That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
400
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
400eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
America is in trouble. We face four major challenges on which our future depends, and we are failing to meet them—and if we delay any longer, soon it will be too late for us to pass along the American dream to future generations.
In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, offer both a wake-up call and a call to collective action. They analyze the four challenges we face—globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and our pattern of excessive energy consumption—and spell out what we need to do now to sustain the American dream and preserve American power in the world. They explain how the end of the Cold War blinded the nation to the need to address these issues seriously, and how China's educational successes, industrial might, and technological prowess remind us of the ways in which "that used to be us." They explain how the paralysis of our political system and the erosion of key American values have made it impossible for us to carry out the policies the country urgently needs.
And yet Friedman and Mandelbaum believe that the recovery of American greatness is within reach. They show how America's history, when properly understood, offers a five-part formula for prosperity that will enable us to cope successfully with the challenges we face. They offer vivid profiles of individuals who have not lost sight of the American habits of bold thought and dramatic action. They propose a clear way out of the trap into which the country has fallen, a way that includes the rediscovery of some of our most vital traditions and the creation of a new thirdparty movement to galvanize the country.
That Used to Be Us is both a searching exploration of the American condition today and a rousing manifesto for American renewal.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429995115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2011 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 500,202 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist-the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of six bestselling books, among them From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat.
He was born in Minneapolis in 1953, and grew up in the middle-class Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean studies, attended St. Antony's College, Oxford, on a Marshall Scholarship, and received an M.Phil. degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. After three years with United Press International, he joined The New York Times, where he has worked ever since as a reporter, correspondent, bureau chief, and columnist. At the Times, he has won three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1983 for international reporting (from Lebanon), in 1988 for international reporting (from Israel), and in 2002 for his columns after the September 11th attacks.
Friedman's first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, won the National Book Award in 1989. His second book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), won the Overseas Press Club Award for best book on foreign policy in 2000. In 2002 FSG published a collection of his Pulitzer Prize-winning columns, along with a diary he kept after 9/11, as Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. His fourth book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005) became a #1 New York Times bestseller and received the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in November 2005. A revised and expanded edition was published in hardcover in 2006 and in 2007. The World Is Flat has sold more than 4 million copies in thirty-seven languages.
In 2008 he brought out Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which was published in a revised edition a year later. His sixth book, That Used to Be Us: How American Fell Behind in the World We Invented and How We Can Come Back, co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, was published in 2011.
Thomas L. Friedman lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.
Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., where he is also the chairman of the Department of American Foreign Policy. Before joining Johns Hopkins in 1990, Professor Mandelbaum taught at Harvard University, Columbia University and at the United States Naval Academy. He also has taught business executives at the Wharton Advanced Management Program in the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mandelbaum is the author of 10 books and the editor of 12 more. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" of 2010.
His first book, The Nuclear Question: The United States and Nuclear Weapons, was published in 1979. The Economist called it “an excellent history of American nuclear policy...a clear, readable book.”
Mandelbaum spent a year in the State Department in Washington from 1982-1983 on a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship in the office of Under Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, working on security issues.
After publishing three books on nuclear weapons issues, The Nuclear Question (1979), The Nuclear Revolution (1981) and The Nuclear Future (1983), Mandelbaum shifted his focus to the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States, co-writing two books on the subject, Reagan and Gorbachev (1987) and The Global Rivals (1988), which was made into a Public Broadcasting series with Bernard Kalb as the host. In 1986 he became a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he also was the director of the Council’s Project on East-West Relations. In this role, which continued for 17 years until 2003, Mandelbaum became a frequent guest on television and radio, discussing such major issues as the arms race, the fall of the Soviet Union, the war in Iraq and the implications of globalization. He has appeared on The CBS Evening News, The News Hour, Face the Nation, Larry King Live and The Charlie Rose Show, among many other programs.
From 1985-2005 Mandelbaum wrote a regular foreign affairs analysis column for Newsday. His Op-Ed pieces on foreign affairs have also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and have been republished in newspapers around the world.
In addition to his newspaper columns, Mandelbaum has written many longer articles for TIME Magazine, as well as the journal, Foreign Affairs, including his provocative 1996 essay entitled “Foreign Policy as Social Work” (about the foreign policy of the Clinton administration), followed two years later by “A Perfect Failure” about the war in Kosovo.
