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Summary
Summary
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 includesthe 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.
Author Notes
Journalist Thomas L. Friedman was born in 1953 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Friedman graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in Mediterranean Studies and earned a graduate degree from Oxford in Modern Middle East Studies. His reporting on the war in Lebanon won the George Polk Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. He won a second Pulitzer for his work in Israel. Friedman began his career as a correspondent for United Press International and later served as bureau chief for the New York Times in Beirut and Jerusalem. He moved to the op-ed page of The New York Times as a foreign affairs columnist. In 2002, Friedman won his third Pulitzer Prize, this time for Commentary.
Friedman wrote about his experiences as a Jewish-American reporter in the Middle East in From Beirut to Jerusalem, which won the National Book Award in 1989. The bestselling Lexus and the Olive Tree won the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy. He wrote Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 and The World Is Flat, which received the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His other works include Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0, and That Used to Be Us which made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. His title, Thank You for Being Late, made the New York Times Best Seller List in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Friedman and Mandelbaum provide a strong and powerful assessment of the serious political, technological, and economic challenges facing the United States, insight into how the U.S. ended up mired in these predicaments, and some "radical centrist" ideas on how to resolve the nation's current issues. Narrator Jason Culp delivers a nuanced performance in this audio production. His tone communicates the authors' sincerity, but avoids condescension and didacticism. And Culp's ability to emphasize key phrases and utilize pregnant pauses helps clarify the book's many complex ideas and abstruse concepts. Additionally, both authors narrate the book's introduction, switching back and forth in a reading that, while it pales in comparison to Culp's performance, proves to be pleasant rather than disjointed. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Friedman, whose prescient if unleavened The World Is Flat (2005) explained the cold realities of globalization specifically, increased competition worldwide that have since hit Americans hard joins Johns Hopkins international-studies professor Mandelbaum to explain the most serious problems the U.S. currently faces and offer some possible solutions. First is China's astonishing economic success during the past 20 years along with America's failure to respond with equal vigor. The authors cite four challenges the U.S. must urgently address: ongoing globalization, which puts downward pressure on American wages and jobs; the changing nature of work wrought by the IT revolution; the national deficit; and climate change. Much of the book rightfully examines the role education and, especially, great teachers could play in equipping young Americans to navigate the global economy, and it cites a paralyzed, polarized federal government and a weakened economy as drags on America's ability to act. Although many of the ideas here have been well covered in Friedman's newspaper column, and although Friedman's prognostications have been imperfect (e.g., he predicted a democratization of the Middle East from the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), he and Mandelbaum, two of the few adults in the room, create, first, a realistic portrait of today's global economy and then a workable plan by which Americans might thrive in this new world they've helped invent.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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. Into this grim situation, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum step forward to offer hope. Or do they? For there is an unnerving tension at the core of "That Used to Be Us," a discordant emotional counterpoint. I don't think it's a disagreement between the authors so much as a disagreement within each of them. Friedman and Mandelbaum repeatedly describe themselves as "optimists," albeit "frustrated" optimists. Yet the stories they tell repeatedly suggest very different and less reassuring conclusions. The main line of the book's argument will arrive with congenial familiarity. Friedman is one of America's most famous commentators, Mandelbaum one of its most distinguished academic experts on foreign policy. Their views - and their point of view - are well known. They speak from just slightly to the left of the battered American political center: for free trade, open immigration, balanced budgets, green energy, consumption taxes, health care reform, investments in education and infrastructure. There is a lot to like and admire in this approach. It is progressive and liberal in the best senses of both those words. It has resulted in a book that is at once enlightened and enlightening. Friedman - not that you need me to tell you this - is a very good reporter. He takes us with him to visit a high