly American cases. But if you agree that the future does not lie with “big, fat, wheezing American business”, doesn’t it make sense to take your training in a different place? Why hasn’t this widespread mediocrity affected the global MBA market yet?

Perhaps it has, and there is simply an information lag—not enough applicants yet realise that American business education is a dead end. Perhaps there is a gap in the market that non-American business schools need another ten years to fill. Or perhaps Mr Haque is more provocative than accurate.

Still, there is a lesson in here for American business schools. George W. Bush aside, most MBAs do not plan to go into politics. And yet Mr Haque is far from alone in holding up failures in the public sphere (crumbling infrastructure, Detroit) as a reason to discount private innovation. Can American business schools apply their knowledge to fixing the current public sclerosis? Given the potential long-term damage to their reputations, among other reasons, they may well want to try.