“THAT USED TO BE US, How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back” By Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
NEW YORK TIMES: Failure after failure after failure. Bubbles that end in busts. Wars that aren’t won. Stimuli that don’t stimulate. All together plunging the United States into the worst economic slump since the 1930s. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, America faces a geopolitical rival that is also an effective economic competitor — a combination not seen since the Kaiser’s Germany…
The “frustrated optimists” describe a country whose people are falling behind, a political system increasingly paralyzed and institutions that seem ever more inadequate to meet ever more intractable challenges. They remark that China led the world until it bumped into a series of “bad centuries” after 1644. That fate could overtake America too…
Together they offer a range of examples of how America can do better than it has done in the recent past. … (more)