school for disadvantaged youths that triumphantly sends 100 percent of its graduates to college, then to view a new fighter jet that runs on fuel 50 percent of which is derived from the oil of pressed mustard seeds. The partnership with Mandelbaum has been fruitful, curbing Friedman's notorious verbal excesses and stiffening the book with extra analytic rigor: a chart detailing the collapse of federal support for research and development is especially disturbing. Together they offer a range of examples of how America can do better than it has done in the recent past. Despite its slightly misleading subtitle, "That Used to Be Us" is not really a "how to" book, not really a policy book. Friedman and Mandelbaum go very light on the programmatic details. Instead, they emphasize the power of good examples: instance after instance of forward-looking C.E.O.'s, effective military commanders, tough educational administrators, responsible politicians who have made things work. The book is more a demonstration than an argument: The situation isn't hopeless! Success is possible! See here and here and here and here. And yet . . . Friedman and Mandelbaum also point out things like this: New military recruits arrive much less physically fit than previous generations because of a lack of exercise, and they come in with what Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calls "a mixed bag of values." Dempsey goes on: "I am not suggesting they have bad values, but among all the values that define our profession, first and most important is trust. If we could do only one thing with new soldiers, it would be to instill in them trust for one another, for the chain of command and for the nation," O.K., so that's alarming. And so is this point from Arne Duncan, the secretary of education: "Currently about one-fourth of ninth graders fail to graduate high school within four years. Among the O.E.C.D. countries, only Mexico, Spain, Turkey and New Zealand have higher dropout rates than the United States." How about this statistic from Friedman and Mandelbaum: "Thirty years ago, 10 percent of California's general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons. Today nearly 11 percent goes to prisons and 8 percent to higher education." Or this, which comes from the Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz: "The top 1 percent of Americans now take in roughly one-fourth of America's total income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, . . . the top 1 percent now controls 40 percent of the total. This is new. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent." Or this, from the Pentagon via Arne Duncan: "Seventy-five percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit." 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. Prophetic warnings usually culminate with an "unless" clause. The casual reader will flip through the book searching in some frustration for the Friedman-Mandelbaum "unless." Their main recommendations tend to stop a block short of the destination: the solutions are unspecific, when they are not outright fanciful, like their yearning for a third-party presidential campaign. Yet there is an "unless" looming implicitly in these pages. Through the weltering confusion of their four points of this and five pillars of that, Friedman and Mandelbaum again and again return to one inspiring theme: the leader "too dumb to quit," who insists on battling a problem again and again until a solution is found. "That Used to Be Us" is a morality play, in which responsible and irresponsible leaders contend against one another: the senator willing to make compromises against the senator who cravenly signs a no-tax pledge; the C.E.O. rebuilding a manufacturing plant against the banker engaged in paper manipulations; the governor who persuades teachers to rewrite their contract to end tenure for the incompetent against the politicians who dismiss today's deficits as tomorrow's problem. Friedman and Mandelbaum at one point praise the beauty of solutions that rise from the bottom up as opposed to the top down. This praise is not consciously insincere, but pretty plainly it does not accurately represent their operational plan. Friedman and Mandelbaum are men of the American elite, and they write to salute those members of the American elite who behave public-spiritedly and to scourge those who do not. They are winners, writing to urge other winners to have more of a care for their fellow citizens who are not winners. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that! Societies inescapably generate elites. Those elites can be public-spirited and responsible or they can be selfish and shortsighted. An elite can have concern and care for the less advantaged or it can callously disregard them. Maybe not surprisingly, the language of anti-elitism has often been a useful tool of the most rapacious and merciless among the elite. American society has had a big serving of that ugly anti-elitist spirit in the recent past. It could use more of the generous responsible spirit Friedman and Mandelbaum recommend. They say less than might be wished about what a more public-spirited American elite might do. But they have eloquently described what such an elite should want to do. Friedman and Mandelbaum describe themselves as optimists, but the stories they tell are not reassuring. David Frum is the editor of FrumForum .com.