In 1988 Mandelbaum published one of his major books, The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the 19th and 20th Centuries, which the American Historical Review called "a tour de force." It is a survey of how a select number of countries have dealt with their security concerns in the modern era. Publishers Weekly called it "brilliant and enjoyable.... [Mandelbaum's] knowledge of philosophy, politics, history and economics results in a stunning delineation of centuries of military actions, political maneuverings and cultural uprisings." The World Affairs Councils of America named him one of the most influential people in American foreign policy.
Mandelbaum’s 1996 book, The Dawn of Peace in Europe, received a rave review in The New York Times Book Review, which called it “a brilliant book...the most lucid exposition yet of the post-Cold War order in Europe.” It was in this book that he introduced readers to the idea that Europe has become a “zone of warlessness” — a region in which armies are kept small and defense budgets modest because the people and their governments have been able to resolve their differences peacefully through such organizations as the European Union rather than, as in the past, on the field of battle.
In 2002 Mandelbaum published The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century, which became an instant classic on the major international themes of the new millennium and has been translated into seven languages, including Chinese and Arabic.
In 2004 he took time out from his usual focus on international relations to write The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football and Basketball and What They See When They Do, which analyzes the appeal of team sports in the United States and compares the workings of sports teams to the cooperation necessary in business enterprise. Pete Hamill in The New York Times described the book as "a subtle extension of Mandelbaum's own expertise in foreign policy. It can help explain the United States to the rest of the often-baffled world.”
In 2006 Mandelbaum returned to the international arena with The Case For Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century. It is a provocative, eye-opening look at America’s global role, the responsibilities it has undertaken, and the challenges it faces. The New York Review of Books described it as “an eloquent statement of the vital role of America in twenty-first-century global security.”
Democracy's Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World's Most Popular Form of Government, published in 2007, was hailed by The Weekly Standard as "an excellent and broadly accessible book.... Mandelbaum stresses the role of free markets, which provide not only economic growth but also a school in the qualities that liberal democracy depends on." His book The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era was released in August of 2010.
Mandelbaum was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1999-2000 and a Carnegie Scholar (in 2004-2005) of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. These fellowships supported the writing of his two most recent foreign policy books.
From 1984-2005 he was the associate director of the Aspen Institute’s Congressional Program on Relations With the Former Communist World, which organized seminars for members of Congress to educate them on the issues facing the United States in its relations with the countries of central and eastern Europe, particularly Russia. In this role he has traveled throughout Russia and Eastern Europe and has met regularly with the members of Congress who take the lead on foreign policy issues, as well as with their counterparts in both western and eastern European legislatures. This has deepened his understanding of the perspectives of American House and Senate members as well as the responsibilities and constraints on many foreign legislators. He also has testified before the Congressional committees and subcommittees with responsibilities for foreign relations and the armed services.
As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mandelbaum contributes his understanding of the Middle East to this Washington, D.C.-based policy group and has made numerous trips to the region with its leadership.
A popular speaker for the United States Information Agency for more than two decades, Mandelbaum has explained American foreign policy to diverse groups throughout Europe, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, India and the Middle East. His ability to cut through clichés and misunderstandings have made him a popular lecturer. He lectures widel
Hometown:
Washington, D.C. areaDate of Birth:
July 20, 1953Place of Birth:
Minneapolis, MinnesotaEducation:
B.A. in Mediterranean Studies, Brandeis University, 1975; M.A. in Modern Middle East Studies, Oxford University, 1978Website:
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/Read an Excerpt
That Used To Be Us
How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented and How we can Come Back
By Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum
Picador
Copyright © 2011 Thomas L. Friedman and Michael MandelbaumAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-9511-5
CHAPTER 1
If You See Something, Say Something
This is a book about America that begins in China.
In September 2010, Tom attended the World Economic Forum's summer conference in Tianjin, China. Five years earlier, getting to Tianjin had involved a three-and-a-half-hour car ride from Beijing to a polluted, crowded Chinese version of Detroit, but things had changed. Now, to get to Tianjin, you head to the Beijing South Railway Station — an ultramodern flying saucer of a building with glass walls and an oval roof covered with 3,246 solar panels — buy a ticket from an electronic kiosk offering choices in Chinese and English, and board a world-class high-speed train that goes right to another roomy, modern train station in downtown Tianjin. Said to be the fastest in the world when it began operating in 2008, the Chinese bullet train covers 115 kilometers, or 72 miles, in a mere twenty-nine minutes.
