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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
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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2011
In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum analyze the four major challenges we face as a country---globalization, the revolution in information technology, chronic deficits, and our pattern of energy consumption---and spell out what we need to do now to preserve American power in the world. The end of the Cold War blinded the nation to the need to address these issues seriously, and China's educational successes, industrial might, and technological prowess in many ways remind us of a time when "that used to be us." But Friedman and Mandelbaum 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. That Used to Be Us is both a searching exploration of the American condition today and a rousing manifesto for American renewal.
- Sales Rank: #16340 in Books
- Published on: 2012-08-21
- Released on: 2012-08-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.31" h x .79" w x 5.48" l, .70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 402 pages
Review
“At once enlightened and enlightening...[American society] could use more of the generous responsible spirit Friedman and Mandelbaum recommend.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“Thoroughly researched and passionately argued...That Used to Be Us is an important contribution to an intensifying debate, and it deserves the widest possible attention....Compelling.” ―The New York Times
“Anyone who cares about America's future---anyone planning to vote in 2012---ought to read this book and hear the authors' compelling case.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“An important and eminently readable book.” ―The New York Review of Books
“Touches a nerve...In a country whose politicians are partisan intransigents and whose commentators are more interested in zingers than solutions, it takes courage to be so baldly civic-minded.” ―BusinessWeek
About the Author
Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist―the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of five bestselling books, among them From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat.
He was born in Minneapolis in 1953, and grew up in the middle-class Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean studies, attended St. Antony's College, Oxford, on a Marshall Scholarship, and received an M.Phil. degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford.
After three years with United Press International, he joined The New York Times, where he has worked ever since as a reporter, correspondent, bureau chief, and columnist. At the Times, he has won three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1983 for international reporting (from Lebanon), in 1988 for international reporting (from Israel), and in 2002 for his columns after the September 11th attacks.
Friedman's first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, won the National Book Award in 1989. His second book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), won the Overseas Press Club Award for best book on foreign policy in 2000. In 2002 FSG published a collection of his Pulitzer Prize-winning columns, along with a diary he kept after 9/11, as Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. His fourth book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005) became a #1 New York Times bestseller and received the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in November 2005. A revised and expanded edition was published in hardcover in 2006 and in 2007. The World Is Flat has sold more than 4 million copies in thirty-seven languages.
In 2008 he brought out Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which was published in a revised edition a year later. His sixth book, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, was published in September 2011.
Michael Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, is the author or coauthor of twelve books, including The Ideas That Conquered the World.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Facts Are Good, Solution is Weak
By Barry S. Riehle
Friedman and Mandelbaum wrote a comprehensive view of how we used to be and how fast things are changing to leave us behind most of the rest of the world. Friedman was very clear that the World is Flat 1.0 means that, with new innovations (especially technology) all countries can have the same competitive advantages now, while the US dominated in the past. Now he claims we are at Flat 2.0, which means that each individual, thanks to technology, can have equal advantages by being able to cooperate with others across the globe without ever meeting the person face-to-face. The authors give a myriad of examples.
The most important component of the authors ‘solution is education. The US can put itself back on the top, or vie for the top by teaching students to think critically and use technology (and keep learning the new technology as it is invented). This will propel the US back to being the leader in the world economy.
As a former High School physics teacher I concur with most of what the authors but not with the authors’ solution to improving education. First, the authors assume schools are failing based on several standards including international test scores. My school had an exchange with one of our administrators and the head of the Shanghai school system. The Shanghai administrator, who spent a week at our school, told our faculty that while the US had a representative sample of all schools take the international test while China only allowed students from Shanghai, their best school district, to take the test. Not surprisingly the Chinese students came in first. There are other apples-and-oranges in international testing that call into question the validity of the test comparisons. Based on that the Shanghai administrator told us that we (a suburban school) should not put much stock in the test results because he saw firsthand that we were doing an excellent job.
Second, not all schools are equal, even among public schools. Suburban schools have distinct advantages over urban schools (more money; more stable families; parents with more education, affecting the aspirations of their children) and rural schools (size matters; a full time physics teacher can devote more time to a subject than a teacher who has to teach physics, chemistry, and earth science). This does not mean that all suburban teachers are better than urban or rural ones are, but by and large the various factors add up to advantages for suburban schools.
Finally, the authors want to make teachers better by incentivizing them with some bonuses, being resigned to the fact that we won’t pay teachers commensurate with their role in society. They believe that teachers will teach regardless of low pay because the want to teach. In the real world money matters, real money not just smaller bonuses for a few. School districts who can offer higher pay have a larger pool of candidates from which they hire. In addition, many who would like to teach and may make very good teachers choose not become educators because of the student debt they have accrued. When society wants to give the teaching profession more respect, including better salaries, teaching will improve because more good candidates will choose teaching. When schools can afford to offer teachers more preparation time the teachers will become more affective. Also, when schools can afford to have a longer school year and pay teachers for working 220 days like in some countries (instead of 180 in the US) education will improve.
It is a good read. I would encourage reading "That Used to be Us" and "The Myth of America's Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies" by Joseph Joffe as a counter. Joffe argues that the US will not fall off the planet because the US has been in this position before and has been able to adapt and move forward. The two books together can give the reader a more balanced approach to reality.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Should be Required Reading
By Amazon Customer
I will admit from the start that I am a big fan of Thomas Friedman. I believe that he has an incredible perspective on current trends that affect all of us and projects that perspective into the future. This book continues that "tradition" and we ignore its' contents and messages at our own peril.
Having worked in higher education for over 30 years and now in k-12, I have seen the way our education system, in general, fails to prepare students for the 21st century. We are still using, for the most part, an outdated model that is an industry unto itself. Without a world class education system, how can we compete in the world that Friedman and Mandelbaum describe?
The authors paint a somewhat gloomy picture of America's future that can only be solved by radical change from the way we are doing things. They have done a good job of summarizing the problems we face because of our broken government, backwards education system and general collective failure of our citizenry to demand better. While there is nothing here that any observant citizen doesn't already suspect, their ability to succinctly define the issues and possible solutions is what makes this book notable.
This book should be required reading for every high school and college student because they are the ones who have the opportunity to fix the mess that we have left for them.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
That Used to be Us
By tobias
I have always enjoyed Thomas Freedman's columns in the NY Times, so I was not surprised by the material presented in his book with Michael Mandelbaum. In fact, I was somewhat bored by the warmed over sentiments voiced in the first several score of pages in this book. Later, the authors present a wealth of statistical information, buttressed by many interviews with some economic and business leaders, concerning what we are not doing correctly in this country and what we need to rectify the present situation. I was alternately buoyed up by the myriad of creative scientific and business people cited in the book, yet ultimately depressed by the authors' condemnation of our lack of will to reverse and obvious social decline. Their remedy, expressed in the last part of the book -- that we should be more creative and make many more start ups and that unemployment can be overcome by everyone starting new businesses -- may have some merit but is hardly likely to be realized. I left the book feeling somewhat pessimistic, not only because of the aforementioned unrealizable goals cited by the authors but because I think that that they, too, are pessimistic and that they concluded the book by trying to put a good face on a bad situation. It is a worthwhile book, interesting but probably with a limited shelf life, as social issues have a way of becoming old very fast.
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