Time to Reboot America

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/opinion/24friedman.html?_r=1&em

by raheemm • 18 years ago

71 88 18 years ago

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

"China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs."

Full openness to information is indeed a great advantage. A country where lots of people ponder what everyday people and governments in other countries are doing better has many sources of ideas for local improvement.

delackner2• 18 years ago

"A country where lots of people ponder what everyday people and governments in other countries are doing better has many sources of ideas for local improvement"

In a country where most people have never even set foot in a modern european or asian city, the trouble is that most people don't have any idea how far behind US infrastructure has gotten.

natrius• 18 years ago

Most Europeans have never set foot in a modern American or Asian city. Most Asians have never set foot in a modern American or European city.

Your point still holds, but too many people use that factoid as some sort of slight against Americans when it's really not.

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

Remembering how rare, and how emblematic of family wealth, foreign travel was when I was growing up, I'm amazed these days at how many Americans I know who have been to both Asia and Europe. The people I know would claim to be only "middle class," not at all rich, but they are well traveled.

The United States has been issuing passports by the millions for quite some time.

http://travel.state.gov/passport/services/stats/stats_890.ht...

Note that unlike some other countries, there is essentially no domestic use for a United States passport. United States citizens get passports if they are traveling overseas, and until recently travel to Canada and Mexico without passports was quite routine. So there are evidently plenty of Americans who have had a chance to go look around and learn from other countries. I would be quite happy to hear of more: in many respects, I think four years spent doing almost ANYTHING overseas and living in the local economy of a country with another language is more educational than four years spent pursuing a college degree, but meanwhile plenty of Americans, for business or for pleasure, do plenty of foreign travel.

sabat2• 18 years ago

He's right that we need to reboot -- but the irony is that it's his generation (and his mentality itself) that is forcing this. The I-got-mine, greed-is-always-good, me-first, I'm-entitled generation of baby boomers (circa 1940-1958) is directly responsible for this mess. And, as usual, it's up to us Xers to clean up.

Friedman is emblematic of his generation. He likes to make blanket statements like "the world is flat!", leaving out precious details (like the fact that cultural differences mean that a guy in Mumbai cannot so easily start the next Amazon), and expects parental-like approval from all of us. Look what I did! Look at me!

Same attitude -- self-satisfied under-achievement -- created this gigantic CF we're calling an economy. Reboot? Yes. That probably means forcing all these codgers into retirement homes where they can bitch and moan about how we Xers aren't doing well enough recovering from their disaster.

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

> cultural differences mean that a guy in Mumbai cannot so easily start the next Amazon

Why do you think so?

Hoff2• 18 years ago

Blame is wasted effort.

Agism (either way) can be legally hazardous.

Bailing out a failed business model is wasted investment.

Given your perception of the older folks, I'd suggest pursuing a business model based on catering to and profiting from those entitled boomers you appear to despise. But trust me on this one: some of those older folks are looking to profit from the perceptions of and the views of the younger folks, too.

Whether US-based or international, looking forward at what might change - what an upgrade from Acela to service competitive with TGV might mean, for instance - would be my preference. I'm looking at where I can improve, and how I can best deal with and can profit from the changes that are inevitably coming. At what and where the target is going to be. At what products and services I can milk or can sell off or can retire, too.

Changes are underway in the world economy. And I'd prefer to profit from both the "Xers" and from the "codgers" if I can manage it, as you'd termed these two large pools of potential consumers.

Blame? There's enough of that to go around.

Profit? Positioning for that in the current chaos is far more interesting.

russell• 18 years ago

Indeed! I am on the leading edge of the boomers and I can tell you we are just as concerned and just as angry. When I was growing up the WWII generation was lamenting how badly they had screwed it up (Vietnam, etc.) and were hoping we could do it better. Well we didn't and the generation after us, the current screw ups, didn't either. If anyone, I would blame Isaac Newton. His legacy is the mechanical universe and the philosophy the everything is perfectible. Hence the endless series of ideological laws and regulations and deregulations that will fix the problem du jour. What we need to understand is that people are greedy, short sighted, and selfish. They are also altruistic and caring. We need to diminish the unfavorable traits and emphasize the favorable. That's what antitrust and regulation do, keep the destructive side from becoming dominant. But we also need to avoid stifling society by tamping down the ability to innovate.

