It was with great relish that I had read Thomas L Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005) a few years ago. His recent book, co-authored with Michael Mandelbaum, and titled That Used to be Us: What went wrong with America – and how it can come back (2011) was equally engrossing.
Prior to reading this book, if you had asked me what is wrong with America, I would have said that America is suffering from an overdose of Keynesian economics. Upon reading this book, however, I find that there are other factors involved too.
America is on the decline not only due to its hefty borrowings and budget deficits and monetary stimuli, it also has done poorly in the face of globalization and the revolution in information technology. As far as globalization is concerned, the authors state: “…with the end of the Cold War, technology was flattening the global economic playing field, reducing the advantages of the people in developed countries such as the United States, while empowering those in the developing ones. The pace of global change accelerated to a speed faster than any we had seen before. It took us Americans some time to appreciate that while many of our new competitors were low-wage, low-skilled workers, for the first time a growing number, particularly those in Asia, were low-wage, high-skilled workers. We knew all about cheap labour, but we had never had to deal with cheap genius – at scale….The failure to understand we were living in a new world and to adapt to it was a colossal and costly American mistake (italics in original).”
And regarding the IT revolution, the authors write: “If globalization has put virtually every American job under pressure, the IT revolution has changed the composition of work – as computers, cell phones, the Internet, and all their social-media offshoots have spread. It has eliminated old jobs and spawned new ones – and whole new industries – faster than ever. Moreover, by making the almost all work more complex and more demanding of critical-thinking skills, it requires every American to be better educated than ever to secure and keep a well-paying job.”
Friedman and Mandelbaum call for an overhaul of the American education system which caters to an older generation of students and look at Singapore and China for better models. They deplore the dumbing down of the US schools. Students just need to be challenged to work harder as the Chinese are doing, they say.
How much ever the running the US may do to retain its position, I believe that this century is inevitably going to be the century of China and other Asian countries (not necessarily including India).
Prior to reading this book, if you had asked me what is wrong with America, I would have said that America is suffering from an overdose of Keynesian economics. Upon reading this book, however, I find that there are other factors involved too.
America is on the decline not only due to its hefty borrowings and budget deficits and monetary stimuli, it also has done poorly in the face of globalization and the revolution in information technology. As far as globalization is concerned, the authors state: “…with the end of the Cold War, technology was flattening the global economic playing field, reducing the advantages of the people in developed countries such as the United States, while empowering those in the developing ones. The pace of global change accelerated to a speed faster than any we had seen before. It took us Americans some time to appreciate that while many of our new competitors were low-wage, low-skilled workers, for the first time a growing number, particularly those in Asia, were low-wage, high-skilled workers. We knew all about cheap labour, but we had never had to deal with cheap genius – at scale….The failure to understand we were living in a new world and to adapt to it was a colossal and costly American mistake (italics in original).”
And regarding the IT revolution, the authors write: “If globalization has put virtually every American job under pressure, the IT revolution has changed the composition of work – as computers, cell phones, the Internet, and all their social-media offshoots have spread. It has eliminated old jobs and spawned new ones – and whole new industries – faster than ever. Moreover, by making the almost all work more complex and more demanding of critical-thinking skills, it requires every American to be better educated than ever to secure and keep a well-paying job.”
Friedman and Mandelbaum call for an overhaul of the American education system which caters to an older generation of students and look at Singapore and China for better models. They deplore the dumbing down of the US schools. Students just need to be challenged to work harder as the Chinese are doing, they say.
How much ever the running the US may do to retain its position, I believe that this century is inevitably going to be the century of China and other Asian countries (not necessarily including India).
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