Win Together or Lose Together
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT
IN the wake of the hugely disappointing budget deal and the S.& P.’s debt downgrade, maybe we need to hang a new sign in the immigration arrival halls at all U.S. ports and airports. It could simply read: “Welcome. You are entering the United States of America. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.”
Because our country is now finding itself in the worst kind of decline — a slow decline, just slow enough for us to keep deluding ourselves that nothing really fundamental needs to change if our future is to match our past.
Our slow decline is a product of two inter-related problems. First, we’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.
We mistakenly treated the end of the cold war as a victory that allowed us to put our feet up — when it was actually the onset of one of the greatest challenges we’ve ever faced. We helped to unleash two billion people just like us — in China, India and Eastern Europe. For us to effectively compete and collaborate with them — to maintain the American dream — required studying harder, investing wiser, innovating faster, upgrading our infrastructure quicker and working smarter.
(More here.)
NYT
IN the wake of the hugely disappointing budget deal and the S.& P.’s debt downgrade, maybe we need to hang a new sign in the immigration arrival halls at all U.S. ports and airports. It could simply read: “Welcome. You are entering the United States of America. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.”
Because our country is now finding itself in the worst kind of decline — a slow decline, just slow enough for us to keep deluding ourselves that nothing really fundamental needs to change if our future is to match our past.
Our slow decline is a product of two inter-related problems. First, we’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.
We mistakenly treated the end of the cold war as a victory that allowed us to put our feet up — when it was actually the onset of one of the greatest challenges we’ve ever faced. We helped to unleash two billion people just like us — in China, India and Eastern Europe. For us to effectively compete and collaborate with them — to maintain the American dream — required studying harder, investing wiser, innovating faster, upgrading our infrastructure quicker and working smarter.
(More here.)
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