The fixing of all this is cross generational. If we don't fix it, every one will loose, including those who have it. Have you seen the projections for social security? The angst isn't fatal. We survived the depression of the depression, we survived the post-Vietnam crisis of confidence, and we survived the crisis that Japan was going to suck up all our mojo. (OK the auto industry didn't.)

lutorm• 18 years ago

Blame is not a wasted effort, if it leads you to think about what policies are to blame for where we are now and think about what needs to change. I'd say that profit is much less interesting, people find ways of enriching themselves without caring about improving society or doing anything useful. I'd wager that that mindset is at least partially to blame for the current state of affairs.

nazgulnarsil3• 18 years ago

stop blaming greed. greed is universal. you think the baby boomers invented greed? the problem was INCENTIVES. The federal reserve pumped up the money supply starting in 1995, then when the bubble popped in 2000 they pumped up the housing market in order to disguise the true severity of the crash. In an environment of practically free money you'd be an idiot NOT to grab your piece.

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

"He's right that we need to reboot -- but the irony is that it's his generation (and his mentality itself) that is forcing this."

I grew up just a few miles away from where Friedman grew up, just a few years later. Friedman and a lot of his neighbors in his generation were early in urging their fellow Americans to have environmental concern and to be aware that America is just part of the world. I have good evidence for this, because my fifth-grade class made a time capsule in 1969 to be opened in the year 2001, with predictions of that year.

Perhaps Friedman's elementary classmates and my elementary classmates were part of a minority in America, but maybe people who share those concerns are still part of a minority in America. Anyway, these days it's easier for more Americans to see what is going on in the rest of the world, and there is plenty to learn from.

P.S. People in Friedman's generation and mine will be retiring at substantially older ages than our parents did--that's already a settled change in the Social Security law.

puzzle-out2• 18 years ago

I think Americans put too much emphasis on the link between freedom of speech and information and creativity/innovation. Sometimes the most explosive innovations are made during the transition from censorship to an open public sphere - such as the parliamentary innovations of the English civil wars. Americans, and people in the West in general, need to be defamiliarised with the concept of freedom of speech and information, so that when they recognise how valuable it is, they will make better use of it.

tempest672• 18 years ago

Great point about the explosiveness of transition periods -- the Renaissance comes to mind as well, powered both by new intellectual openness and the thuggish Medicis. But calling for "defamiliarization" with free speech sounds kind of horrible -- like putting us in jail for a while so we appreciate our freedom of movement.

But isn't the process of technological upheaval a continual defamiliarization of sorts, with people constantly changing modes and methods of communication with every new development? We don't need to be subjected to tyranny to be continually thrown off balance and required to innovate...

puzzle-out2• 18 years ago

Sorry, I was using 'defamiliarisation' in the context of the Russian critical readings of literature - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization - I can see how it takes on sinister overtones outside of this, and I have no idea how it can be done in practice, other than looking at examples of tyranny elsewhere, contemporaneously or historically, of which there are many. There are certainly parallels between today's technological upheaval and say the English civil wars, when the printing press was being celebrated by people like Milton in similar terms - "as good as almost kill a man as kill a good book". I guess the point I'm getting at it is often the struggle that leads to the creativity - and thus why the Renaissance as you say is so interesting.

nazgulnarsil3• 18 years ago

an innovation designed to get around an artificial restriction is an artificial innovation that disappears once the restriction disappears.

a real innovation is something that universally increases standards of living.

tptacek9• 18 years ago

Thomas Friedman was able to get steady wi-fi on a bullet train running through the wealthiest outpost of a country of 1.3 billion people, 3/4 of which are rural poor living at or near the $1/day poverty level. Therefore, America needs a reboot.

iamwil• 18 years ago

You skipped a step there. It seems you're mixing effects with causes. When you do that, of course it sounds ridiculous.

tptacek9• 18 years ago

The evidence Friedman marshalls for the "effect" he's writing about is inadequate.

hassy• 18 years ago

well said. from TFA:

> All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us?

he seems to have forgotten about hundreds of millions of Chinese living in poverty. how disgusting.

potatolicious7• 18 years ago

As opposed to the tens of millions of Americans living in poverty? Yeah, the Chinese poor have it far worse than the poor in America - but at least their middle class is growing, not shrinking. Wealth is being generated for the everyman, and things are rapidly getting better for the average Joe.