Choice Review
Thomas Friedman is a popular writer who has a knack for making the conventional wisdom sound profound, often by presenting powerful business leaders in the best possible light. Here, he and Mandelbaum (Johns Hopkins Univ.), both of whom have authored several books, call for a renewal of the US economy in response to the competitive challenge created by modern information technology. They envision a highly entrepreneurial society in which individuals are promised nothing but expected to provide highly creative work and ideas that contribute to corporate success, which is assumed to be in the best interest of society as a whole. However, the authors show little concern for the lives of such people, let alone those who cannot meet the needs of the corporate sector. They recognize that education is important, but its importance seems to be in making workers more useful to the corporate sector. Despite the priority the authors give to education, little thought is given to the defunding of education, even though the authors contend that those without good education are destined to drift in the economy. Despite such serious deficiencies, the book is timely, offers some interesting observations, and will appeal to a wide readership. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; all levels of undergraduate students. M. Perelman California State University, Chico
Kirkus Review
A comprehensive but unoriginal look at the challenges America faces in 2011 and beyond.New York Timescolumnist Friedman (Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolutionand How It Can Save America, 2008, etc.) and Mandelbaum (American Foreign Policy/Johns Hopkins Univ.; The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era, 2010, etc.) join forces to explain why they believe America's glory days are waning and what Americans should do to reverse the downward slide. The authors suggest that America's problems should be addressed through "stick-to-itiveness," political compromise and a renewed sense of national purpose. Americans must admit that global warming exists, impose saner environmental regulations, reform the immigration policy, demand more from teachers, principals and schools, lower government spending and break the addiction to oil. None of these recommendations are new, and all have been argued more cogently elsewhere. (For more incisive discussions of climate change, see Bill McKibben's Eaarth. Regarding oil, see Amanda Little's Power Trip.) Friedman and Mandelbaum's solutions to America's difficulties take the form of motivational slogans littered with clichs, and they delight in relating inspirational tales of average Americans who accomplished great things by being "just too dumb to quit." More than once, they write that Americans must be prepared to do "something big and hard together," to become "creative creators." The urgency of deficit reduction places "the future of the country" in our hands, "as it was for the GIs on the beaches of Normandy." High-skilled immigrants are "brainy risk takers;" low-skilled immigrants are "the brawny ones" (America needs both). Friedman and Mandelbaum are clearly attempting to make complicated concepts accessible to a general audience. However, in relying on Friedman's trademark blend of condescension, clumsy analogies and uninspiring centrism, they fail to break any new ground.While the challenges described in the book are serious indeed, and most readers will agree with much of what the authors explore, the narrative execution is lacking. Disappointing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Friedman (The World Is Flat) and Mandelbaum (Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy, Johns Hopkins Sch. of Advanced International Studies; The Frugal Superpower) argue that the United States has been losing its importance on the world stage since the end of the Cold War because we have become complacent in a world that we, as a country, created. The authors take on the worrisome questions of why America is failing to meet the four major challenges it faces today-globalization, the IT revolution, out-of-control deficits and debt, and energy consumption and climate change-and what it can do to overcome them. They suggest that how the country deals with these challenges will be critical to America's future greatness, to the benefit of the entire world. Friedman and Mandelbaum are cautiously optimistic that the United States is up to the task but only if it is willing to do some urgent, serious, and difficult work. Verdict This is a book of exceptional importance, written on a sweeping scale with remarkable clarity by two of our most gifted thinkers. A soon-to-be best seller, it should be read by policymakers and every American concerned about our country's future.-Elizabeth L. Winter, Georgia Inst. of Tech. Lib., Atlanta (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction: Growing Up in America A reader might ask why two people who have devoted their careers to writing about foreign affairs--one of us as a foreign correspondent and columnist at The New York Times and the other as a professor of American foreign policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies--have collaborated on a book about the American condition today. The answer is simple. We have been friends for more than twenty years, and in that time hardly a week has gone by without our discussing some aspect of international relations and American foreign policy. But in the last couple of years, we started to notice some- thing: Every conversation would begin with foreign policy but end with domestic policy--what was happening, or not happening, in the United States. Try as we might to redirect them, the conversations kept coming back to America and our seeming inability today to rise to our greatest challenges. This situation, of course, has enormous foreign policy implications. America plays a huge and, more often than not, constructive role in the world