Back to Work - Bill Clinton [78]
When a lifelong Republican, John Bogle, who pioneered the indexed mutual fund, can write in his book Enough that the financial sector has taken too much out of the American economy by focusing on high-dollar transactions that have large fees but make no contribution to the growth of companies or employment, then join other successful Republicans and Democrats in proposing drastic changes to reduce the obsession of Wall Street and corporate America with “short-termism,” there’s hope.1
As long as Americans by the thousands keep lining up for every open job, and young (and not so young) people keep coming up with good ideas, there’s hope.
To turn that hope into positive changes, Americans in all walks of life have to muster the confidence, common sense, and creative imagination to get our country out of its economic and political rut and back onto the road to the future.
In a Gallup poll in the spring of 2011, fewer than half of Americans surveyed believed the current generation of young adults will have a better life than their parents. An August 14, 2011, article in the Los Angeles Times titled “Generation Vexed: Young Americans Rein in Their Dreams” documented how young people are altering their career plans, putting off marriage, and downsizing their dreams.
I can understand the pessimism of the young. After all, we’ve been mired in the current mess for a significant portion of their lives. But giving up is not a strategy for success. Downsizing budgets may be necessary, but downsizing dreams is a decision to be disappointed.
There is one thing we can’t change. We are rapidly becoming more and more enmeshed in an interdependent world, one with more rising economic powers and more widely dispersed political influence. Anybody who was thinking about it on the day the Berlin Wall fell realized then that America had become the world’s sole economic, political, and military superpower but that it couldn’t last very long. If you believe that intelligence and effort are equally distributed, then you shouldn’t begrudge the fact that our interdependent world is bound to give more people in other nations the chance to claim their dreams, more nations a chance to rise or to reinvent themselves and rise again. And if you really believe in freedom and free markets, you shouldn’t complain about the competition but learn from it.
In this new, multipolar world, we can still be the world’s best innovator; the world’s best producer of new products and services; the world’s best assimilator of people from every nation, race, religion, and culture; and the world’s best example of shared opportunity and responsibility, demonstrating the power of both individual freedom and close cooperation and proving both the genius of free markets and the necessity of active government.
Success in the twenty-first-century world requires Americans to be curious enough to learn from countries that are doing important things better than we are, humble enough to listen and to learn from Americans who disagree with us, smart enough to realize that shared prosperity is a better formula for success and happiness than “you’re on your own,” and big enough to admit we’re all going to be wrong once in a while. (If you want to feel better about not being perfect and see the potential upside in your errors, read Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz.)
We’re in a mess now. At the dawn of the new century, after years of strong job growth, rising incomes, and declining debt, we abandoned a proven path to shared prosperity in favor of doubling down, once more, on antigovernment ideology. Now we’re paying for it. The only sensible thing to do is for all of us to take some responsibility for changing things. The world is moving on, and if we want to stop falling behind, we have to get back in the game. Let’s ditch the stale certainty of ideology and bring our values, ideas, experiences, and dreams to a real debate about the future. Think how exciting it would be if all of us—Democrats, Republicans, and independents, conservatives, liberals,