Compared to the shrinking middle class in America as wealth flows upwards.

Don't get me wrong - I'm far from pro-Chinese, I'm just saying, let's not let the fact that there are starving people there prevent us from seeing our own faults.

raheemm• 18 years ago

The key point is not how many poor people China has and hence we should reboot; but that the rest of the world is sprinting towards new opportunities in spite of their handicaps. 60 years ago (after WW2), there was no real competition to America - we built cars, planes, trains, and the world ate it all up. About 40 years ago, the Japanese started giving us a run for the money in some sectors. Today the competitors are increasing in quantity if not in quality - there is Japan, Europe, China, etc. Friedman uses generic examples such as bullet trains and broadband access. But these are valid nonetheless. The larger point remains - we need a massive reboot.

tptacek9• 18 years ago

How lazy the writing, which cloaks itself in a thesis reinforced in conventional wisdom and flits about a series of misleading and superficial anecdotes. Is Friedman "right"? Either way, he serves his argument poorly by comparing the wealthiest splinter of southeast Asia to the whole expanse of America.

Or engage his column elsewhere: are we really losing our most promising engineers to "financial engineering"? Perhaps a less famous writer could support that argument with evidence. For instance, that writer might marry Friedman's argument with the fact that people like John Meriwether managed to nearly destroy capitalism with nothing more than an MBA.

Are there nuclear physicists on Wall Street? Of course. Are most nuclear phsyisicists on Wall Street? Prove it! Are the nuclear physicists on Wall Street the ones responsible for speculating on netted-out credit default swaps? The CDS racket was no more complicated than the MBS racket Michael Lewis wrote about in "Liar's Poker", and the BSD's on the Salomon trading desks were definitely not rocket surgeons.

Prrometheus4• 18 years ago

What does a "reboot" mean? It sounds scary to me. When they rebooted France, blood ran in the streets.

More than likely, though, he means we need a prettier President to waste larger checks. That is certainly in the pipeline.

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

60 years ago (after WW2), there was no real competition to America because the competition mostly got blown up during WW2.

To go back to the postwar situation, we'll need another war. And it needs to be a real war with firebombs, tank columns and opposing armies, not a stupid "suicide bomb some orphans for the cameras" event like what we have now.

ardit33• 18 years ago

to be fair, he is comparing a financial capital, to another one. He didn't compare Hong Kong to West Virginia, Alabama... or other rural backwaters of this country.

Plus Hong Kong didn't always use to be a part of China, so it is a fair comparison.

While people in china might live in poverty and suffer of malnutrition, in here people are suffering form junk food. Fat and obese, compromise more 70% of the population in the states, and fresh healthy food is too expensive.

tptacek9• 18 years ago

It's fair to compare the showpiece financial crown jewel of Southeast Asia to the largest, most diverse metropolitan area in the US? Hong King has a population of 7MM. NY Metro has 19MM. And NY Metro has to serve all its citizens through democratic muni, state, and federal processes; neither Michael Bloomberg nor David Paterson can declare "wi-fi bullet trains for everybody!" and keep their office, at least not while there are schools to fund.

I don't disagree that America needa a new approach. I just think Friedman chose an easily sniped-at rhetorical device to make that point.

Prrometheus4• 18 years ago

Alot of revenue is siphoned out of the urban, prosperous areas in the United States and sent to the rural backwaters. Flyover country receives more money from the feds than it pays in federal taxes, and the dense and rich regions face the opposite calculus.

Hong Kong imposes an 18% flat tax on its citizens. New York City could never get away with that, since its citizens already pay about half their incomes to the feds. Instead New York runs on a 3% tax, and I don't think the services they get from the feds make up for lost value.