The conference itself took place at the Tianjin Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center — a massive, beautifully appointed structure, the like of which exists in few American cities. As if the convention center wasn't impressive enough, the conference's co-sponsors in Tianjin gave some facts and figures about it (www.tj-summerdavos.cn). They noted that it contained a total floor area of 230,000 square meters (almost 2.5 million square feet) and that "construction of the Meijiang Convention Center started on September 15, 2009, and was completed in May, 2010." Reading that line, Tom started counting on his fingers: Let's see — September, October, November, December, January ...
Eight months.
Returning home to Maryland from that trip, Tom was describing the Tianjin complex and how quickly it was built to Michael and his wife, Anne. At one point Anne asked: "Excuse me, Tom. Have you been to our subway stop lately?" We all live in Bethesda and often use the Washington Metrorail subway to get to work in downtown Washington, D.C. Tom had just been at the Bethesda station and knew exactly what Anne was talking about: The two short escalators had been under repair for nearly six months. While the one being fixed was closed, the other had to be shut off and converted into a two-way staircase. At rush hour, this was creating a huge mess. Everyone trying to get on or off the platform had to squeeze single file up and down one frozen escalator. It sometimes took ten minutes just to get out of the station. A sign on the closed escalator said that its repairs were part of a massive escalator "modernization" project.
What was taking this "modernization" project so long? We investigated. Cathy Asato, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, had told the Maryland Community News (October 20, 2010) that "the repairs were scheduled to take about six months and are on schedule. Mechanics need 10 to 12 weeks to fix each escalator."
A simple comparison made a startling point: It took China's Teda Construction Group thirty-two weeks to build a world-class convention center from the ground up — including giant escalators in every corner — and it was taking the Washington Metro crew twenty-four weeks to repair two tiny escalators of twenty-one steps each. We searched a little further and found that WTOP, a local news radio station, had interviewed the Metro interim general manager, Richard Sarles, on July 20, 2010. Sure, these escalators are old, he said, but "they have not been kept in a state of good repair. We're behind the curve on that, so we have to catch up ... Just last week, smoke began pouring out of the escalators at the Dupont Circle station during rush hour."
On November 14, 2010, The Washington Post ran a letter to the editor from Mark Thompson of Kensington, Maryland, who wrote:
I have noted with interest your reporting on the $225,000 study that Metro hired Vertical Transportation Excellence to conduct into the sorry state of the system's escalators and elevators ... I am sure that the study has merit. But as someone who has ridden Metro for more than 30 years, I can think of an easier way to assess the health of the escalators. For decades they ran silently and efficiently. But over the past several years — when the escalators are running — aging or ill-fitting parts have generated horrific noises that sound to me like a Tyrannosaurus Rex trapped in a tar pit screeching its dying screams.
The quote we found most disturbing, though, came from a Maryland Community News story about the long lines at rush hour caused by the seemingly endless Metro repairs: "'My impression, standing on line there, is people have sort of gotten used to it,' said Benjamin Ross, who lives in Bethesda and commutes every day from the downtown station."
The National Watercooler
People have sort of gotten used to it. Indeed, that sense of resignation, that sense that, well, this is just how things are in America today, that sense that America's best days are behind it and China's best days are ahead of it, have become the subject of watercooler, dinner-party, grocery-line, and classroom conversations all across America today. We hear the doubts from children, who haven't been to China. Tom took part in the September 2010 Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) meeting in San Jose, California. As part of the program, there was a "School of the Future Design Competition," which called for junior high school students to design their own ideal green school. He met with the finalists on the last morning of the convention, and they talked about global trends. At one point, Tom asked them what they thought about China. A young blond-haired junior high school student, Isabelle Foster, from Old Lyme Middle School in Connecticut, remarked, "It seems like they have more ambition and will than we do." Tom asked her, "Where did you get that thought?" She couldn't really explain it, she said. She had never visited China. But it was just how she felt. It's in the air.
We heard the doubts about America from Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, in his angry reaction after the National Football League postponed for two days a game scheduled in Philadelphia between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Minnesota Vikings — because of a severe snowstorm. The NFL ordered the games postponed because it didn't want fans driving on icy, snow-covered roads. But Rendell saw it as an indicator of something more troubling — that Americans had gone soft. "It goes against everything that football is all about," Rendell said in an interview with the sports radio station 97.5 The Fanatic in Philadelphia (December 27, 2010). "We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked, and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."
