Luce - Time to start thinking: America in the age of descent

Praise for Time to Start Thinking

Time to Start Thinking is not only a wonderful tapestry of the current state of America, it provides a deeply insightful narrative on the origins of our current economic and political malaise. Ed Luce is a brilliant reporter who has spoken to everyone: CEOs and members of the cabinet, lobbyists and small town mayors, recent MBAs and unemployed teachers. In his acutely observed, often witty, and very humane portraits he succeeds in converting the abstractions of economics and bringing them to life.

Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prizewinning author
of Lords of Finance

Americans need friends who will tell us what we need to hear and how to think about the troubles, many of our own making, that threaten our democracy, prosperity, and leadership in the world. Weve got just such a friend in Ed Luce. Hes a foreign observer who has not just traveled widely in the United States but listened carefully to a wide array of our citizens.

Strobe Talbott, president, The Brookings Institution

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 disturbingand may sometimes set your teeth on edgebut 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

Luce is a good writer with a vacuum-cleaner for a notebook. His book could not be bettered as a compendium of American problems, at least as filtered through the center-left sensibilities of a pro-American Euro pean.... Time to Start Thinking raises the right questions at the right mo ment, which is what books are supposed to do. It deserves an audience in America. And I wouldnt be surprised, too, if it ends up stacked on the best-seller tables in China.

Jonathan Rauch, The New York Times Book Review

[T]he book is not simply a laundry list of present-day policy failures (of which there have been many) but as hinted at by the title of a political system thats stopped constructively engaging with policy challenges.... Its time to start thinking.

Matthew Yglesias, Slate.com

A superb new book.

The Council on Foreign Relations

Rarely has the case for our national decline been made more chillingly and in more persuasive detail... Like a doctor examining the patient organ by organ, Luce diagnoses Americas ills in a wide variety of fields.... Luce wisely offers no magic bullet. Instead, he does what journalists are good athe listens.

Huffington Post Business

Luce is a very good reporter. He has spoken to a terrific array of characters.... Best of all are his vivid portraits of Americans struggling to get by, assailed by what he calls the hollowing out of Americas middle class.

Financial Times

In this well-reported and extensively researched book, Luce puts his finger on many of the countrys most serious problems and explores the gaping disconnect between elite optimism and popular bewilderment, anger, and despair.

Foreign Affairs

Carefully balanced and often startlingly evocative analysis and reportage ... painful and illuminating.

The Guardian

[Luce] reveals, from his extraordinary access to Pentagon officials, that even they admit the era of US global dominance is over.

The New Statesman

[A] lucid, reported tour dhorizon. It provides an excellent snapshot of America in 2010 and 2011, a country grappling with serious issues and unsure about its place in the world.

Yahoo.com

Luce wisely refrains from prescribing what America needs to do to get out of the rut.... They need new ideas, the lack of which Time to Start Thinking hopes to have captured. That in itself is no meager achievement.

Hindustan Times

Thoughtful and gently polemical... an engaging read, filled with anecdotes, stories and character vignettes that make the main arguments easy to follow and interesting to read.... thought-provoking... Luce argues convincingly.

Irish Examiner

[Luce] puts forward a picture of a society that is poised delicately on the edge. America might not be facing complete collapse, la Rome, but Luces narrative makes it clear that tremendous effortand plenty of luckwill be needed to reverse its current decay.

India Today

Time to Start Thinking

Also by Edward Luce

In Spite of the Gods

TIME TO
START THINKING

America in the Age of Descent

EDWARD LUCE

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 2012 by Edward Luce

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or .

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9461-9

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

Contents

THE GRADUATIONS

WHY A MERICAS MIDDLE CLASS CONTINUES
TO HOLLOW OUT

WHY A MERICAS EDUCATION SYSTEM
IS STILL FALLING BEHIND

WHY A MERICAS LEAD IN INNOVATION CAN NO LONGER
BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED

WHY BUREAUCRACY IN HARMING
A MERICAS COMPETITIVENESS

WHY A MERICA IS BECOMING LESS GOVERNABLE

WHY MONEY CONTINUES TO RULE W ASHINGTON

WHY THE COMING STUGGLE TO HALT A MERICAS
DECLINE FACES LONG ODDS

Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking.

Sir Ernest Rutherford, winner of the
Nobel Prize in chemistry

Time to Start Thinking

Introduction: The Graduations

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

T HE SUN WAS shining. The last of the late spring cherry blossoms was still visible. All was well with the world. Or at least that is how it must have seemed to the three hundred or so graduating MBAs as they gathered for ceremonies beneath their universitys clock tower. This being the Georgetown class of 2011, most of the graduates, including my wifes cousin Bikram Basu, who was my reason for attending, were keenly aware of the choppy economic waters into which they were heading. But on this day the positive was sure to be accentuated. Robert Solow, that years distinguished commencement speaker, had other ideas. I am sorry, Solow said to the graduates a few minutes into his bracing address. I dont do motivational speaking.

Approaching ninety years of age, Solow is one of the few surviving American economists to have lived through the Great Depression, having been born five years before the crash of 1929. He won his Nobel Prize chiefly for identifying and measuring the technological underpinnings of economic growth, which, during the middle decades of his lifetime, created by far the largest and wealthiest middle class the world had seen. That same class has been under a grinding and, until recently, largely ignored siege for a generation or so. Having lived through the biting deprivations of a genuine depressionand seen the differenceSolow would surely cast todays uncertainties in a reassuring light.