today. But that role depends on the country's social, political, and economic health. And America today is not healthy--economically or politically. This book is our effort to explain how we got into that state and how we get out of it. We beg the reader's indulgence with one style issue. At times, we include stories, anecdotes, and interviews that involve only one of us. To make clear who is involved, we must, in effect, quote ourselves: "As Tom recalled . . ." "As Michael wrote . . ." You can't simply say "I said" or "I saw" when you have a co-authored book with a lot of reporting in it. Readers familiar with our work know us mainly as authors and commentators, but we are also both, well, Americans. That is important, because that identity drives the book as much as our policy interests do. So here are just a few words of introduction from each of us--not as experts but as citizens. Tom: I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was raised in a small suburb called St. Louis Park--made famous by the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen in their movie A Serious Man, which was set in our neighbor- hood. Senator Al Franken, the Coen brothers, the Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, the political scientist Norman Ornstein, the longtime NFL football coach Marc Trestman, and I all grew up in and around that little suburb within a few years of one another, and it surely had a big impact on all of us. In my case, it bred a deep optimism about America and the notion that we really can act collectively for the common good. In 1971, the year I graduated from high school, Time magazine had a cover featuring then Minnesota governor Wendell Anderson holding up a fish he had just caught, under the headline "The Good Life in Minnesota." It was all about "the state that works." When the senators from your childhood were the Democrats Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Eugene McCarthy, your congressmen were the moderate Republicans Clark MacGregor and Bill Frenzel, and the leading corporations in your state--Dayton's, Target, General Mills, and 3M--were pioneers in corporate social responsibility and believed that it was part of their mission to help build things like the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, you wound up with a deep conviction that politics really can work and that there is a viable political center in American life. I attended public school with the same group of kids from K through 12. In those days in Minnesota, private schools were for kids in trouble. Private school was pretty much unheard of for middle-class St. Louis Park kids, and pretty much everyone was middle-class. My mom en- listed in the U.S. Navy in World War II, and my parents actually bought our home thanks to the loan she got through the GI Bill. My dad, who never went to college, was vice president of a company that sold ball bearings. My wife, Ann Friedman, was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, and was raised in Des Moines. To this day, my best friends are still those kids I grew up with in St. Louis Park, and I still carry around a mental image--no doubt idealized--of Minnesota that anchors and informs a lot of my political choices. No matter where I go--London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore--I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart. That used to be us. In fact, it used to be my neighborhood. Michael: While Tom and his wife come from the middle of the country, my wife, Anne Mandelbaum, and I grew up on the two coasts--she in Manhattan and I in Berkeley, California. My father was a professor of anthropology at the University of California, and my mother, after my two siblings and I reached high school age, became a public school teacher and then joined the education faculty at the university that we called, simply, Cal. Although Berkeley has a reputation for political radicalism, during my childhood in the 1950s it had more in common with Tom's Minneapolis than with the Berkeley the world has come to know. It was more a slice of Middle America than a hotbed of revolution. As amazing as it may seem today, for part of my boyhood it had a Republican mayor and was represented by a Republican congressman. One episode from those years is particularly relevant to this book. It occurred in the wake of the Soviet Union's 1957 launching of Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite. The event was a shock to the United States, and the shock waves reached Garfield Junior High School (since renamed after Martin Luther King Jr.), where I was in seventh grade. The entire student body was summoned to an assembly at which the principal solemnly informed us that in the future we all would have to study harder, and that mathematics and science would be crucial. Given my parents' commitment to education, I did not need to be told that school and studying were important. But I was impressed by the gravity of the moment. I understood that the United States faced a national challenge and that everyone would have to contribute to meeting it. I did not doubt that America, and Americans, would meet it. There is no going back to the 1950s, and there are many reasons to be glad that that is so, but the kind of seriousness the country was capable of then is just as necessary now. We now live and work in the nation's capital, where we have seen first- hand the government's failure to come to terms with the major challenges the country faces. But although this book's perspective on the present is gloomy, its hopes and expectations for the future are high. We know that America can meet its challenges. After all, that's the America where we grew up. Thomas L. Friedman Michael Mandelbaum Bethesda, Maryland, June 2011 THAT USED TO BE US © 2011 by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum Excerpted from 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 All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