We read the doubts in letters to the editor, such as this impassioned post by Eric R. on The New York Times comments page under a column Tom wrote about China (December 1, 2010):
We are nearly complete in our evolution from Lewis and Clark into Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam. We used to embrace challenges, endure privation, throttle our fear and strike out into the (unknown) wilderness. In this mode we rallied to span the continent with railroads, construct a national highway system, defeated monstrous dictators, cured polio and landed men on the moon. Now we text and put on makeup as we drive, spend more on video games than books, forswear exercise, demonize hunting, and are rapidly succumbing to obesity and diabetes. So much for the pioneering spirit that made us (once) the greatest nation on earth, one that others looked up to and called "exceptional."
Sometimes the doubts hit us where we least expect them. A few weeks after returning from China, Tom went to the White House to conduct an interview. He passed through the Secret Service checkpoint on Pennsylvania Avenue, and after putting his bags through the X-ray machine and collecting them, he grabbed the metal door handle to enter the White House driveway. The handle came off in his hand. "Oh, it does that sometimes," the Secret Service agent at the door said nonchalantly, as Tom tried to fit the wobbly handle back into the socket.
And often now we hear those doubts from visitors here — as when a neighbor in Bethesda mentions that over the years he has hired several young women from Germany to help with his child care, and they always remark on two things: how many squirrels there are in Washington, and how rutted the streets are. They just can't believe that America's capital would have such potholed streets.
Frustrated Optimists
So, do we buy the idea, increasingly popular in some circles, that Britain owned the nineteenth century, America dominated the twentieth century, and China will inevitably reign supreme in the twenty-first century — and that all you have to do is fly from Tianjin or Shanghai to Washington, D.C., and take the subway to know that?
No, we do not. And we have written this book to explain why no American, young or old, should resign himself or herself to that view either. The two of us are not pessimists when it comes to America and its future. We are optimists, but we are also frustrated. We are frustrated optimists. In our view, the two attitudes go together. We are optimists because American society, with its freewheeling spirit, its diversity of opinions and talents, its flexible economy, its work ethic and penchant for innovation, is in fact ideally suited to thrive in the tremendously challenging world we are living in. We are optimists because the American political and economic systems, when functioning properly, can harness the nation's talents and energy to meet the challenges the country faces. We are optimists because Americans have plenty of experience in doing big, hard things together. And we are optimists because our track record of national achievement gives ample grounds for believing we can overcome our present difficulties.
But that's also why we're frustrated. Optimism or pessimism about America's future cannot simply be a function of our capacity to do great things or our history of having done great things. It also has to be a function of our will actually to do those things again. So many Americans are doing great things today, but on a small scale. Philanthropy, volunteerism, individual initiative: they're all impressive, but what the country needs most is collective action on a large scale.
We cannot be pessimists about America when we know that it is home to so many creative, talented, hardworking people, but we cannot help but be frustrated when we discover how many of those people feel that our country is not educating the workforce they need, or admitting the energetic immigrants they seek, or investing in the infrastructure they require, or funding the research they envision, or putting in place the intelligent tax laws and incentives that our competitors have installed.
Hence the title of this opening chapter: "If you see something, say something." That is the mantra that the Department of Homeland Security plays over and over on loudspeakers in airports and railroad stations around the country. Well, we have seen and heard something, and millions of Americans have, too. What we've seen is not a suspicious package left under a stairwell. What we've seen is hiding in plain sight. We've seen something that poses a greater threat to our national security and well-being than al-Qaeda does. We've seen a country with enormous potential falling into disrepair, political disarray, and palpable discomfort about its present condition and future prospects.
This book is our way of saying something — about what is wrong, why things have gone wrong, and what we can and must do to make them right.
Why say it now, though, and why the urgency?
"Why now?" is easy to answer: because our country is in a slow decline, just slow enough for us to be able to pretend — or believe — that a decline is not taking place. As the ever-optimistic Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, son of Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver, and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, responded when we told him about our book: "It's as though we just slip a little each year and shrug it off to circumstances beyond our control — an economic downturn here, a social problem there, the political mess this year. We're losing a step a day and no one's saying, Stop!" No doubt, Shriver added, most Americans "would still love to be the country of great ideals and achievements, but no one seems willing to pay the price." Or, as Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, put it to us: "What we lack in the U.S. today is the confidence that is generated by solving one big, hard problem — together." It has been a long time now since we did something big and hard together.