If New York city got 15% more of its citizens income, hell yeah it could build a magnetic anti-gravity bullet train run off of angel farts. But it has its share to pay of pork projects in Alaska and troop presence in 170 countries.

kingkongrevenge2• 18 years ago

How is this guy famous? Everything he has ever written sounds like something anybody's uncle might toss out at the dinner table. The guy is not original and has nothing insightful to say. Frequently, he sounds like an idiot. I'm just completely mystified at his acclaim.

byrneseyeview• 18 years ago

There are a lot of "somebody's uncle"s out there, and they all buy Friedman's books to give to their nephews.

patrickg-zill2• 18 years ago

Buy gold and/or silver.

The US Dollar is in the early stages of collapse; it will be severely devalued, perhaps down to being worth 50 or 60 Yen or more.

This is not being political, it is not Bush's or Obama's fault, but the result of an entire generation or more of mistakes, which started back in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and accelerated in 1933 under FDR and then again in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window.

nazgulnarsil3• 18 years ago

to be fair Nixon's hand was kinda forced. the vietnam war combined with the OPEC problems practically bankrupted us.

david9272• 18 years ago

> Buy gold and/or silver

And if you want to keep it, store it in Switzerland.

potatolicious7• 18 years ago

Don't buy gold and silver. I don't know where this "buy gold" superstitious BS came from. I think it's out of some mistaken idea that gold has intrinsic value where paper money does not. This is false.

The value of gold is not intrinsic - it is assigned by people, just like fiat currency (which is also why gold-backed currency, or the lack thereof, is not our problem). In fact, gold's value also fluctuates with the economy, just like everything else - when the economy tanks, gold prices rise, etc etc. It's almost expected for people to run screaming back to gold every time the economy hiccups, and this has made it an unsafe commodity to hold.

Not to mention when you buy gold - you are not buying any actual, physical gold, you are buying gold production, which will never ever reach your hands. If you really want to hoard precious metals, at least go out and physically have it. Your gold is just as imaginary as fiat money until you have it in your hands.

patrickg-zill2• 18 years ago

Gold can be argued to have intrinsic value, when it has shown to retain some amount of value across over 5000 years of human history; and it would be almost impossible to have a working electronics industry without some amount of gold, or some other metal with nearly-equivalent properties (right now the industry is working on ways to minimize gold but it is still needed). It is not superstition.

I don't know where you got the idea that I was recommending a non-physical holding of gold or silver, but it is a good point to address: all COMEX contracts state that in the event of default (non-delivery) they can just give you USD, which of course is exactly what you don't want.

Prrometheus4• 18 years ago

You know what, Friedman? It's a lot harder to manage a continent-spanning country of 300 million people than a tiny, rich city-state. That's where the wisdom of decentralization comes in, but we completely abandoned that in the 1930s. Can you imagine the bureaucracy to manage a country of 300 million people as well as Hong Kong? Neither can I. It probably doesn't exist.

The One's election to office and his promise to shovel out $1 trillion in green pork doesn't change a whole lot. Friedman says:

>"Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely."

There is not a single example from American history to give me hope of this.

potatolicious7• 18 years ago

As hard to manage as a country of 1.3 billion people? Or an industry leading nation of 130 million people? Hong Kong is not the only example of a hyper-advanced Asian city. Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Beijing... you name it, and we're not even approaching India and further west.

The success of China, Japan, South Korea, and the myriad of other east Asian powers is not an isolated case of blind luck. Incredible dedication has been shown here to grow a nation's infrastructure, and the US would be wise to take heed and follow suit if they want to maintain their lead.

Take a look at the bureaucracy needed to manage a country of 1.3 billion people, including a wealth gap far wider than that of the US, and yet continually building out massive infrastructure projects both urban and rural. This is something America is not doing, and I'd hate to see a repressive dictatorship out-do the West in anything.

Prrometheus4• 18 years ago

Have you heard about the economist Mancur Olson and his theory of institutional sclerosis? His thesis is that bureaucracy tends to build on itself, becoming less rational and more wasteful as a society ages. Occasionally, there is a catastrophic event that overturns the established order, wiping out the cruft and allowing society to start fresh. However, over time the waste grows again.

