Is the USA in decline?

Great Debates
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Time to Start Thinking is a book destined to spark debate among liberals and conservatives alike. Drawing on his decades of exceptional journalism and his connections within Washington and around the world, Luce advances a carefully constructed and controversial argument, backed up by interviews with many of the key players in politics and business, that America is losing its pragmatism - and that the consequences of this may soon leave the country high and dry.

Luce turns his attention to a number of different key issues that are set to affect America’s position in the world order: the changing structure of the US economy, the continued polarization of American politics; the debilitating effect of the “permanent election campaign”; the challenges involved in the overhaul of the country’s public education system; and the health - or sickliness - of American innovation in technology and business. His conclusion, “An Exceptional Challenge” looks at America’s dwindling options in a world where the pace is increasingly being set elsewhere. While many Americans believe that their country can and should retain its status as a global superpower, Luce sees this as an increasingly unlikely scenario, unless Americans themselves can stand up against the country’s increasingly plutocratic character. America has bounced back successfully from the shocks of The Great Depression and the Soviet launch of Sputnik, but Luce wonders if the next crisis in American confidence may knock it off the top-dog position for good.

“Warning: this book could be a danger to your peace of mind. One of the finest journalists of our time, Ed Luce has crisscrossed the United States, trying to understand what ails the country and what must be done. His conclusions are highly disturbing - and may sometimes set your teeth on edge - but they are a “must read.” Once again, a visitor to these shores has written a masterful portrait of America.” - David Gergen, professor, Harvard Kennedy School; senior political analyst, CNN

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In forming his views on America in 2012, Mr. Luce drew, first, on his own experience in trying to make sense of it for the Financial Times, where he is the chief U.S. columnist and former Washington bureau chief…

Mr. Luce puts his finger right on some obvious and less obvious problems, all the time pointing the way out of the swamp. He finds himself “skeptical about America’s ability to sharply reverse her fortunes,” but, sounding very FDRish, he says that America can restore its economic vitality through “shared sacrifice.”

It’s the “shared” part that, notably, he finds missing from the current equation. He notes that between 2002 and 2007, two-thirds of all financial growth went to the top 1 percent of the population. The top 1 out of 1,000 Americans received one-third of that growth. **America now shows the lowest rate of income mobility in the whole industrialized world. **So much for the Horatio Alger concept of starting at the bottom and climbing to the top, the experience of President Barack Obama to the contrary.

He says the miserable state of America’s education system is one source of that malady. California, the former laboratory of American innovation, now disburses $8,000 per child for education while spending $47,000 on each of its prisoners. One miserable result of the country’s misallocation of its resources is the figure of “economic participation,” the percentage of the population that is active in the U.S. economy. That fell from 64 percent in 2000 to 58 percent in 2011.

In innovation, an area that Mr. Luce points out as crucial, “the United States has given up the chase,” he says. The fossil fuel lobby controls Washington. The United States will have no high-speed rail network, unlike China. The United States spends a miserly 2.3 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure. (In Pennsylvania, think of the locks and dams, not to mention the bridges.)

The U.S. government, he says, “lacks agility.” He puts the principal blame on the Congress. It blocks presidential appointees, sponsoring gridlock. More than half of all U.S. government contracts are “no bid” crony affairs. The Food and Drug Administration averages 15 years to approve a new drug. The Senate is the worst, according to him. Its super majority rule – requiring 60 votes instead of a majority to pass a bill – is “the minority’s weapon of paralysis.” Paralysis is what America gets from the Congress, not problem-solving. American legislators’ “real business” now, he says, is “pre-empting any challenges to their incumbency.”

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/ae/book-reviews/time-to-start-thinking-a-briton-sees-america-in-the-age-of-descent-629422/

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Eric the Green, you’re violating our policy on material under copyright. It looks like you are just copying some of the promotional copy for the book in your OP, but in the second post you’ve used a large chunk of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article. I realize you were not trying to pass these off as your own work, but the quotes are much too large to qualify as fair use. Generally we ask that people not quote more than about a paragraph of a work that is under copyright. Since your first two posts here are almost entirely quotes, I’m closing this thread. You can start a new one discussing Luce and his ideas, but you have to post some of your own thoughts and not just promotion or encouragement to read the book.