We will argue that this slow-motion decline has four broad causes. First, since the end of the Cold War, we, and especially our political leaders, have stopped starting each day by asking the two questions that are crucial for determining public policy: What world are we living in, and what exactly do we need to do to thrive in this world? The U.S. Air Force has a strategic doctrine originally designed by one of its officers, John Boyd, called the OODA loop. It stands for "observe, orient, decide, act." Boyd argued that when you are a fighter pilot, if your OODA loop is faster than the other guy's, you will always win the dogfight. Today, America's OODA loop is far too slow and often discombobulated. In American political discourse today, there is far too little observing, orienting, deciding, and acting and far too much shouting, asserting, dividing, and postponing. When the world gets really fast, the speed with which a country can effectively observe, orient, decide, and act matters more than ever.
Second, over the last twenty years, we as a country have failed to address some of our biggest problems — particularly education, deficits and debt, and energy and climate change — and now they have all worsened to a point where they cannot be ignored but they also cannot be effectively addressed without collective action and collective sacrifice. Third, to make matters worse, we have stopped investing in our country's traditional formula for greatness, a formula that goes back to the founding of the country. Fourth, as we will explain, we have not been able to fix our problems or reinvest in our strengths because our political system has become paralyzed and our system of values has suffered serious erosion. But finally, being optimists, we will offer our own strategy for overcoming these problems.
"Why the urgency?" is also easy to answer. In part the urgency stems from the fact that as a country we do not have the resources or the time to waste that we had twenty years ago, when our budget deficit was under control and all of our biggest challenges seemed at least manageable. In the last decade especially, we have spent so much of our time and energy — and the next generation's money — fighting terrorism and indulging ourselves with tax cuts and cheap credit that we now have no reserves. We are driving now without a bumper, without a spare tire, and with the gas gauge nearing empty. Should the market or Mother Nature make a sudden disruptive move in the wrong direction, we would not have the resources to shield ourselves from the worst effects, as we had in the past. Winston Churchill was fond of saying that "America will always do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options." America simply doesn't have time anymore for exhausting any options other than the right ones.
Our sense of urgency also derives from the fact that our political system is not properly framing, let alone addressing, our ultimate challenge. Our goal should not be merely to solve America's debt and deficit problems. That is far too narrow. Coping with these problems is important — indeed necessary and urgent — but it is only a means to an end. The goal is for America to remain a great country. This means that while reducing our deficits, we must also invest in education, infrastructure, and research and development, as well as open our society more widely to talented immigrants and fix the regulations that govern our economy. Immigration, education, and sensible regulation are traditional ingredients of the American formula for greatness. They are more vital than ever if we hope to realize the full potential of the American people in the coming decades, to generate the resources to sustain our prosperity, and to remain the global leader that we have been and that the world needs us to be. We, the authors of this book, don't want simply to restore American solvency. We want to maintain American greatness. We are not green-eyeshade guys. We're Fourth of July guys.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from That Used To Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum. Copyright © 2011 Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Preface to the Paperback Edition: It's Halftime in America,
Introduction: Growing Up in America,
PART I - THE DIAGNOSIS,
ONE - If You See Something, Say Something,
TWO - Ignoring Our Problems,
THREE - Ignoring Our History,
PART II - THE EDUCATION CHALLENGE,
FOUR - Up in the Air,
FIVE - Help Wanted,
SIX - Homework x 2 = The American Dream,
SEVEN - Average Is Over,
PART III - THE WAR ON MATH AND PHYSICS,
EIGHT - "This Is Our Due",
NINE - The War on Math (and the Future),
TEN - The War on Physics and Other Good Things,
PART IV - POLITICAL FAILURE,
ELEVEN - The Terrible Twos,
TWELVE - "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It",
THIRTEEN - Devaluation,
PART V - REDISCOVERING AMERICA,
FOURTEEN - They Just Didn't Get the Word,
FIFTEEN - Shock Therapy,
SIXTEEN - Rediscovering America,
ALSO BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN,
About the Author,
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR - THAT USED TO BE US,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Thank You for Being Late,
Copyright Page,
Reading Group Guide
"It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth—that used to be us." —President Barack Obama, November 3, 2010
From the skyrocketing federal deficit to plummeting rankings in education, America faces a turbulent future. How did we get to this point? What will it take to make our nation a beacon of innovation and prosperity once again? In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, provide a searching, clear-eyed assessment of the situation, with bold solutions for getting the country back on track. Drawing on in-depth analysis from around the globe, their approach balances evidence from a variety of viewpoints, including the political, entrepreneurial, scientific, and technological sectors. Despite America's woes, the authors argue, our nation's ideals remain strong—strong enough to propel us to a new era of reinvention.
A wake-up call for every American, That Used to Be Us raises the most important questions of our time. We hope this guide will enrich your discussion of Friedman and Mandelbaum's inspiring action plan.