He uses this theory to explain why the American South did so well after reconstruction and after the Civil Rights movement. He would likely also argue that this explains why Japan and China have done so well, since both underwent massive disruptions in the last century. Our own society, however, has been very stable for many centuries and has had plenty of time to accumulate bureaucratic lard.

dataangel• 18 years ago

Have you ever been to Beijing? I lived there for 6 months just 2 years ago and 'ultra modern' is not the phrase I would use to describe it. Internet access to any site not hosted on the mainland is unbearably slow (bad news for travelers), the subway has only one line and the cars are always crammed full, and many of the cars on the street are tin boxes with recycled bike pedals and tractor engines inside them. Granted, I was there before the Olympics, while they were still doing a lot of construction in the hope of impressing everyone. If you were there then, and got an ultra-modern impression, did you ever look off the tourist beaten path and see ultra modernity there? I'd be surprised.

gruseom• 18 years ago

Yay, another reason to roll out the Tom Friedman smackdown to end all Tom Friedman smackdowns (as well as possibly the best book review of the last 10 years):

http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html

gahahaha• 18 years ago

Sorry to repeat what everybody else is saying, but Thomas Friedman is a total loser. Why he is famous is beyond me.

3/5 cheap rhetoric, 1/5 bragging about some "exotic" place he has been, 1/5 self evident observation equals one Thomas Friedman column.

Dear NYT. Fire this man already!

Oh, wait. NYT is the newspaper who thinks it is a good idea to employ Ben Stein too. They will not see the incompetence of Friedman if they are blind to the insanity of Ben Stein (search google for Ben Stein Watch)....

delackner2• 18 years ago

"1/5 bragging about some "exotic" place he has been"

I'm curious, what G7 nation's major city have you been to that had trains as terrible as New York?

Tichy8• 18 years ago

It is well known outside of America that the American trains are bad. I suppose Americans just go by car or airplane, so it doesn't matter much.

I really disliked the article, too. So Hongkong airport is impressive. Hm, maybe some dictatorship has shelled out serious money to make an impression? Somehow it reminds me of the dot com boom - the companies who spent the most were to first to go bankrupt...

potatolicious7• 18 years ago

I'm not sure his observations are so self-evident, which may be why he's emphasizing the fact that he has been to these "exotic" places. I don't like the folksey tone either, but it sells papers and gets attention.

Believe it or not, there are many Americans who still believe that they are the top of the world, that in Asia people are still wallowing in shantytowns and mud-brick houses. When my mother first came to Canada, someone actually asked her if we had running water and electricity.

The "USA No. 1" mentality that many people still seem to have is the main reason why the US cannot proceed to fixing itself - most people have never traveled outside of the USA, least of all to Asia, and the media doesn't cover this nearly enough - Asia is advancing rapidly, its wealth and quality of life is rapidly approaching that of the US, and unless you act now your supremacy in the world will be lost forever.

Until more people realize how advanced Asia has become, I think Thomas Friedman's message is entirely appropriate and welcome.

dangoldin• 18 years ago

I think you hit the nail on the head there. You need to be the underdog to keep you motivated and innovative.

illume• 18 years ago

The author needs needs to get some exercise... like a lot of Americans.

bbgm• 18 years ago

I think Friedman makes a fair point. I've lived in three very different countries for some lengths of time, and traveled to many others over the years, so the following is a little more than anecdotal. When I first came to the US several years ago, my first reaction was that in many ways (and remember this was over a decade ago) the US was a little backwards, culturally, socially and most definitely when it came to infrastructure and facilities. Is it still the technological leader of the world? Yes, but that's less due to its own efforts and more due to sheer inertia from the heyday of US technology and an inability of the rest of the world to take advantage of the sense of ennui that seems to be pervasive.

There are many countries, out there, young democracies (or not), that are hungry, eager. When they figure it out, watch out. You can't assume that the US will stay ahead forever.

America does need a reboot. Our future depends on it.

known• 18 years ago

No Risk No Return.

I think post 9/11 average American has stopped taking risks.

Instead he invested (time & money) in buying houses.

Time to Reboot America

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