Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum wrote a book that is coming out this week, What Used to Be Us. The book deals in detail with what has gone wrong with the American economy. Tom Friedman, an award-winning columnist for The New York Times, appeared today on television’s Meet the Press and said this to moderator David Gregory:
"…what I and my co-author Michael Mandelbaum from Johns Hopkins are basically arguing is we've got good news and bad news. The bad news is this problem didn't start in 2008 with the subprime crisis. This problem, in our view, started at the end of the Cold War. The good news is, there is a way out if we understand exactly where we are. I beg [to offer for discussion the following] four big points, basically.
"First of all, we made the worst mistake a country or species can make at the end of the Cold War, we misread our environment. We interpreted the victory in the Cold War--for the end of the Cold War as a victory and not understanding it's actually an onset of one of the biggest challenges we've ever faced as a country. We had just unleashed two billion people just like us. But the '90s turned out to be quite a party, thanks to the peace dividend, thanks to the massive productivity boost of the Internet, and thanks, most importantly, in many ways, to the collapse in oil prices, which was like a huge tax cut. Then that brings us into the 21st century. So really the '90s was like a 3,650-day victory parade for the United States.
"Start with the 2000s, 9/11, which we're going to talk to here. Tragically, 9/11 set us on a really bad course. We spent the last decade, in many ways necessarily, many ways excessively, chasing the losers from globalization rather than the winners. And we made up for a lot of the fall behind there by basically injecting ourselves with steroids. Just as baseball players did it to hit home runs, we injected ourselves with credit steroids, created a huge housing boom and construction boom to create jobs.
"The third, I think, big change is a big technological change. The world--we, we--the grid of the world, basically, the number of people who can compete, connect, and collaborate exploded in the last decade. You know, I wrote a book in 2004 called "The World is Flat," which is about this connecting of the world. We've gone from connected to hyperconnected in terms of the people who are now competing with us and connecting with us. When we sat down to write this book, I actually went back to "The World is Flat." I looked in the index, and I realized that Facebook wasn't in it. When I said the world was flat, Facebook didn't exist--or for most people it didn't exist, Twitter was a sound, the Cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications were what you sent to college and for most people, Skype was a typo. OK. That all happened in just the last seven years, David. And what it's done is taken the world from connected to hyperconnected. And that's been a huge opportunity and a huge challenge.
"Lastly, I just say one thing, all of this is overlaid--and I'm interested in [historian] Doris' [Kearns Goodwin’s] view on this, in particular--with a generational shift. We went from the greatest generation, whose philosophy was basically save and invest--and we are still living off their saving and investing--to basically the baby boomer generation, whose philosophy turned out to be borrow and spend. And we've really shifted from a generation born in the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War--these were serious people; they wouldn't think of shutting down the government for a minute, OK--to a generation basically that is much less serious. We've gone from basically the values of the greatest generation where--which were what my philosopher friend Dov Seidman calls sustainable values, values that sustain--to a baby boomer generation whose values are situational values. Do whatever the situation allows. You put them all together and I think you really account for a lot of the hole we're in right now structurally."
-- from the transcript of Meet the Press, September 4, 2011, online at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44391034/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/t/meet-press-transcript-september/
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Related Information
Tom Friedman gave a blistering speech at the American Institute of Architects convention on May 12, 2011. Here’s a link to a write-up summarizing his comments by the Times-Picayune newspaper:http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2011/05/new_york_times_columnist_thoma.html
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