Reinventing America — from the bottom up
By Peter Sims The opinions expressed are his own.
With Europe on the precipice, economically and politically, and U.S. institutions experiencing a significant crisis of moral leadership in the wake of the debt ceiling debacle, any student of history can predict that the world is approaching an inflection point.
Into this period of enormous uncertainty (and leadership vacuum) steps Thomas L. Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist, with his latest book That Used to Be US: How America Fell Behind the World it Invented and How We Can Come Back.
Coauthored with Friedman’s close personal friend, Michael Mandelbaum, who is a Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the authors set out to diagnose and frame a national dialogue and a set of possible solutions about a way forward.
Although the book has two authors, it reads much like Friedman’s other best-selling books, most recently The World is Flat, structured around a series of key arguments, themes, and insights and, of course, stories and memorable phrases.
The authors begin to lay out a major national problem by saying: “People have sort of gotten used to it.” That is, they argue, Americans have developed a certain resignation that America’s best days are behind it, while China’s best days are ahead. We hear a range of voices illustrating the national malaise, ranging from teachers to former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who declared, “We’ve become a nation of wusses,” after the NFL postponed a Philadelphia Eagles football game due to snow. “The Chinese are kicking our butt at everything,” Rendell went onto say, “If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game?”
Herein lies a crux of the authors’ literary foil, consistent with Friedman’s NYT columns over the past several years: that the Chinese are somehow doing many things better than Americans these days (although the authors are careful to note much remains to be unfolded as China develops). Their main goal in highlighting the rise of China, which they state explicitly, is to create a sense of urgency for the reform movement that is so badly needed.
You seem to be painting a rosy picture and divorcing yourself from reality.
US Corporations and the political establishment have and are perusing the dollar or euro in the sky with complete disregard to cost.
The policy of doing it cheap regardless cost is only just starting to be felt. We contracted our production out overseas and now we no longer have the labor or production facilities to have a rapid recovery.
We no longer produce goods that are as good as or better than the rest of the worlds producers, we no longer have a production based work force, housing which is a secondary based industry is now considered a primary base industry.
We do not have mass transit systems in all major cities, high rise accommodation and high density urban areas are few and far between.
Minor earth quakes on the east coast are reported as disasters followed by a storm which would be considered minor in SE Asia causes damage out of proportion. i.e., our infrastructure cannot handle it.
Hence, all is not well in the US in the short or longterm.