Ever had a lingering feeling that something just isn't right with the world? Stop ignoring it. It's real.
And Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum want to tell you all about it.
America, they say, has lost its place in the global race to the top, and if we don't do something about it, future generations will suffer.
"That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28) is the authors' attempt to explain America's decline and a rallying cry. Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times, is in town Monday for an appearance at the Book Festival of the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.
The five-part book begins with a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. America, missing an archrival since the end of the Cold War, has been snoozing on issues of state. With countries such as China encroaching on U.S. dominance in many areas with what we thought was cheap labor but is in fact "cheap genius" (low-paid, highly skilled workers), our complacency has finally caught up with us.
The country now faces four major challenges laid out in the book: globalization, the information technology revolution, the out-of-control debt and budget deficits stemming from increasing demand on government at every level, and energy consumption and rising climate threats.
If we thought Sept. 11 would have been the defining moment that forced us to face our vulnerabilities and pull it together, the impact proved temporary. "There are three things you can say about post-9/11," Friedman said in an interview earlier this month. "Everything we did in totality prevented any further terrorist attack. The second thing is we overpaid for that in terms of dollars and opportunity cost. And the third thing we can say is what we need to do ... recapture that spirit of post-9/11 action and pull together to do the things we need to do to fix the country."
A major challenge we face is education, and Friedman and Mandelbaum devote a section to discussing how we've failed. The book reveals America's average or below-average standing in areas of mathematics, reading and science when viewed on a global scale, and that is a direct function of our poor educational system. Cheating scandals, such as those that have cropped up in Atlanta and other cities, are evidence of our failures, Friedman said.
"Those kind of scandals show on one end the pressure on people to achieve higher scores. At the same time, you realize that we are cheating ourselves. The whole global curve has risen," said Friedman, noting that college-bound American students now compete with highly educated students from other countries, particularly China, for a finite number of slots.
It can all seem overwhelming for the average individual just trying to make it, but Friedman and Mandelbaum offer a suggestion for almost any working man or woman to improve his or her lot in this climate of uncertainty. "Everyone has got to understand that average is over," Friedman said. "Our advice to people is think like an immigrant. Understand the environment you are in. Second, think like an immigrant in that nothing is owed you. And third ... think like an artisan. Bring something so special to what you do that you would want to put your initials on it."
Event preview
Prologue to the Book Festival of the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta
The Eva Stern Lecture featuring Thomas L. Friedman, co-author of "That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28)
7:30 p.m. Monday. $15-$22. Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, 5342 Tilly Mill Road, Dunwoody. For information and tickets, www.atlantajcc.org.
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